If there is one central critique coming from cultural psychology about moral development, it is that the process of moral development – and even the moral domain itself – is not as uniform as traditional psychological theories have put forth. The Three Ethics framework (Autonomy, Community, Divinity) emerged out of just such a critique, providing critical perspectives on cultural variation to the ways that we theorize and imagine moral development (i.e., Jensen, Reference Jensen2008; Shweder, Mahapatra, & Miller, Reference Shweder, Mahapatra, Miller, Kagan and Lamb1987; Shweder, Much, Mahapatra, et al., Reference Shweder, Much, Mahapatra, Park, Brandt and Rozin1997). Many of the chapters in this volume build on this framework and this cultural critique of moral development. In this chapter we offer critical nuance to this line of inquiry. We suggest some new directions for Three Ethics research that would move toward analyses of the dynamic relations of the three ethics as they co-occur within individuals' moral discourse. Doing so reveals important culturally specific trends, such as the mutual imbrication and ontogenetic interdependence of Autonomy, Community, and Divinity. These trends represent significant developmental patterns that would otherwise be overlooked and, we argue, would be hard to detect without such an explicit focus on ethical co-occurrence.
We suggest that this kind of relational analysis of ethical co-occurrence is fruitful for cultural-developmental research for three reasons. First, we find that the co-occurrence of ethics within one line of thinking is common and may take several different forms. Taken together with other research findings (e.g., Pandya & Bhangaokar, Chapter 2, this volume; Vainio, Chapter 3, this volume; Padilla-Walker & Nelson, Chapter 5, this volume), we argue that there is mounting empirical evidence to suggest that ethical co-occurrence is an important aspect of individuals' moral reasoning that researchers should attend to in their analyses of moral thinking across the life course. However, we also find evidence of deeper forms of relation between the three ethics, which we call ethical imbrication – the inextricable integration of seemingly disparate (from a theoretical perspective) moral discourses into a single line of moral reasoning. In these imbricated forms of co-occurrence, the delineation of reasoning into separate ethics is arbitrary from an emic point of view. Following from this point, our second argument for using the Three Ethics framework to analyze the relations between justifications is that it can reveal whether these distinctions are meaningful to participants. By uncovering aspects of moral thinking in which the analytic categories of Autonomy, Community, and Divinity are “imbricated” (from the point of view of the analyst), we can reconstruct cultural logics that underlie particular ethical constellations. Third, such relational analyses of ethical co-occurrence can also reveal imbricated processes of moral development. In other words, we argue that imbrication occurs within an individual's moral reasoning not only at a single point in time but also developmentally, where one ethic may provide a developmental foundation for the emergence of another ethic.
These insights rest on innovative methodological uses of the Three Ethics framework. Specifically, examining the relation between justifications in individuals' moral discourse requires various forms of discursive analysis, such as cultural discourse analysis and language-interaction analysis. Such analyses, we argue, can uncover culturally distinct visions of the moral realm and culturally distinct developmental processes through which individuals come to adopt those visions in ways that comparative analyses of the distributions of the three ethics cannot. Moving Three Ethics research in this direction provides a critical nuance to the approach that can help analysts stay closer to the construction of the moral domain as research participants themselves experience it – the original intent behind developing this framework.
We build these arguments through our analysis of moral reasoning in two different empirical projects. DiBianca Fasoli's data are derived from research that aims to understand the socialization of a divine moral code in American evangelical Christian families in Boston, whereas Hickman's data come from a comparative ethnography of the transnational and intergenerational patterns of moral thinking of Hmong families in both Thailand and the United States. Despite the distinctness of these two projects, they converge by revealing aspects of ethical co-occurrence that were not sufficiently accounted for in existing Three Ethics scholarship. Crucially, it was by combining the Three Ethics framework with various cultural discourse approaches that enabled us to recognize the implications of these aspects of ethical co-occurrence, and each distinct data set provided evidence toward this end.1 Specifically, the ethnographic approach of Hickman's transnational data on moral reasoning enabled him to interpret the co-occurrence of ethics as ethical imbrication. The parent-child conversation approach of DiBianca Fasoli's data on moral reasoning enabled her to interpret the co-occurrence of ethics in terms of their developmental implications for ethical imbrication. We believe this convergence on ethical imbrication demonstrates the utility of these new directions for employing the Three Ethics framework across a diverse range of empirical projects.
We first review the Three Ethics research that has examined the relation of the ethics in moral thinking, outlining the ways in which this research has examined ethical co-occurrence and explaining, by contrast, what we mean by ethical imbrication. We build on this research by presenting three forms of co-occurrence that we recognized through discourse analysis of Hmong moral discourse and specify when co-occurrence can signal parallel justifications, divergent justifications, and ethical imbrication. We then address the ontogenetic implications of ethical co-occurrence by drawing on American evangelical moral discourse in parent-child conversations. We conclude by discussing future directions of Three Ethics research, with a particular focus on methodological approaches that can help us to better understand the nature and development of particular cultural moral codes.
Three Ethics
The Three Ethics approach to moral thinking and moral development emerged from work pioneered by Shweder and his colleagues in an effort to critique ethnocentric assumptions about moral reasoning embedded in much of the cross-cultural psychology research (Shweder, Reference Shweder1990; Shweder, Mahapatra, & Miller, Reference Shweder, Mahapatra, Miller, Kagan and Lamb1987; Shweder & Much, Reference Shweder, Much and Shweder1991; Shweder, Much, Mahapatra, et al., Reference Shweder, Much, Mahapatra, Park, Brandt and Rozin1997). Shweder and colleagues conducted ethnographic research on moral thinking and collected moral discourse in India and the United States. On the basis of this research and in conjunction with a review of the developmental and cultural literature, Shweder and colleagues ultimately derived three central ethics, labeled Autonomy, Community, and Divinity. Conceptually, each ethic is grounded in a distinct conception of the self, as an “individualized preference structure” (Autonomy), as an “office-holder” (Community), or as a “divine soul” (Divinity).
The three ethics provide a minimalistic framework for understanding culturally varying deontological moral discourses (Jensen, Reference Jensen1993, Reference Jensen1995, Reference Jensen2004; Shweder, Reference Shweder1990; Shweder, Much, Mahapatra, et al., Reference Shweder, Much, Mahapatra, Park, Brandt and Rozin1997). The central aim of this framework is to capture cultural variations in moral rationalization in a way that does not favor any particular view of the good. More specifically, Community and Divinity can be rationalized and considered ultimate moral goods in the same way as liberal individualism (or Autonomy), which psychological theories of moral development had typically framed as the sole ultimate moral good. Through a sophisticated discourse analysis of a Brahmin priest, for example, Shweder and Much (Reference Shweder, Much and Shweder1991) demonstrate that communal ethics reach beyond mere conventionalism and can be grounded in a transcendent Ethic of Community, providing an “alternative version of an objective postconventional moral world” (p. 229). Thus, by proposing three distinct moral ethics and outlining how they develop in different cultural contexts, the Three Ethics approach has provided an important corrective to traditional theories of moral development that emphasized the uniformity of the moral realm. As such, this approach is appealing because it provides a means of identifying similarities in the rational processes underpinning culturally distinct moral systems while also allowing for a great degree of complexity and cultural specificity in various conceptions of the moral domain. Various cultural visions of the good provide unique configurations of Autonomy, Community, and Divinity and fill these ethics out in culturally distinct ways.
