Moral Development, Authoritarian Distemper, and the Democratic Persuasion

The problem of moral development is inherent in the coupling of the two words. Few would dispute that there is such a thing as morals, and fewer still that there is another entity called development. Whether they fit together conceptually in a neat, two-tiered package becomes a large question. The present disarray of moral philosophy has not helped. Ethicists are as polarized as can be. One sense of moral development is that it is a historical, evolutionary, and soiological concept of expanding rights. Relativists like Richard Brandt ¹ and Abraham Edel ² have argued this thesis. There is a diametrically opposite view of moral development, advocated by people such as Leo Strauss ³ and Richard Flathman, ⁴ claiming a normative, natural law foundation to human behavior; the assumption being that social obligations are analogous to mathematical axioms: deduced from a set of first principles.