Dr. Clare W. Graves

From the Historical Collection of the work of Dr. Clare W. Graves of William R. Lee, March 2001

1959

Criteria for a Model of Ethical Behavior

1. It must not concentrate on some one element and aspect of moral experience as if
      it alone could serve as a standard for evaluation of the rest. (p. 600)

2. An adequate theory must be truly scientific. It must seek knowledge of the thing to
     be known and not some other thing, the ethical behavior of man. It must not
     destroy moral experience in order to make it fit previously established forms of
     factual science and it must not set up morality s transcendent and exalted above

     human lives, as for example, some person’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s
     superman.

3. It must include all other conceptions of ethical behavior because such are some of
     the data regarding ethics.

4. It must include the problems of whether things are infinite or finite.

5. It must recognize that certain people do feel that there are right and wrong ways
     to behave.

6. It must allow one to develop, test and revise hypotheses.

7. It must enable one to describe ethical behavior in some orderly way.

8. It must allow one so systematically examine for and seek explanations for the
     nature and arisal of ethical value systems.

The theory presented tries to meet these criteria, though it may not meet criteria of which others would think. But before we examine it the reader should know the author’s theoretical position so that we can peruse the theory within the writer’s theoretical framework as well as from within his own.

My basic theoretical orientation within psychology is the organismic position as represented by Goldstein, Lecky, Angyal et. al., wedded to the personalistic point of view of Stern, G. W. Allport et. al. I do not react against or deny the validity of the conditioning theorists, the various psychoanalytic theorists or any other theoretical position existent today. The difference is that the latter are seen as the more narrow, more exclusive of all aspects of human behavior while the

former are seen as the more widely encompassing, more inclusive of the many aspects of human behavior.

Thus, I have assumed that ethical behavior, like any other behavior, grows and changes with time. Like any other growth, it may progress, regress, fixate or change. It is assumed that there is

something of an inherent ethical nature in man which is triggered into operation as one or another ethical system in one or another form by certain life circumstances. Also, it assumed that a growth

phenomenon ethical behavior develops naturally through definable but overlapping stages be an orderly progression from a less complex to a more complex stage. And, like any other growth phenomenon, it has been assumed that there is no assurance once growth starts that subsequent stages will emerge. Ethical behavior could, like a seed, grow through all its natural stages to its ultimate mature form or, like the seed, ethical behavior could become stunted or even reorganize and take on a form not usually of its nature. Then finally it was assumed that just as the seed must have favorable living circumstances to flower fully so to is man’s ethical potential limited by the life circumstances in which the human develops. These assumptions led to the search for a model which would represent the phenomenology assumed and the conceptual ways of representing such.

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