Much research has used the three ethics to trace similarities and differences in moral reasoning in different cultural contexts and developmental periods (e.g., Arnett, Ramos, & Jensen, Reference Arnett, Ramos and Jensen2001; Guerra & Giner-Sorolla, Reference Guerra and Giner-Sorolla2010; Haidt, Koller, & Dias, Reference Haidt, Koller and Dias1993; Jensen, Reference Jensen1998; Vasquez, Keltner, Ebenbach, et al., Reference Vasquez, Keltner, Ebenbach and Banaszynski2001). For example, in Shweder and colleagues' original research, they suggested that liberal individualists were more likely to prioritize the principles reflecting Ethics of Autonomy and Community in their moral rationalization than the Ethic of Divinity, whereas Brahmin priests might draw more heavily from Ethics of Divinity and Community than from Autonomy.
A common finding generated by these research endeavors is that, although the three ethics are differentially patterned across individuals from diverse cultural groups, nonetheless, all three ethics can be recognized in all societies and even within the responses of many individuals (e.g., Haidt, Koller, & Dias, Reference Haidt, Koller and Dias1993; Jensen, Reference Jensen1995, Reference Jensen1997a, Reference Jensen1997b, Reference Jensen2008; Rozin, Lowery, Imada, et al., Reference Rozin, Lowery, Imada and Haidt1999). Consequently, one implication of these largely quantitative analyses is that the co-occurrence of multiple ethics in moral responses is a common psychological experience. How multiple ethics are psychologically related for individuals as well as how multiple ethics are related developmentally are central questions for the cultural psychology of morality and for the present volume. Our goal in this chapter is to push our understandings of this co-occurrence in new directions and emphasize its importance for a cultural-developmental approach to morality.
Relation of three ethics in moral thinking
The co-occurrence of Autonomy, Community, and Divinity has been empirically examined at various levels of analysis. Most broadly, research has demonstrated ethical co-occurrence at the group level, finding that certain groups may show equally high preference for more than one ethic (Haidt, Koller, & Dias, Reference Haidt, Koller and Dias1993; Jensen, Reference Jensen1995; Shweder, Much, Mahapatra, et al., Reference Shweder, Much, Mahapatra, Park, Brandt and Rozin1997). Other research has demonstrated ethical co-occurrence at the level of the individual or even the response. Vasquez, Keltner, Ebenbach, and Banaszynksi's (Reference Vasquez, Keltner, Ebenbach and Banaszynski2001) analysis of moral examples generated by Filipino and American participants demonstrated not only that all three ethics can be given “equal emphasis” within a cultural group, as evidenced in their sample of Filipino responses, but also that ethics can be “infused” within a single response (p. 107). Such ethical infusion was recognized when participants generated examples of one ethic that contained themes from another ethic (e.g., when an example of an autonomy breach included references to community themes such as duty, hierarchy, interdependence, or social status).
Guerra and Giner-Sorolla (Reference Guerra and Giner-Sorolla2010) examined ethical co-occurrence at the individual level by measuring British and Brazilian individuals’ degree of endorsement of a series of statements representing each ethic. In both samples, researchers demonstrated positive correlations between various ethics. At minimum, these findings indicate that multiple ethics can be embraced simultaneously by an individual. They also indicate that in certain cultural contexts, ethics can become linked to each other in an individual's reasoning. For example, Guerra and Giner-Sorolla found that both Brazilian and British participants' moral endorsements of certain community statements were associated with their endorsements of certain Divinity statements. Additionally, Brazilian participants' moral endorsements of autonomy statements were associated with their endorsements of Divinity statements. In turn, by associating these ethical correlations with cultural orientations, such as vertical and horizontal dimensions of individualism and collectivism, these researchers can point toward the particular cultural underpinnings of co-occurring ethics.
These quantitative analyses of ethical co-occurrence can reveal which ethics are likely to co-occur in certain cultural contexts.2 However, these analyses have limited utility in revealing the dynamic of ethical co-occurrence itself – that is, how co-occurring ethics are related to one another. To our knowledge, there are only a few studies that have examined the relation between co-occurring ethics within individuals' moral reasoning. Arnett, Ramos, and Jensen (Reference Arnett, Ramos and Jensen2001), in their study of ideologies among emerging adults in the United States, recognized multiple ethics in response to one question among a sizable minority of participants. Analysis of these qualitative statements indicated two ways that ethics were related in individuals' discourse. For some individuals, ethics appeared in a “mutually reinforcing” relationship (p. 78). In these cases, one ethic was framed as a logical prerequisite for another ethic, such that fulfilling one ethical goal enabled the fulfillment of another. For other individuals, ethics appeared in an “oppositional” relationship, such that justifications coded as one ethic were “explicitly embraced” and used to deny the legitimacy of a justification coded as another ethic. In other words, within the framework of one ethic, another ethic is “disparaged” as a “destructive force” (p. 78). Jensen (Reference Jensen1995) also examined qualitative statements involving ethical co-occurrence in her analysis of moral reasoning across the life course among US individuals. Among midlife and older adults, she illustrated how different ethics compounded on one another as participants offered multiple, distinct lines of reasoning. In this way, ethics appeared side by side as parallel justifications to support a moral stance.
As these research examples illustrate, an examination of the relation between ethics requires situating coded justifications in their discursive contexts. This is because it is through various communicative and discursive moves that speakers position ethical justifications in relation to one another. Through using discursive methods to analyze these moments of ethical co-occurrence, this chapter builds on previous research to uncover various relations of ethical co-occurrence in a systematic fashion. Additionally, a more critical goal of this chapter is to propose a more serious consideration of the nature of one of these types of ethical co-occurrence that we call “ethical imbrication.” By imbrication we are referring to the extent to which these seemingly distinct ethics (in this case Autonomy, Community, and Divinity) come into play in the same place and time in the production of moral discourse. In this way, our use of the term imbrication is meant to denote overlap, similarly to the way tiles on a roof overlap and coconstitute one another to make up the entirety of the roof structure. By making ethical imbrication itself an object of analysis in a way that has not been the case thus far, our analyses challenge some of our theoretical and methodological considerations as we engage in cross-cultural and developmental Three Ethics research.
Specifically, our analysis of ethical imbrication challenges firm conceptual distinctions between the three ethics. This kind of “conceptual essentialism” can be implied when cultures (or individuals) are characterized by their distributions of each ethic. Such analytic approaches treat the three Ethics of Autonomy, Community, and Divinity as distinct entities. These approaches ask what we can say about group differences given an assumed moral domain. Our focus, by contrast, is about the moral domain itself within these group discourses. Thus, while we find these distinctions to be analytically useful as Weberian ideal types, when it comes to analyzing moral discourse, our analysis of ethical imbrication suggests ways in which these ideas so deeply interpenetrate one another that it calls into question the empirical utility of these distinctions in characterizing a cultural moral code on its own terms. In this way, our purpose is to argue for a space in which the mutual distinctiveness of the three ethics can be called into question in the analysis of moral discourse. What our approach offers is a close phenomenological account of a moral system under analysis that seeks to avoid conceptual essentialism, such as imposing an a priori structure of the moral domain that may not provide a good fit to the moral domains revealed in the discourse of our ethnographic interlocutors.
