Let me review briefly the organismic conception of man, and from this conception let me apply Roe’s modification of Maslow’s conception of motivation to the problem of ethical behavior. The motivational aspect of this theory says that human needs are organized into a hierarchy of eight systems: the physiological or survival system, the safety system, the belonging system, the status system, the knowledge system, the understanding system, the beauty system and the system of self-actualization.

It says that each lower level system has prepotency over the next level, until satisfaction of the lower level becomes automatic. It says, there are forms of behavior typical of man when operating at a particular level. The theory states, also, that man moves naturally to the next highest level when he has solved his problems at the preceding level.

Man tries first to satisfy his physiological or survival needs. As soon as these needs can be satisfied, with minimum energy expenditure, he switches to problems of safety from physical, animal and human violence. Once assured of survival and safety, man moves to the belonging level, tarries long enough to conquer his problems there, and moves on to the level of status-seeking.

As man moves from the fourth level of status-seeking, to the fifth level, freedom to know and do, a chasm of unbelievable depth of meaning is being crossed. The bridge, from the fourth to the fifth, is the bridge between getting and giving, taking and contributing, destroying and constructing. It is the bridge between similarity to animals and dissimilarity to animals.

Once we are able to grasp the meaning of passing from the level of status-seeking, to the levels to do and to know, we will see that we are able to explain the enormous differences between man and other animals. It will be seen that at this point we step over the line which separates those needs man has in common with lower animals, and those need which are almost distinctly human.

Man, as the step of the fifth level, is on the threshold of his true being. He is now becoming a human being. He is no longer just another nature’s species. And we, in our times, in our moral and general behavior, are but approaching this threshold.

Would that we will not be so lacking in understanding, and would that we not be so hasty in condemnation, that by such misunderstanding and by such condemnation we block man forever from crossing the line between his animalism and his humanism.

Once man crosses to the fifth level of need emergence, he is driven by the winds of knowledge, and the surging waves of confidence, on to higher levels.

Knowledge and competence lead him on the level of understanding and compassion from whence he moves to the level of appreciation of the beauty of it all and, finally, on to tasting the delight of his true self, that which he, himself, and no other person is ordained to be.¹

It appears that no one has applied, thoroughly this organismic, hierarchy of needs, theory of motivation to the problem of moral and ethical behavior, and it appears that this might be a worthwhile exercise.

According to the theory, one could suggest that a certain system of ethics develops naturally at each level of need operation, and one could suggest that the system of ethics typical to each need level consists of two kinds of value. The first kind, would be values good for man when he is operating at a particular need level.
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¹  Those knowledgeable in psychology will note, in respect to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, that the author has modified not only Maslow’s original presentation of upper level behavior, but also that a modification of Roe’s version of Maslow’s hierarchy has been injected at the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth levels of behavior.