Page 122 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

99 The Development of Normative Structures

for general characteristics, one encounters the same structures of
consciousness. This can be shown in connection with those ar-
rangements and orientations that specialize in maintaining the
endangered intersubjectivity of understanding in cases of action
conflicts—law and morality. When the background consensus of
habitual daily routine breaks down, consensual regulation of ac-
tion conflicts (accomplished under the renunciation of force)
provides for the continuation of communicative action with other
means. To this extent, law and morality mark the core domain
of interaction. One can see here the identity of the conscious
structures that are, on the one hand, embodied in the institutions
of law and morality and that are, on the other hand, expressed
in the moral judgments and actions of individuals. Cognitive
developmental psychology has shown that in ontogenesis there
are different stages of moral consciousness, stages that can be
described in particular as preconventional, and postconventional
patterns of problemsolving.® The same patterns turn up again in
the social evolution of moral and legal representations.
The ontogenetic models are certainly better analyzed and bet-
ter corroborated than their social-evolutionary counterparts. But
it should not surprise us that there are homologous structures of
consciousness in the history of the species, if we consider that
linguistically established intersubjectivity of understanding marks
that innovation in the history of the species which first made
possible the level of sociocultural learning. At this level the
reproduction of society and the socialization of its members are
two aspects of the same process; they are dependent on the same
structures.
The homologous structures of consciousness in the histories of
the individual and the species [are not restricted to the domain
of law and morality}. The success of the theoretical approach
programmatically presented here also requires an investigation of
rationality structures in domains that have heretofore been scarcely
examined, either conceptually or empirically—in the domain of
ego development and the evolution of world views on the one
hand, and in the domain of ego and group identities on the
other.?°
To begin with, the concept of ego development, ontogenesis,