This conceptual essentialism can occur on at least two levels. On the one hand, the analyst may conceptualize certain moral categories as philosophically or empirically distinct. This kind of essentialism can be implied when cultures (or individuals) are characterized by their distributions of each ethic. On the other hand, the individuals producing the moral discourse may essentialize certain moral ideals or concepts in the ways that they conceptually carve up the moral domain according to various ethnotheoretical perspectives on morality and ethics. This chapter deals more substantively with the former type of conceptual essentialism (that imbued by the analyst), while also suggesting some ways to more effectively document ethnotheoretical conceptual essentialism. The Three Ethics framework has already built into it a cultural flexibility by allowing for different configurations (both in kind and quantity) of the three ethics in culturally distinct visions of the good. We advocate furthering this flexibility by suggesting that close discursive analysis of ethical co-occurrence opens up new avenues for understanding the ways that convergent and divergent ethical concepts are discursively wielded in the production of particular moral discourses in distinct social contexts.
Method: discourse analysis of moral vignettes
As mentioned above, the examples of moral reasoning that we present here were derived from interviews with Hmong families in the United States and Thailand (Hickman, Reference Hickman2011) and American evangelical families in Boston (DiBianca Fasoli, Reference DiBianca Fasoli2013). Each of us developed a series of culturally relevant moral vignettes based on our prior ethnographic work with each community. These vignettes were designed to portray realistic instances of moral breaches relevant to each community, and in some cases the moral breaches came directly from ethnographic observations in these communities.3 In each project, vignettes were followed by a series of prompts (asked verbally by Hickman, presented in written form by DiBianca Fasoli) designed to assess various dimensions of participants' moral reasoning. These included the participant's moral evaluation of the breach, the relative degree of the breach, justification for the moral stance taken, and whether the participant would condone or suggest interference in the breach.4 These questions were built on prior research utilizing this vignette approach (Haidt, Koller, & Dias, Reference Haidt, Koller and Dias1993; Jensen, Reference Jensen1995, Reference Jensen1998; Miller & Bersoff, Reference Miller and Bersoff1998; Miller, Bersoff, & Harwood, Reference Miller, Bersoff and Harwood1990; Shweder, Mahapatra, & Miller, Reference Shweder, Mahapatra, Miller, Kagan and Lamb1987).
Vignettes were presented to Hmong parent-child dyads separately in two subsamples: a set of nine transnational kinship groups with members in both Thailand and the United States5 and a set of ten Hmong families living in the midwestern United States.6 In order to harness naturally occurring speech genres in the production of moral discourse, the vignettes and discussion were framed according to ethnographic research on communicative practices and moral discourse in each community (compare to Briggs, Reference Briggs1986; see Hickman, Reference Hickman2011, and DiBianca Fasoli, Reference DiBianca Fasoli2013, for a more comprehensive account of these methods). In the Hmong sample, a speech genre wherein Hmong members of a community narrate and comment on moral tales was mimicked in order to collect quasi-naturalistic discourse surrounding the predetermined vignettes. Among the American evangelical sample, vignettes were presented to sixteen parent-child dyads (children's ages ranged from 6 to 9 years), who responded to vignettes together, without an interviewer present. Specifically, dyads were asked to read and respond to each prompt aloud. They were told that the goal of these prompts was to generate conversation and thus to move to subsequent prompts when they felt their conversation was exhausted. This procedure was designed to elicit moral reasoning in the context of parent-child verbal interactions, taken as a window onto socialization processes of moral reasoning.
Analysis of each data set began by using the Three Ethics framework to analyze the distribution of the three ethics by different subgroups and, subsequently, to identify and extract instances of moral discourse reflecting multiple ethics. Hickman utilized cultural discourse analysis (Quinn, Reference Quinn2005a, Reference Quinn and Quinn2005b; Strauss, Reference Strauss and Quinn2005) – based on cultural model and cultural schema theory (e.g., Shore, Reference Shore1996; Strauss & Quinn, Reference Strauss and Quinn1999) – to analyze the nature of co-occurring ethics and to point out when such instances signaled imbrication. DiBianca Fasoli utilized a form of language interaction analysis, which draws on the methods of talk-in-interaction and conversation analysis and has been fruitfully used by researchers to analyze the making of morality in social interaction (Fasulo, Loyd, & Padiglione, Reference Fasulo, Loyd and Padiglione2007; Fung & Chen, Reference Fung and Chen2001; Sterponi, Reference Sterponi2003). She employed these analytic methods to examine the sequential organization of coded justifications in parent-child verbal interaction.
How prevalent is ethical co-occurrence?
In both analyses of the present data sets, instances in which ethics co-occurred in participants' moral reasoning were common. Hickman (Reference Hickman2011) examined co-occurrence at the level of the vignette, using the whole of moral discourse produced in response to each vignette as a unit of analysis. When employing the Jensen (Reference Jensen2004) coding manual for the three ethics, analysis suggests that in the majority of vignettes (63.1 percent) respondents employed justifications from more than one ethic. In other words, there were only 73 out of 198 vignettes presented to participants for which a single ethic was coded in the participant's resulting moral discourse.7 Table 7.1 parses out the patterns for each ethic, giving the raw number of vignette responses where each ethic was coded alone versus when it was coded along with another ethic. In the majority of moral discourse prompted by each vignette, participants utilized these ethics in concert with others.
Table 7.1 Frequency of ethical co-occurrence in Hmong and American Evangelical moral discourse
| Hmong sample | American Evangelical sample | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| # Vignettes | % of total | # Prompts | % of total | |
| Autonomy alone | 13 | 6.6 | – | – |
| Community alone | 39 | 19.7 | – | – |
| Divinity alone | 21 | 10.6 | 27 | 43.5 |
| Subtotal no co-occurrence | 73 | 36.9 | 27 | 43.5 |
| Autonomy + Community (co-occurring) | 82 | 41.4 | – | – |
| Autonomy + Divinity (co-occurring) | 7 | 3.5 | 25 | 71.4 |
| Community + Divinity (co-occurring) | 18 | 9.1 | 5 | 14.3 |
| Autonomy + Community + Divinity (co-occurring) | 18 | 9.1 | 5 | 14.3 |
| Subtotal co-occurrence | 125 | 63.1 | 35 | 56.5 |
| Total | 198 | 62 | ||
DiBianca Fasoli's analysis focused on the Ethic of Divinity, as the original research question was to understand the socialization of spiritual concepts in moral thinking among evangelical Christian families. Using the Jensen (Reference Jensen2004) manual to code justifications at the level of the prompt, 62 prompt responses that included Divinity were identified (from a possible 240 prompt responses), and all other justifications that occurred in these prompt responses were coded (see also Appendix A, this volume). The results reported in Table 7.1 suggest that in parent-child verbal interactions, children are just as likely to encounter Divinity principles in relation to other ethics (56.5 percent) as they are to encounter them independently (43.5 percent), even at the level of the prompt.
Together, these analyses suggest that ethical co-occurrence appears frequently in the moral reasoning of our American evangelical and Hmong participants. Although the frequency of such co-occurrence may vary from community to community, its prevalence in these two distinct samples suggests that the phenomenon is worth examining in greater detail.
