Immorality is behavior by someone that requires another to behave in a manner for which he is not yet ready. Immorality is behavior which prevents another person from evolving to a higher level when that person is ready to evolve. Immorality is behavior at a higher level which demonstrated one does not comprehend lower level ethics. It would be immoral, within this theory, to demand that those who lead Ghana establish our kind of democracy. It would be immoral to expect that the uneducated, unprepared Congolese could be ready for freedom, as we know it. It would be immoral of the mother to ask of her off-spring behavior he cannot yet produce, and it would be just as immoral to hold back a child or a nation from moving on when that child or the humanity of that nation is reaching upward. It was immoral for Britain and France to try to block Egypt, and it was just as immoral for Red China to try to force Tibet up the scale, or to try to drag Formosa back, but there is a serious question whether Red China’s internal activities are unethical. Featherbedding and slowdown by workers, and the conformity of the "organization man" are definitely improvements over previous worker subservience, and Machiavellian might-is-right business operations. And the crass materialistic values of the "status-seekers" are certainly better than being a serf or an automaton, though some will argue they are not better than Christian self-sacrifice. But, is the latter point debatable, if to enter heaven one must accept living on the tottering precipice of survival? According to this theory, the examples mentioned earlier are healthy moral signs rather than signs of moral decay. They are healthy signs because some of the people are confusedly groping for those rules of behavior which are more appropriate to the new circumstances of their lives; they are healthy because others of the people are operating appropriately within the level of ethical system development to which they have evolved; and they are healthy because still others are falling back, understandably, for a period of time before they are able to find the more inclusive moral principles of their next stage of ethical evolution.

Ultimately, he will be moral who lives by the human ethic, an ethic which, you see is not different from what many great thinkers have described through the ages. Behavior will be moral which is based on the ideas of trust, autonomy, inclusion, respect, knowing, compassion and appreciation, and particularly behavior will be moral when it allows man to be what he has to be, at the time he is supposed to be that. The last point may be the only variation from other conceptions of ethical behavior. Ultimately, behavior will be immoral which operates in contradistinction to the above. Behavior will be immoral if it is based on distrust, subservience, exclusion, disrespect, superstition, prejudice and disdain, and if it blocks man from becoming what he might become, or denies him the right to be what he must be, at his time in his circumstances.

The theory presented is a sketch. It is not a finished product. Obviously, it is oversimplified, and obviously man does not move slowly and steadily toward the goal described. In our world of past and present, there are societies at all levels, and societies in which levels are mixed. And, within societies there are people at different levels, and people whose levels are mixed, but these are complications to be dealt with at another time, in some other place. All men do not progress, and all societies may not mature. Man may never reach his goal, on the other hand, he may. The problem of ethical and moral decline lies, this theory says, not in the breakdown and discard of the old, as one moves on to the new, it lies, rather, in the demand that man behave in a manner for which he has not yet matured, and in the disappearance of what is, and the reappearance of what was.