Who Are These “Big People”, Anyway?

This morning in an article in the New Yorker George Packer castigates the top management of the country’s big financial forms for having the moral development of six year olds:

The moral code of these Wall Street executives corresponds to stage one of Lawrence Kohlberg’s famous stages of morality: “The concern is with what authorities permit and punish.” Morally, they are very young children. The Swiss bankers are closer to stage four, most common among late teens, where a concern for maintaining the good functioning of society takes hold. Stage six, an elaboration of universal moral principles based on an idea of the good society, is a distant dream for the titans of global finance.

He closes the article:

Of course, nothing like this is going to happen. So instead, like the parents of two-year-olds, the next Congress should summon them to Washington and publicly punish these executives who, in Kohlberg’s terms, “see morality as something external to themselves, as that which the big people say they must do.”

A quick look at the backgrounds of these men suggests that they aren’t dummies. Vikram Pandit, CEO of Citigroup, is a Columbia grad; John Thain, likely to be the last CEO of Merrill Lynch graduated from MIT and Harvard Business School. And so on.

Human beings are not born with high levels of moral sensibility. They are born selfish, grasping, and self-centered. As they mature the may learn higher levels of moral awareness. Or not as their experiences and natures dictate.

In my experience most Americans have little more formal moral education than infants. Somehow they’ve been expected to become moral adults. Those few who’ve had more stopped when they were confirmed, mostly as adolescents.

There is no particular correlation between intelligence and moral judgment nor between intelligence and virtue. One thing that’s rather clear is that the Ivy League grads with which the Wall Street firms are packed didn’t learn moral judgment there.

So, who are the “big people” that we’re depending on to instill fear in these highly compensated moral infants? They’re people with exactly the same backgrounds, educations, and presumably, values as those whom Mr. Packer criticizes in his article.