Forms of ethical co-occurrence
Given that individuals use multiple ethics in their moral reasoning, the next question is to determine how individuals are relating those ethics in their moral reasoning. We suggest three distinct forms of ethical co-occurrence that we identified using the analytic categories of Autonomy, Community, and Divinity. Below we provide a brief overview of each of these three forms and then present cultural discourse analysis of examples of moral reasoning of Hmong participants. In particular, we use ethnographic findings to demonstrate how instances of ethical co-occurrence may signal ethical imbrication.
We label the three forms of ethical co-occurrence that we recognized “parallel justifications,” “divergent justifications,” and “imbricated justifications.” (1) Co-occurrence as parallel justifications entails the use of multiple lines of moral discourse that can be demonstrably represented as distinct rationales (e.g., Autonomy and Community), yet they converge on the same moral judgment. In other words, they compound on one another in order to provide a more expanded rationale for a singular moral assessment. Distinct from this type of co-occurrence, (2) divergent justifications refers to instances that we interpret as a kind of moral-cognitive dissonance. In these cases, our interlocutors employed moral discourse representing discrete ethics (e.g., Autonomy and Community), but each toward distinct and often incompatible moral ends. In other words, our interlocutors felt conflicted about their moral judgment and utilized different lines of reasoning that pushed them in different directions with regard to their moral assessment. (3) Co-occurrence as imbricated justifications denotes instances in which interlocutors could be recognized as employing elements of multiple lines of moral discourse (e.g., Autonomy and Community), woven into a single rationale, such that it becomes impossible to extract the autonomy dimensions or the community dimensions from the discourse that was produced without the original rationale falling apart. This last set of cases points toward a kind of integration of analytic categories that is so deep that it suggests that the analytic distinction between ethics is not one that is necessarily meaningful in participants' moral outlooks.
Parallel justifications.
As an example of a parallel justification, one participant in the United States responded in the following way when presented with the following vignette:
A poor man went to the hospital after being seriously hurt in an accident. At the hospital they refused to treat him because he could not afford to pay.
While describing why he thinks the doctors and medical staff in this situation were morally wrong in not providing treatment to the individual in the vignette, a 64-year-old Hmong man responded (in Hmong):8
P: …the right thing to do is that they [the doctors] must help the person as much as 1
they can, because it is their responsibility. It's their job.9 And they need to know what 2
the sickness is, and how to fix it so they must help fix it. Even if there isn't enough 3
money for the doctors or medical staff, they must still help! If they don't help, then 4
it's like – if they are able to help but they – he doesn't have money to pay them and 5
now they won't fix him, then it's like – it's like they're killing that person and 6
disposing of them, because they [the doctors] are the ones who save people. This is 7
what I think. But who knows if I am correct! (smiles and laughs)10 8
I: (Laughs) So you think that perhaps they are wrong? 9
P: I think they are wrong. 10
I: This wrong, how heavy is the violation? Would you say it is not wrong, just a 11
little wrong, quite wrong, or extremely wrong? 12
P: I think it must be extremely wrong. 13
I: Why is that? 14
P: Because this is a poor person. If one compares it now to the law of heaven, one 15
can show grace, let's say this poor person didn't do anything wrong to you, but just 16
comes to you sick but doesn't have money to pay you, and doesn't have relatives to 17
help, and you don't heal him, then – if you do this then you did not show grace to 18
him [the poor person], and perhaps heaven will not show grace to you either. 19
Utilizing the Jensen (Reference Jensen2004) coding scheme, the emphasis this person placed on the place in society of doctors and their role and responsibility to heal the sick was coded as Community. In line 2 he emphatically repeated that it is the doctors' responsibility in society, and again in line 7. However, this respondent went on to provide a further justification that invokes “the law of heaven” (kev cai ntuj) and the karmic principle of just desert (lines 15–19). While this participant invoked both a community-based responsibility (i.e., the essential role of doctors in society) as well as a divinity-based response, these multiple ethics are appealed toward the same moral end – the doctors must treat the man regardless of his ability to pay. In this sense, these parallel justifications converge on the same moral assessment, while providing distinct rationales that can clearly be coded under different ethics in the Three Ethics framework.
Compared to the other forms of ethical co-occurrence we discuss below, parallel justifications can be accounted for by current methodologies most easily. For example, the common practice of computing the total frequencies of each ethic in the moral profile of a given individual or group does not require only a single ethic to be at play in response to a single item (e.g., vignette or question). This form of co-occurrence is perhaps the most commonly noted in the literature and has been observed and documented by Jensen (Reference Jensen1995) and Arnett, Ramos, and Jensen (Reference Arnett, Ramos and Jensen2001) in American samples. Jensen (Reference Jensen1995) argues that with age, midlife and older Americans “become more concerned with the goals of the community and with integrating the self into a natural and sacred order” (p. 85). In other words, later in life they begin to compound the Ethic of Autonomy with Community or Divinity in their moral reasoning. Arnett, Ramos, and Jensen (Reference Arnett, Ramos and Jensen2001) also described examples of ethical co-occurrence, including how some emerging adults regarded autonomy as a foundation for the development of healthy communal relationships. Our analyses build on these findings to demonstrate the work that is being done by individuals when parallel justifications factor into a person's moral discourse. Among other things, parents can use parallel justifications to socialize their children into particular modes of moral thinking, thus providing important developmental pathways to intended moral outlooks in culturally particular visions of the good. We address this point in greater detail below.
Divergent justifications.
Divergent moral justifications occur when an individual seems to be conflicted about the ultimate moral judgment at hand, with different ethics pulling the individual's rationales in different directions. We argue that this can be characterized as a kind of moral-cognitive dissonance. As an example, consider responses to the following vignette, both by young Hmong males living in the United States:
A letter arrived addressed to a 14-year-old son. Before the boy returned home, his father opened the letter and read it.
