Canter Bridge

In this thoroughly revised Princeton University doctoral dissertation, Craig Dykstra contrasts L. Kohlberg’s `juridical (decision-making) ethics’ with his own proposal for `visional ethics’. As the author notes in his introduction (pp. 1-4), the same landscape looks rather differently when viewed from these two divergent angles. Dykstra has adapted the fruit of his doctoral labors to a form likely to prove more helpful to religious educators, a group whose affinity to Kohlbergian ethics Dykstra finds surprising.

In his chapter one (`Kohlberg’s Juridical Ethics: a critique’, pp. 7-29), Dykstra establishes the elements of Kohlberg’s approach that he finds problematic, beginning with the observation that it is the very `problematic’ nature of morality that Kohlberg presumes and thus projects. That is, his method is to place the human subject before a dilemma and then observe how he or she deals with the problem at hand. For Dykstra, Kohlberg implicitly or explicitly makes three claims, all of which can refuted, leaving little remaining cause for confidence in the system. At the philosophical level, Kohlberg claims that virtue is one thing: knowledge of the ideal of justice.

Dykstra counters that justice may indeed be just one thing, but that one thing is immeasurably more complex than Kohlberg’s reductionism would have us believe. For Dykstra, justice is also contingent, for human justice depends upon divine justice. This is one of the author’s early nods in the direction of the Christian tradition out of which and for the enrichment of which he writes.

At the psychological level, Dykstra summarizes Kohlberg’s assertion that it is the maturity with which the human subject organizes and processes information that is the psychological criterion of morality. Again, Dykstra smells a reductivistic and-though he does not say so-an elitist scent emanating from Kohlberg’s rather clinical method. Yet Dykstra is not merely deconstructing here. Rather, he offers a positive alternative that measures morality in terms of the individual’s `capacity for imaginal thought’. A human being’s ability to place himself imaginatively in the shoes or posture or dilemma of another human being is, for Dykstra, near the center of human-and, no doubt, divine-morality.

Turning to Kohlberg’s operational claim is that we can assess a person’s morality `by looking at the pattern of judgments a person makes about situations in which people have conflicting claims on one another’. Here we begin to bump up against the case study method of teaching ethics and other things, made famous by its core status at the Harvard Business School, an application of Kohlbergian method that Dykstra does not bring into the conversation.

Dykstra is not so much alarmed by the deficiencies of Kohlberg’s approach to morality as he is bemused by the warm reception among religious people that the Kantian Kohlberg has received. Unlike the subject of his study, Dykstra does write from a self-consciously religious-and Christian-perspective. From that angle, he does not consider Kohlberg’s work to be false, just inadequate. Between the lines, one wonders whether Dykstra would agree that an inadequate system, when taken and applied as though it were comprehensively adequate, is not in the end essentially false.

Having offered his critique of a widely followed model in moral education, Dykstra dedicates the bulk of the book to the topic of `alternative foundations’. In chapter two (`Fundamentals: Visional Ethics’, pp. 33-62) Dykstra works out the differences between juridical and visional views of the world. Much of the distinction lies in epistemology. The Kohlbergian (juridical) view encounters the world as eminently knowable and its problems as patient of clear-headed resolution. In contrast, the visional view encounters the world and the persons in it with due attention to the mysteries that attend them. For Dykstra, `the moral world is a world of mystery, rather than a world of problems … being moral means encountering it that way.’

Here one can appreciate that Dykstra the philosopher is before that Dykstra the theologically attuned Christian (and dare one add, Augustinian?) thinker. He finds living with this world’s mysteries as an act of obedience in a trustworthy Creator. The self-confidence of juridical ethics begins to look not so much mistaken as immoral:

`The theological name for this inability to see rightly is sin. One of the great differences between visional ethics and juridical ethics is that the latter does not take sin very seriously at all. It pictures moral difficulties to be difficulties in thinking rationally, and suggests that moral progress is attainable by a combination of increased reasoning power plus sincerity or strength of will. But this, empirically, is not the case. People, as they strive to be moral, consistently find it impossible to think their way into goodness. Reasoning power plus willpower does not translate directly into moral power.’

Dykstra’s chapter will prove frustrating to card-carrying pragmatists, for there are corollaries that resist measurement and a-makes-b assurances of outcome. Visional ethics requires that one live by faith, that being the conviction that one is loved by a generative Mystery who is known only as he reveals himself. Other persons, and the communities in whose stories their own history is embedded, will necessarily be approached cautiously and appreciatively rather than in terms of what can be made of them. Visional indeed.

In chapter three (`Dynamics: Imagination and Revelation’, pp. 63¬-88), Dykstra appeals to a story to communicate the dynamic nature in which imagination opens itself up to transformative revelations. Flannery O’Connor’s emotionally turbulent tale about `Mrs. Turpin’ illustrates a kind of moral development that lies worlds distant from the `stages of moral development’ common to both Kohlberg and Piaget. Dykstra is uncomfortable with the unidirectional and, again, non-complex and non-particularized path to moral development that those influential figures depict.

The author’s fourth chapter (`Disciplines: Repentance, Prayer, and Service’, pp. 89-114) shows how people do develop morally. In short, they shape their lives in ways that facilitate encounter with transformation and revelation. Dykstra is both eloquent and a superb quote-picker, though sometimes in reverse order. He is certain that it is the human choice to place ourselves outside the center of the universe in our imagination-because that is where we are in reality-that opens myriad opportunities for the complex growth as human individuals-in-society for which Christians and morally-acute non-Christians long. In this sense, his prescription is deeply moral; repentance is at its core. Struggle is its character, for we are shaped in a way that resists Dykstra’s kind of intentionally centripetal conduct.

Further, worship is the context in which our imagination is stirred in a manner that aligns with this kind of selfless re-orientation. Worship is not just something we do—though it manifestly is that, as disciplines by their very nature are—but rather something that molds us even at preconscious levels into persons whom we would not become without doxological encounter with divine Mystery. Finally, the church is the community in which these good things happen.

The book’s subtitle pays its dues in a final chapter (Ch. 5, `Moral Education in the Church’, pp.117-143), where the author affirms that moral education is not an addition to Christian education, but rather the core of what Christian educators due. We are, according to Dykstra, forming people `for the moral life’.

Many such educators will resonate with Dykstra’s nuanced portrayal of Christian education that allows one increasingly to turn away from life for oneself and to live for others. They will also be gratified by the theologically Christian nature of this activity as the author describes it. If moral education is not an add-on to Christian education, neither is the warp and woof of Christian belief alien or even subsidiary to Christian education.

Yet perhaps the most valuable portion of the book for many readers will be Dykstra’s suggestive ruminations on `The Significance of a Teacher’ (pp. 124-129). Those who have suffered under bad teachers and those whose lives have been irreversibly advanced by good ones will find the author articulating their intuitions about this task and its practitioners.

Dykstra has indeed provided an alternative not only to the limitations inherent in Kohlberg’s thinking but also to all kinds of shallow understandings of the critical—indeed, Dykstra might have us say noble—privilege of Christian education.