It’s a very fundamental part of human behavior. How do we make moral decisions? I’ll share a model with you today that is absolutely powerful. Moral, decision-making is one of the primary principles that we talk about in the Nova principles program. I’ve shared with you before that I’m on the board of, directors for Nova principles foundation. There’s a playlist here at live on, purpose TV that’s dedicated to Nova principles.
Go check it out and you’ll see some other videos that are related to what we’re doing here. Moral,decision-making. Let’s do a definition to start this off.
Moral: Concerned with the principles of right and wrong behavior and the goodness or badness of human, character. Ooh! It sounds pretty awesome, doesn’t that? Moral decision-making is, basically how we decide to do what we do based on whether it’s right or wrong. And we understand what’s right or wrong based on our culture, our training, and our, upbringing. The family that we grew up in. The particular societal norms that we face. All of these things tend to shape our moral decision-making. But there’s, something that goes even deeper than that and maybe you’ll relate with me here on this. I believe that ingrained in human beings is what I sometimes call natural knowing. It’s the ability to connect with something that is true naturally. Just as a result of who we are in our makeup in their character. I had an opportunity for a while to run treatment groups at a youth Correctional Facility.
Now, this is a place where young people had been incarcerated for decisions that they had made. Maybe that wasn’t of the highest morality. As I was running these groups, I noticed something. These kids all had a sense of what’s right. And what’s wrong? I was even challenged on this once. I remember one particular group meeting and one of the group members pipes up. Well, what’s right for me might not be right for you. You know, launching into this moral relativism that is fairly common in our society right now. Well, that opened up a discussion. So, we started to talk about it in the group. Now, remember some of these kids were there for very serious crimes. Others were there for maybe less serious but still morally incorrect things that they had done. And so that’s the makeup of the group. And I started to ask around the group. Okay here’s an example. Hurting another person, right or wrong? I hope you have an answer to that too. Because everyone in the group answered it the same way.
How about taking something that doesn’t belong to you? Right or wrong? Again, consistent answers through the whole group. See, there’s a natural knowing. Sometimes we call it our conscience and let your conscience be your guide, right? It’s a natural knowing of what’s right and what’s wrong. Now, in our media and in mainstream society, sometimes that gets confused. And things that are really not morally correct are presented as being something that’s okay or something that you could accept. Let’s get to the psychological part of this. I promise that I’d share with you a model that is absolutely powerful and I have found this to be very consistent in my clinical experience also my experience as a husband and father and just the citizen of Planet Earth. It has to do with the interplay between control and maturity. So, in this graph you can see that we’ve plotted control over here on this axis. And control means control over your own life. It goes from zero at the bottom to a 100% at the top. And you can have all the control or you can have none of the control or somewhere in between.
Usually it’s somewhere in between. This other axis is where we plot maturity. Maturity gets a little more complicated. But stay with me here for a minute. The most common way to think of maturity is age. So, over here at the lower end might be birth. When you’re born, how much control do you have over your own life? Hardly any. So, it’s way down here. Well, how about as an adult at the other end of the maturity spectrum? How much control do you have? Well, I know that there’s some small print that you might want to argue about but when I ask teenagers how much control do the adults have, oh I get a quick answer. ‘100%.’ So, it’s way up here. Now, this line represents our control over our own life. As we gain maturity we get to have more and more control. We make our moral decisions based on the level of maturity that we have obtained. As we move this direction, we have more and more internal control. And the external control is less necessary. Let me give you an example. A young child… Let’s say it’s a two-year-old. A two-year-old is not merely mature enough to control their own life. So, they have someone outside of them (usually their parent) controlling most of their life.
As that child grows, let’s say we’ve got a 17, year old now. A 17-year old is capable of taking a whole lot more internal control over their life. And there’s a lot less external control that is required. We make our moral decisions based on where we are in our moral development. For convenience, sometimes I like to break this into 3 chunks. Stage 1, stage 2, and stage 3. If you want an overview of that, go to the positive parenting, playlist here on the channel. And look up the video about teaching children, responsibilities. And you see what I’ve done there to break this, into three stages. I think the main thing is that we understand moral, decision-making is based on moral maturity. And we can’t expect someone in the lower stages of maturity to make good solid moral decisions because they haven’t made that kind of developmental progress yet. It’s interesting that this model accounts for people of any age because it’s really about stage of development not age. And even an older person, if they’re doing things for selfish reasons are probably not at the level of moral maturity as even a,younger person who’s doing things because it’s just the right thing to do.,
Quick recap: We make our moral decisions based on our moral development. I hope that you found that helpful. And if you’d like to learn more about Nova principles you can go to the Nova principles playlist here at live on purpose TV. You can also check out the website Nova principles.com if you want to bring this program into your community or make a donation to a very worthy cause.