One 23-year-old Hmong man responded (in English):
P: The father still has the right to know what is it, who is it that – the son is still 1
fifteen years old so he's still a minor, so he can't be independent yet. So if the father 2
reads it, if there's a problem, then he can solve it, then they can solve it. 3
…
I: So what if the son was eighteen years old? 4
P: Eighteen years old? Then really, then it's too the point, I feel it gets to the point 5
where the father has to slowly step back, slowly step back. If it's a letter that says 6
maybe an – it's from the college or university, then maybe the father can just let that 7
one slide and give it to him, the son, to look at. Then that's okay, I feel that that's – 8
I: What if it was a personal letter? 9
P: If it's a personal letter, let's say, um, maybe, his girlfriend maybe? Hypothetically 10
if it's his girlfriend, I think he should also let it slide, too. Let it slide just a little bit. 11
But, for the first few times he see that, he should at least take a look at it to see if 12
there is anything serious such as – 13
I: Even if he is eighteen years old? 14
P: Even if he's eighteen years old. Because what if the letter says that, you got me 15
pregnant, you've got to take care of me, then the father, if the son keeps that a secret, 16
then that's going to be a situation. 17
…
I: Is it a sin? [Nws puas muaj txim?]11 18
P: Uh, in this – in this context here, uh, no. Because the father really take – the goal 19
of the father is really to keep watch of the son, so that – to keep him safe, to keep 20
him on track so that he can become a good person. I think that's what he – That's 21
what it does. 22
In response to the same vignette, another 18-year-old Hmong man explained (in English):
P: because it's, well, his father should have permission to like – I know it's a privacy 1
thing, but if it's important to his parents, his father should be able to check his 2
personal things. He is the household leader anyway. 3
…
P: Well, if it's personal letter, I think he could uh – uh – he'll probably – I don't – 4
I don't really think it's – I think it's okay, because it's – the father probably will 5
understand if it's a personal letter and go back and give it to him. 6
I: And what if the father reads it before the son reads it, is that wrong? 7
P: I think it's – as far if he'd read like a personal letter, because he should understand 8
we have our personal rights, besides just a family thing, you know? So, also that's 9
like the other side of that. 10
I: So if the father's reading a letter to the son, and it's a personal letter, then it is 11
wrong? 12
P: Yeah, it is wrong. That's a privacy thing. We all have, you know, an outside life of 13
the house. It's okay if we get [them at] this point, but I mean sometimes you don't 14
want to get families involved in [some of these things]. 15
In both of these responses there are two distinct and competing ethics at play. On the one hand, the father is seen as having a particularly important role of watching over and guiding his son toward being “a good person” (line 21 in the first transcript). Other participants phrased this in terms of protecting the son against his own ignorance and making sure the father is able to help the son resolve any troubles in his life. The key here is that the role of the father as a father vis-à-vis his son is foregrounded, and this hierarchical role relationship is the ethical principle that grounds this argument (i.e., “he is the household leader anyway,” line 3 of the second transcript, or the argument in lines 5–6 of the first transcript that as the son ages his father needs to “step back” and grant the son his independence). Such reasoning can be recognized as an Ethic of Community. On the other hand, the rights to privacy of the son – such as the privacy of a letter addressed to him – is painted as a competing ethic (i.e., “We all have, you know, an outside life of the house,” lines 13–14 in the second transcript). This notion of privacy clearly falls under the rubric of Autonomy.
One can see the back-and-forth in these responses. In the first transcript the speaker is working out a compromise between the responsibilities of the father and the autonomy of the son throughout his response. The second transcript makes this ambivalence particularly clear. The phrase “also that's like the other side of that” (lines 9–10) and the hesitations and discursive course corrections are all telling. In lines 4–5 the dashes represent the constant changing of direction in his discourse. He also starts his statement with the qualification “well.” Both of these discursive characteristics are representative of the ambivalence that this young Hmong man is experiencing as he weighs the competing ethics in this situation.
Hickman discusses the developmental significance of this moral-cognitive dissonance elsewhere (see Hickman, Reference Hickman2011, for an ethnographic description of the lives of these youth and an intergenerational-transnational comparison of patterns in moral discourse), but for present it is sufficient to note that these youth did manifest higher levels of this type of moral-cognitive dissonance than their parents did. Critically, these young Hmong were born right about the time that their parents resettled to the United States as refugees from Laos. One explanation of this increased moral ambivalence for the younger generation, then, may be that they are struggling with competing moral goods offered by their parents and peers. In other words, they are dealing with the competing demands of Hmong moral models handed to them by their parents and relatives versus those that are more prevalent in American society (such as their non-Hmong peers) and more typical of American emerging adults in particular (see Jensen, Reference Jensen1995). This is an important dynamic for understanding the moral worlds of these migrant youth, and it suggests a more complicated picture of the development of moral identity (see Hardy, Walker, Olsen, et al., Reference Hardy, Walker, Olsen, Woodbury and Hickman2013). Critically, this trend would be overlooked by an approach that stops at coding the mere presence of the three ethics rather than analyzing the particular dynamic of competing moral goods in the discourse. The key methodological point here is that employing the Three Ethics framework within a cultural discourse analysis reveals psychocultural underpinnings of moral motives – in this case a manifest moral ambivalence that would otherwise be missed.
Ethical imbrication, or coconstitution of “distinct” ethics.
Beyond parallel and divergent justifications, we also found many instances across our data sets where the analytical categories of Autonomy, Community, and Divinity co-occurred but could not be extricated from one another in the participants' moral discourse in a culturally meaningful way. In the following example, the vignette which was used to elicit moral speech went as follows:
A father and son lived together in their village. One day, the father committed a serious moral transgression that made him lose face, and made the son very embarrassed. The son decided to move to another village, and he changed both his given name and his clan name, so no one would know whose son he is. Is a son that does this morally wrong?
In an interview in Thailand, a 48-year-old Hmong father, whom we will call Txawj Pheej, responded to this vignette in the following way after indicating that the son in this situation was wrong and should be corrected (the interview was in Hmong):
I: What would you say to him? 1
P: I would say to him that those people are your mother and father that gave birth to 2
you! (emphatic intonation) You have to just take responsibility for admitting / 3
confessing (lees) them to be your parents. One must tell him [the son] this. And, he is 4
just a little mad (chim), right, just a little mad, then say to him – he still has to accept 5
his mother and father also, as he is only a little ashamed (txaj muag me me xwb). 6
I: But what if he says that “I can't accept them because I am too embarrassed. My 7
father has lost face, I have also lost face.” If he says this and that he just wants to run 8
away, what would you say to him? 9
P: Um, even if he says that, he can't do it. Because they are his parents and they 10
raised him, so he can't do that. One must tell him that he must absolutely own up to 11
them. 12
I: Oh. 13
P: Being ashamed, losing face, is not as important as the fact that one's parents 14
provide one's fate and fortune (txoj hmoov) – which is more important. 15
I: Is that right? 16
P: Yes, [this is] much more important. 17
…
I: Is this a violation of social convention or a violation of heaven's law [i.e., natural 18
law]?12 19
P: [It's] a sin against – heaven's law. 20
I: This is a transgression of heaven's law – of heaven's law just a bit, is that right? 21
P: Yes. It's a minor violation of heavenly law. 22
I: Why is it a violation of heavenly law, but not just a matter of social convention? 23
P: Because he is not thinking sufficiently – not thinking about everything – about 24
his parents that raised him, which is the most important thing for fate and fortune 25
(txoj hmoov). 26
I: Oh.27
P: So if you don't accept the wrong that your parents did – Doing something wrong, 28
whoever did it, will only hurt that person. 29
I: Uh-huh. 30
P: So if your parents do something wrong and you are not going to accept them, that 31
is not right. Wherever you run to, you shouldn't change your last name. You should 32
remember who your parents are – They are these people. 33
I: Uh. 34
P: Doing this, you won't wrong the heavens. 35
On the one hand, the behavioral prescription here is that the son should respect and honor his parents because of their relationship to him and his filial obligation to them (lines 2–3). This seems to fit squarely under an Ethic of Community. On the other hand, what Txawj Pheej is marking here is the importance of the son's fate or fortune, as mediated by his parents (lines 14–15) and the potential impact that their influence will have on his interests. The issue here is that one's selfish interest and ultimate welfare is tied up in one's communal and kinship obligations and, further, that these moral obligations are based on an ontology that fits squarely under the Ethic of Divinity. That is, the welfare of the soul (both the parents' and the son's) here is indistinguishable from one's “secular” interests that might be stressed under an Ethic of Autonomy. Third, all of this is based on a divine ontology, namely, the conception of ancestors and their ability to mediate the fate or fortune of the self, as well as the conceptions of the eternal life course and life and death more broadly.
