The Morality Dilemma

Bank failures, violent students and the systems that stop lawmakers from finding solutions that work

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the Heinz Dilemma.

The Heinz Dilemma is about health, death and robbery. And morality. Well, back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, University of Chicago psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, and his protege, Carol Gilligan - whose work has influenced me deeply - made it about morality.

This is the Heinz Dilemma:

Heinz's wife is dying because of a special type of cancer. There's only one drug that the doctors think might save her. It is a new formula, which a pharmaceutical company in the same town has recently discovered. The drug is very expensive to produce, but the company is charging ten times the production cost. Heinz goes to everyone he knows to borrow money, but he can only collect half of what the drug costs. He tells the CEO of the company that his wife is dying, and asks him to sell it for less, or if he can pay it off over time. But the CEO refuses. He can make no exceptions. The research had been very expensive, and the company needs to turn a profit. Heinz knows the drug is at his local pharmacy, and he knows he can steal it. Should Heinz steal the drug?

The answer actually doesn’t matter here. Kohlberg and Gilligan weren’t interested in whether people thought Heinz should or should not steal the drug. What they were looking for were the reasons people made their choices.

They grouped these reasons into moral stages.

Here are Kohlberg’s stages:

Level 1, Pre-Conventional Morality. This is broken up into Obedience and Self-Interest. It’s outside/in morality. “Will I be punished,” rather than “is this right.” It’s a transactional attitude.

Level 2, Conventional Morality. This is broken up into Conformity and Law & Order. What will people think? Will Heinz be punished or not? It doesn’t matter if the law is unjust, you broke it by stealing. (Or crossing the border.)

Level 3, Post-Conventional. Someone who chooses this sees this moral dilemma through Social Contract and Universal Human Ethics orientations. In other words, life is more important than law. Surely all of us have read “Waldon Pond.”

Gilligan largely agrees with Kohlberg, but felt the hierarchical way of looking at the world was very much male, and didn’t take into account the holistic view that women bring. (Whether that view is innate or taught is the subject of much debate.)

For Gilligan, the three stages are not about logic and rules, but about society and relationships:

Survival - which just considers one’s personal needs

Conventional Care - which considers other’s needs above your own

Integrated Care - which considers both personal and universal needs

One of the things that Gilligan says is that people in different stages see the question at the end of Heinz’s Dilemma differently. The first two groups ask, “SHOULD Heinz steal the drug?” The last group asks, “Should Heinz STEAL the drug? Or, is there another way to solve the problem?”

Like, I don’t know, mandating that a dose of insulin, which costs two or three bucks to make, be limited to a $35 market price, rather than an $800 market price. So people don’t die or starve.

This is a long way of saying we are living in a country with a lot of people in the Level 1/Survival stage and quite a few in the middle stage.

These are the people who don’t want insulin to be affordable, even though it would help them and their loved ones. They don’t want student loans to be forgiven because it feels like reaching out a hand to someone else means cutting off your own hand.

It is spiteful self-interest.

Obviously, Donald Trump figured out a way to weaponize people with spiteful self-interest, either because their needs are not being met, or they are incapable of considering the needs of the community. 

This has been the overwhelming ethos of the last 40+ years; which “obedient/law and order” people have blindly followed. Our entire economic system - ushered in by Ronald Reagan - depends on the theory of “rational self-interest.” This essentially means that free market actors will act in such a way as to maximize benefit to themselves without inflicting harm.

But it doesn’t work that way, as we saw this week with Silicon Valley Bank.

To be sure, SVB’s CEO, Greg Becker, was looking out for his self-interest when, in 2018, he led a successful lobbying campaign in Congress to roll back the part of the Dodds-Frank financial regulations that applied to regional banks. Rollbacks that Senator Elizabeth Warren warned about at the time, and wrote about this week.

Becker and his fellow C-Suite folks were definitely thinking about their own interest as they took bonuses the morning of the day their bank was shut down. “Rational Self-Interest” pre-supposes that Becker would have cared more about the longevity of his bank and the trust of the people who deposited their money in it, rather than risky investments that killed the bank entirely and damaged Becker’s reputation as someone who could be trusted.

Or, maybe it didn’t. Maybe the tranche of “rational” actors who defend SVB for being good guys who “invested in start-ups that had no revenue plans” also don’t think Becker did anything wrong in driving his business into the ground and risking the paychecks of millions of people who had never heard of his bank. After all, he took home nearly a billion dollars a year. Plus that last bonus. For him, and the people who defend him, that’s “rational self-interest.”

But another story I’ve been following this week shows how the various stages of Gilligan’s systems complement each other in society.

Teachers in Las Vegas (and much of the country) are in survival mode. Sometimes literally. For over a year, I’ve been hearing the stories of kindergarteners throwing chairs at teachers, second-graders trying to stab their teachers with scissors. In April of 2022, a teacher was raped and almost murdered in her classroom. There are guns found on campuses, daily. These are disruptions that harm all the kids in these classes.

Many of these teachers testified before the Nevada Assembly Education Committee this week, pleading for tougher tools to get these kids out of their classes. They don’t care where the kids go. They just want to work in a safe environment and teach the kids who want to be taught.

And I get that. Teachers are in Gilligan’s Survival mode. They may not have started out that way - teachers are the first group that comes to mind in the Conventional Care stage - but the system broke around them and leaders expect them to hold it up.

What bothers me is that the solutions from the leaders, themselves, are to expel more students. And few folks in the Nevada legislature or governor’s office seem to care where they go; or want to say it out loud, for fear of offending the powerful local teachers’ union. There not only should be an education committee meeting, but a health and human services committee meeting - and more money going to youth mental health, even if it has to be siphoned from the education budget.

But that’s not going to happen. Because most of our leaders are stuck in the Conformity/Law and Order mode. Hell, our new governor’s previous job was Clark County Sheriff.

I know there are legislators who care about ethics and the needs of the student who is disruptive, as well as the students and teachers they are harming. I know there are leaders who understand that “teaching” and “health care” are not mutually exclusive, but need to work in harmony. But our systems of governing push against political leaders actually solving the problem.

It’s clear to me that Kohlberg and Gilligan’s “moral” ways of seeing the world continue to define our political bifurcation. It’s about our obligation to each other versus our obligation only to our own self-interest. But in the last four decades, we’ve made a religion out of self-interest. And even people who fit in the third stage - who understand that there must be some other solution to Heinz’s dilemma that isn’t stealing - find themselves conforming to the world around them as they start to drown in the tide they strove to swim against.

Here’s the thing though - we have to do something. We have to do something moral. Our leaders have to take a stand in that third stage. We have to do what’s right by everybody. And we have to do it now.