Page 105 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

82 Communication and Evolution of Society

This empirically supported classification of expressions of
moral judgment is supposed to satisfy the theoretical claim to
represent developmental stages of moral consciousness. If we
now take upon ourselves the burden of proof for this clatm—a
claim that Kohlberg himself has not made good—we commit
ourselves to show that the descriptive sequence of moral types
represents a developmental-logical nexus (in Flavell’s sense).
I should like to arrive at this goal through connecting moral
consciousness with general qualifications for role behavior. The
following three steps serve this end: first I introduce structures
of possible communicative action and, indeed, in the sequence
in which the child grows into this sector of the symbolic universe.
I then coordinate with these basic structures the cognitive abili-
ties (or competences) that the child must acquire in order to be
able to move at the respective level of his social environment;
that is, taking part first in incomplete interactions, then in com-
plete interactions, and finally in communications that require
passing from communicative action to discourse. Second, I want
to look at this sequence of general qualifications for role be-
havior (at least provisionally) from developmental-logical points
of view in order, finally, to derive the stages of moral conscious-
ness from these stages of interactive competence.
I begin with the basic concepts of communicative action that
must be presupposed for the perception of moral conflicts. These
include. concrete behavioral expectations and corresponding in-
tentional actions; then generalized behavioral expectations that
are reciprocally connected with one another, that is, social roles
and norms that regulate actions; principles that can serve to
justify or to generate norms; the situational elements that are
connected with actions (e.g., action consequences) or with norms
(e.g., as conditions of application or as side effects); also actors
who communicate with one another about something; and finally
Orientations, insofar as they are effective as motives for action, I
am adopting the action-theoretic framework introduced by Mead
and developed by Parsons, without thereby accepting conven-
tional role theory.4® (In Schema 3 I have ordered these compo-
nents from the perspective of the socialization of the growing
)
child.