The most fundamental point to be made here is that what Txawj Pheej is doing is not simply negotiating between competing ethics in his moral assessment of the son's actions here. Rather, at least in this instance, he is expressing a deontological stance that contains essential elements from all three ethics. If the assumptions of any one of these ethics were minimized or extracted from Txawj Pheej's rationale, his moral argument would disintegrate. Without the Ethic of Autonomy operating here, the son would not have as significant of a motivation to follow through with his filial obligation. In fact, Txawj Pheej implicitly argues here that the benefits to the personal preferences of the son are a primary reason for why he should respect his parents (the phrasing in lines 14–15 and 24–26 is undergirded by this assumption), despite any personal issues of shame or suffering (lines 5–6). The Ethic of Community is even more obvious and apparent in this example, but without the Ethic of Divinity and a metaphysical understanding of how elders and ancestors mediate one's own well-being, the basis for the personal incentive to be pious would also fall apart. In sum, Ethics of Autonomy, Community, and Divinity work in concert to fill out this particular moral rationale. Although they may seem like principles that work in opposite directions, at least in some instances, this example of Hmong moral discourse depends explicitly on two or more of these ideal types.
Other aspects of Hmong metaphysics and ancestral beliefs make this point even more apparent. As described in detail elsewhere (Hickman, Reference Hickman2011, in press), a Hmong view of the life course extends one's existence and filial obligation far beyond the supposed barrier of death. Ancestral rituals involve intimate interactions with deceased ancestors that mirror living relationships, and these ancestral rites are even anticipated in informal rites while elders are still alive. In this context of a Hmong ethnotheory of the life course, it does not make much sense to make a strong distinction between the kinship dimensions of an Ethic of Community, on the one hand, and an Ethic of Divinity that concerns the transmigration of souls to ancestral villages, on the other. Consequently, in coding systems that make such sharp distinctions, it would seem that once an ancestor dies, one's filial obligation to that ancestor turns from communal to divine. We argue that from the standpoint of a Hmong ethnotheory of the life course, this is a fairly arbitrary distinction.
In this section we have sought to illustrate various forms of ethical co-occurrence by presenting cultural discourse analysis of examples of moral reasoning from Hickman's (Reference Hickman2011, in press) larger ethnographic study. We argue that trends in ethical co-occurrence itself can tell an important story about the moral outlooks of people from varying cultural backgrounds that analyses of the mere distribution of ethics cannot. We further argue that analyses of ethical co-occurrence can help researchers see where these analytic categories do not represent meaningful categorical distinctions in the moral outlook of research participants. At the same time, however, what we hope our analysis has illustrated is how one can reconstruct the moral outlook of participants in culturally meaningful terms through employing these categories within a cultural discourse analysis, in conjunction with rich ethnographic data. In other words, the Three Ethics framework provides a critical epistemological means of discovering ethical imbrication and other forms of ethical co-occurrence. That is, even if the theoretical separation of the three ethics does not map exactly onto the emic worldviews of participants, this framework provides a good heuristic and starting point for detecting differences and filling out those worldviews in their cultural specificity. Researchers should take advantage of the utility of this framework for investigating cross-cultural patterns in moral thought but ought not to overdetermine the extent to which these theoretical distinctions inhere in the actual moral discourse that researchers collect and analyze. In sum, the interactions between the three ethics provide critical insights into both cultural and developmental moral dynamics. It is to the latter that we now turn.
Ontogenetic implications of ethical co-occurrence (or the developmental story)
DiBianca Fasoli's data on Divinity reasoning illustrates how a close language-interaction analysis of parent-child interaction can be used to examine the socializing potential of ethical co-occurrence. In this section, we highlight what such an analysis can tell us about the processes through which moral thinking may develop in particular cultural contexts.
In the parent-child interaction data, instances in which Divinity co-occurred with other ethics typically followed a common format, such that parents introduced the justification coded as Divinity and children contributed justifications coded as Autonomy. Analysis of these instances suggests three ways Autonomy and Divinity were typically related in these interactions. Together, these relations suggest a process whereby parents socialized their children into an Ethic of Divinity by reframing children's self-generated Autonomy reasoning.
The first way that Divinity-coded and Autonomy-coded justifications were related to one another was in opposition. Parent-child conversations created such an oppositional relationship when parents used Divinity principles to counter their child's Autonomy principles, which were typically Autonomy principles of exchange relations based on reciprocity or social contracts. This type of co-occurrence was recognized in the interactions of 31 percent of the dyads. In these instances, parents did not disagree with their child's judgment of the action as right or wrong but rather with the child's justification for that judgment. For example, one father-son dyad negotiated why they thought it was wrong for the protagonist of the vignette, Jack, to refuse to give some money to Sam, a classmate who had lost his lunch money:
Child: Because it [giving some money] would be fair, 1
even and fair if, um, Jack had given him some of his money for lunch. 2
Dad: Well, sometimes you do things and you don't get anything back, right? 3
Sometimes you do things, ah, just to be helpful, 4
just because God is leading you to help. 5
The child justified his position by appealing to equality and fairness – concerns both classified under the Ethic of Autonomy. However, the father voiced doubt about these appeals when he said “well” to introduce his own position. He continued by providing a different line of reasoning, one that evaluated the moral status of the act in terms of God. By appealing to spiritual concerns to discourage concerns relating to equality and fairness, the parent can be recognized as conveying that Divinity-based reasoning is a more appropriate ground for moral judgment than certain Autonomy principles are in this case.
A very different relation between Autonomy and Divinity was available to children when parents legitimated their child's Autonomy reasoning through further appealing to Divinity principles. In these instances, which were apparent in the reasoning of 50 percent of dyads, parents reinforced children's Autonomy-coded evaluations through using Divinity-coded justifications as an additional layer of meaning in the situation.
To illustrate, consider the conversation between 7-year-old Rachel and her mother Laurel as they responded to the Lunch Story (described above). Laurel read the standardized prompt, asking her daughter whether she thought refusing to give money in this situation was a sin:
Rachel: Yes 1
Laurel: How come? 2
R: Because she was saying, “no I don't want you to have my money, 3
because it's my money 4
and I want to get all these extra things” 5
and she could've actually had food than having no food at all. 6
L: Mhm that's right, that's right 7
L: And, the, do you remember there's another thing, 8
that Jesus says about feeding the hungry. 9
R: Huh!? 10
L: He says something like, when you feed…11
when you help the least of these, 12
when you give someone hungry something to eat, 13
it's like you're feeding me. 14
He asks us to take care of others. 15
In this exchange, we once again see the child appealing to principles recognized as Autonomy, namely, self-interest and the interest and welfare of another individual. First, in lines 3–5, Rachel cast self-interest on the part of the protagonist as selfish. She accomplished this by embedding the protagonist's words in her speech, thereby transforming those words into evidence to support her own stance. Within the reported speech, Rachel placed emphatic stress on “you” and “my,” highlighting the contrast between potential giver and receiver. This contrast was amplified in line 5 when she placed stress on the word “extra” and paired it with the word “all.”
Second, Rachel described the consequences of self-interest on another's welfare through an implicit counterfactual statement in line 6. Here, she evoked a world where the classmate “could've actually had food.” She then explicitly contrasted the imagined world and the current world such that in the imagined world the classmate “had food” while in the current world she had “no food at all.” Meanwhile, in the current world, the character Sarah had “all” these things, which Rachel saw as “extras.”
In response, the parent appealed to concerns that were coded under the Ethic of Divinity: she first evoked Jesus as a speaker (line 9) and then directly reported his words (lines 11–14). Within this reported speech, she also evoked Jesus as a recipient of giving, such that giving food to another is like feeding Jesus. To justify this claim, Laurel appealed to the authority of Jesus by attributing the claim itself to Jesus. Importantly, Laurel did not position this line of reasoning in opposition to her daughter's Autonomy reasoning but rather as coexisting, suggested through her use of the conjunction “and,” the label “another thing” (line 8), and her affirmation “that's right, that's right” (line 7).
In this exchange, both Rachel and Laurel mobilized the speech of others as evidence to support their stances. However, Laurel appealed to the words of Jesus, presumably a higher authority than the words of Sarah, the potential giver. Moreover, while Rachel imagined alternate possible worlds of literal givers and receivers through her counterfactual, Laurel moved to a symbolic world that evoked Jesus as a third actor in giving. Thus, rather than solely an act of material exchange between the giver and receiver – as her daughter suggested – the mother constituted helping as also a symbolic act of giving to Jesus. These were not necessarily in opposition but simply different layers of meaning – a kind of strategic deployment of parallel justifications toward the ends of the socialization goals of the parent.
Finally, a third and similar way in which justifications coded as Autonomy and Divinity were related in parent-child interactions was when parents scaffolded their child's Divinity reasoning through Autonomy reasoning. In these instances, parents first prompted children to interpret the protagonist's action in terms of self-interest versus other-interest (Autonomy) and then introduced God (Divinity) to judge the moral worth of the Autonomy-based interpretation. In other words, an Autonomy-based interpretation of an event was used to arrive at a Divinity-based evaluation of that event. In the following excerpt, the mother, Martha, invited her daughter, Lydia, to participate in this logic by first prompting her to interpret the situation in terms of self- and other-interest. The excerpt opens with Lydia reasoning why it was wrong to refuse to comfort a neighbor before surgery:
Lydia: [It was wrong] because she could see that movie anytime. 1
Her friend only has one life, she, this is the only time, she can see her friend do that. 2
She can't just take a time machine and – go back. 3
That's the only, that's a one in life time. That movie she could see anytime. 4
Martha: But she had broken her leg and was going to the hospital 5
and that was happening then and there, right? 6
L: Yeah. 7
M: So you're saying she should right at that moment do what was right. 8
L: Yeah. 9
M: And put off the movie. 10
Who is she, who is she thinking about if she goes with her friend to the hospital? 11
L: Her friend. 12
M: And who is she thinking about if she goes to the movie? 13
L: Herself. 14
M: Herself. 15
And what does God ask us to do? 16
L: Do unto others as they would have you do unto you. As you would have them do unto 17
you. 18
M: Mmm. 19
Or to serve others, right? 20
In this excerpt, the daughter first appealed to the uniqueness and urgency of the opportunity to help (lines 1–4) to justify her stance. After some clarification in lines 5–10, the mother then introduced additional considerations, namely, principles of self-interest and other-interest (subcategories of Autonomy in Jensen's Reference Jensen2004 coding manual). She introduced these considerations as questions, inviting her daughter to interpret the situation in terms of self-interest and other-interest (lines 11–14). The mother then introduced God's interests (Divinity), again in the form of a question she posed to her daughter (line 16). In this way, the mother used her daughter's understanding of certain Autonomy and Divinity principles to scaffold her daughter's expression of those principles as moral justifications. In doing so, she suggested that the relative moral worth of two Autonomy principles (self-interest and other-interest) were to be decided in terms of Divinity principles (God's wants and desires).
Together, these data suggest that parents used spiritual concerns to selectively encourage and discourage a set of concerns recognized as Autonomy. Specifically, the Autonomy concerns of “reciprocity” and “self-interest” were devalued, but “other-interest” was elevated to divine status. Consistent with these findings, Jensen (Chapter 8, this volume) found that the use of reciprocity in evangelical Christians' moral reasoning declined across the life course, such that it was used frequently by children, minimally by adolescents, and not at all by adults. The current findings suggest the processes that produce this pattern – namely, that such concerns may be cast by socializing agents as “morally objectionable” within an Ethic of Divinity.
At the same time, however, such opposing relations between Autonomy and Divinity represent only a partial view of their potential relations. Other findings of this study demonstrated several other types of Divinity-Autonomy co-occurrence that were not opposing. Specifically, parents appealed to God and Jesus to legitimate their children's appeals to “other-interest,” and parents also scaffolded their children's spiritual reasoning through “other-interest” and “self-interest.” Such findings would explain the corresponding rise of Divinity and decline in Autonomy among highly religious individuals as due to increasing scope of Divinity over Autonomy rather than solely their opposition. These findings suggest that Autonomy may decline over the life course as it becomes increasingly superficial or proximal, that is, as it is encompassed by the increasing scope of Divinity as an ultimate moral end.
These patterns of Autonomy-Divinity relations have implications for understanding the ontogenetic origins of the three ethics in moral reasoning. For example, one way that parents may socialize their children into an Ethic of Divinity is by building on their Autonomy reasoning. From this perspective, children come to see Divinity principles as relevant for moral reasoning through their initial link with Autonomy principles. Thus, rather than envisioning Divinity as having its own, distinct trajectory of development, it may be that Divinity is ontogenetically rooted in Autonomy. Consequently, in this community, Divinity may already be tied to and encompass certain forms of Autonomy reasoning when it emerges in individuals' self-generated moral reasoning. In other words, Divinity may emerge in moral reasoning already “imbricated” with Autonomy in this community.
In sum, discursive analysis of ethical co-occurrence in parent-child interactions suggests specific dynamics between ethics, namely, Autonomy and Divinity. The specific ways in which Divinity and Autonomy co-occurred in these interactions was nuanced, but in all cases, a relationship between Autonomy principles and Divinity principles was made available for children. Attending to such moments of ethical co-occurrence provides a means of deessentializing these ethics in order to illuminate culturally grounded patterns of the development of moral thinking.
Conclusions: methodological and theoretical treatments of ethical imbrication
Let us conclude by briefly sketching some implications for analyzing moral discourse that extend from our argument against conceptual essentialism of the three ethics. We agree with philosophers Isaiah Berlin and David Wong that the negotiation between incommensurable goods constitutes an essential dimension that varies between cultural moral codes and that this incommensurability does not discount the ultimate rationality of any particular system (Gray, Reference Gray1996; Wong, Reference Wong2014). Rejecting the assumption of commensurability in the moral domain – that is, that all rationally defensible moral goods can be fulfilled simultaneously – allows for immense cultural variation in the moral domain without the conclusion that one system is more rationally coherent than another. It was in this spirit that the critiques that led to the Three Ethics approach first challenged our understanding of moral development in different cultural contexts (Shweder, Reference Shweder1990; Shweder, Mahapatra, & Miller, Reference Shweder, Mahapatra, Miller, Kagan and Lamb1987). However, the conceptual essentialism implicated in some research on moral reasoning limits the types of cultural complexity that can be detected in the moral systems and developmental trajectories of our ethnographic interlocutors. This cuts against the grain of the spirit of the original critique that brought about the Three Ethics framework. Crucially, conceptual essentialism leads the analyst to give priority to abstract ethical categories that may preclude us from seeing the full vision of the good that members of a given society themselves may recognize or implicitly operate from. We therefore propose new directions of research that emphasize analyzing moral discourse for parallel justifications, divergent justifications, and ethical imbrication. Methods that accomplish such analyses will be more sensitive to culturally divergent views of the moral domain and the developmental trajectories that are engendered by them. These new directions offer ways of revealing the cultural logics that conceptually underlie particular constellations of ethics.
On the one hand, we need to be open to the possibility that these categories are often inextricably linked, can coconstitute one another, or even provide developmental precursors to one another in the cultural moral codes of our interlocutors – what we have termed “ethical imbrication.” Thus, given the ways that our Hmong and American evangelical interlocutors frame their moral arguments, we are compelled to question contemporary trends of conceptual essentialism and consider the ways in which analytically distinct ethical goods can in fact be imbricated as part and parcel of the same threads of moral discourse (i.e., part of the same moral domain as experienced by our interlocutors). Such instances of ethical imbrication would not represent a simple trade-off, hierarchical ordering, or compartmentalization of discrete moral ideals. Rather, the mutual constitution of these concepts can run so deep that they require each other to exist as our interlocutors imagine them and as these principles inform the moral discourse that we collect. In such cases, justifications coded as separate ethics may be so imbricated that they cannot be meaningfully separated without dismantling the logic of the response.
On the other hand, our position is not to deny that people can hold moral ideals that are incommensurable in the same place and time. Rather, our descriptions of “parallel” and “divergent justifications” demonstrate how the production of moral discourse can have much to do with negotiations that people make between what they experience as competing moral goods.
This argument can be situated in a broader context of scholarship that has similarly suggested that paradoxically held beliefs can play important roles in driving a cultural system or socializing children into those systems. Nuckolls (Reference Nuckolls1998) points to paradoxes of values as a critical source of cultural dynamism in his studies of American psychiatry, identity in Oklahoma, and emotional experience in Micronesia. Using these examples, Nuckolls (Reference Nuckolls1998) argues that “culture is a problem that cannot be solved” (p. 32). In other words, cultural knowledge systems are often made up of a dialectic tension between ultimately incommensurable values. Nuckolls argues that it is the working out of these incommensurable values that drives cultural production of the ideas that we experience as natural. Applied to the Three Ethics framework, this argument suggests that the drive to resolve the (ultimately irresolvable) competing demands of incommensurable ethics such as Autonomy, Community, and Divinity constitutes the very knowledge systems of the people working out these differences, such as American evangelical parents socializing their children into a religious worldview or Hmong youth who simultaneously ascribe to competing cultural models of parent-child relationships.
Astuti (Reference Astuti, Talwar, Harris and Schleifer2011) makes a related developmental point in her description of the discrete sets of beliefs that provide ontogenetic precursors to one another among Vezo parents and children in Madagascar. Analyzing the developmental trajectories of ideas about the afterlife, Astuti (Reference Astuti, Talwar, Harris and Schleifer2011) points to developmental trajectories where children hold developmentally prior “ideas that are very different from – and not just immature versions of – those of their parents and elders” (p. 13). Whereas Vezo children eventually develop the “Vezo” eschatology as adults, Astuti demonstrates that children's views represent an altogether distinct eschatology. Rather than correcting these views, Vezo parents instead encourage or poke fun at them. Astuti argues that it is through ritual performance, rather than explicit teaching, that children eventually develop the adult set of beliefs about the afterlife and ancestors. Paired with our analysis of the various ways that American evangelical parents socialize Divinity thinking in their children, a developmental picture emerges here that is more complex than the increasing or decreasing prevalence of distinct ethics over the life course. Specifically, what we want to draw attention to with our concept of ethical imbrication is that the analytic categories of Autonomy, Community, and Divinity can be shown in some contexts to depend on one another for their very realization.
It is a major goal of this chapter to address this ethical imbrication directly, to argue for its potential salience, and to develop methodological and theoretical perspectives to productively use this ethical imbrication in research on moral thinking across the life course. It is critical to note here that the directions we propose are not necessarily inconsistent with current Three Ethics approaches. Ethical co-occurrence can readily be identified in current methodological implementations of the three ethics, as it is common practice to allow the coding of a single stretch of moral discourse under more than one ethic. Similarly, in our approach, employment of the Three Ethics framework was an essential first-step analytic to reveal moments of ethical co-occurrence. Such analyses involve tight distinctions between the three ethics (a requisite to claim co-occurrence). However, what we propose is that further analyses of ethical co-occurrence ought to be included as necessary post hoc analyses, designed to understand what is actually happening in the discourse when multiple ethics come into play. Indeed, in both empirical projects presented in this chapter, the discourse analyses performed began as post hoc analyses to a more conventional use of the Three Ethics approach. In this way, our critique encourages researchers to analyze the particular dynamics of ethical co-occurrence as a way to go beyond understanding moral codes as distributions of abstract ethical categories. When multiple ethics are coded in responses to particular moral situations, then researchers ought to investigate the implications here, with particular attention to the precise dynamics between and among the “different” ethics at play in the discourse. Doing so can reveal the cultural logics that make sense of the dynamic interplay of different ethical concepts as well as the socialization processes through which abstract ethical categories are acquired as ultimate moral goods.
Ethical imbrication has interesting implications for the development of moral thinking that build on cultural-developmental approaches (Jensen, Reference Jensen2008, Reference Jensen2011a). If two ethics are inextricably linked in a particular cultural logic, is this relationship reflected in moral development as well? Based on the present research, we suggest that it is. Specifically, by examining the relation between ethics in parent-child conversations, we can see how parents selectively cultivate and impede children's moral reasoning in ways consistent with their own moral vision. The findings of this particular investigation depict a socializing process whereby certain elements of Autonomy are selectively imbricated with – or absorbed within – Divinity. Thus, it was only by studying the relation between ethics that we were able to raise the hypothesis that Divinity, which emerges as self-generated reasoning during early adolescence (Jensen, Reference Jensen2011b; see also Trommsdorff, Reference Trommsdorff, Trommsdorff and Chen2012), may be ontologically premised on children's expression of certain Autonomy concerns in this community. Similarly, an explicit emphasis on the dynamics of ethical co-occurrence – with the Three Ethics framework as an epistemological starting point – informed our analysis of the ways that Hmong youth navigate competing moral demands. Although these developmental processes are cut across by migration and are admittedly complex, the analytic moves we have argued for in this chapter are useful in starting to tease apart this complexity and derive a better understanding of the developmental pathways of migrant youth.
We have sought to delineate a mode of analysis that has important theoretical and methodological implications for how we think about Three Ethics theory and related frameworks. The developmental trends that we point to demonstrate that any cultural-developmental approach must take stock of ethical co-occurrence at various points in the life course. By employing discourse analysis methods to uncover the dynamics of parallel, divergent, and imbricated forms of ethical co-occurrence, researchers can develop more robust accounts of the nature and development of moral thinking across diverse cultural contexts.
