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2.1. Historical background

ONYX is a transliteration of a Russian acronym. The full name of the test reads like «Assessment of moral discernment and coherence of judgment». The meaning would be more properly represented if the word «moral’ were relocated and placed before the word «judgment’, but this would make the abbreviation unpronounceable in Russian. What is more, the name of the stone would be lost in this case, and it would be a pity because onyx is a good symbol for the test. Like any stone our test is a solid cohesive thing but besides that it has a striped structure, just like onyx.

The idea of quantifying and measuring the moral qualities of a person cannot but cause an instinctive repulsion. Yet science has a history of breaking its way through the cordons of intuitive prejudices and instinctive protests. Anatomy is a good example showing how the once blasphemous practice of studying the human body gave new opportunities for healing. Is it impossible that results of the «anatomy of the soul» will bring forth good fruits in the future for pedagogical practice? Of course, the latter case is much more complicated not least because it is much more difficult to come to agreement about what is to be measured. A unifying theory is necessary in this case not only at the stage of the interpretation of data but at the very beginning while designing the approach. Differences of concepts about light or gravity were not obstacles to using scales or differentiating stars according to their luminosity because the ability to distinguish heavy from light and dark from bright lies in the commonality of sensual perception. Moral properties are not generally valid in the same sense.

Attempts to build a general theory of morality and establish common criteria of what it is to be moral have a long history. Of special interest in this respect is Socrates’ reasoning presented in Plato’s dialogue «Hippias Minor». In this dialogue Socrates asks his collocutor to think what is more immoral – to behave badly when you know what is right and what is wrong or to do it when you don’t know. Hippias, as the majority of us would, answers immediately:

– And how, Socrates, can those who intentionally err, and voluntarily and designedly commit iniquities, be better than those who err and do wrong involuntarily?

But this answer does not satisfy Socrates:

– And now I cannot agree in what you are saying, but I strongly disagree <….> and my opinion, Hippias, is the very contrary of what you are saying. For I maintain that those who hurt or injure mankind, and speak falsely and deceive, and err voluntarily, are better far than those who do wrong involuntarily.

Argumentation for this shocking conclusion is built on a sequence of analogies. Who is the better musician: the one who produces cacophony voluntarily or the one who can’t play properly? Who is the better athlete: the one who pretends that he has a pain in his knee and doesn’t want to run fast or the one who can’t run fast? Socrates does not find a reason why we should make an exception for moral actions in this sequence. And Hippias does not find contra-arguments except for a mere appeal to moral feeling:

– O, Socrates, it would be a monstrous thing to say that those who do wrong voluntarily are better than those who do wrong involuntarily!

– Socr.: And yet that appears to be the only inference.

Probably it could be regarded as a mere sophistic exercise, more so as Socrates confesses finally that he does not agree with himself in his conclusion. But in the history of pedagogy the nontrivial line of reasoning presented by Socrates in this dialogue appears from time to time among the thoughts of the most venerable scholars. Herbart in his «Textbook in Psychology» (Lehrbuch der Psychologie) claims that ethics attains its strength not in appeals for good behaviour addressed to human will but in the clarity and cohesion of moral vision or insight which constitutes a special competence. He called this competence moral judgment (or moral sense) and insisted time and again that this competence is not innate but is to be developed and trained by means of education. Being a variant of aesthetic judgment, this competence is more related to ideas of beautiful and ugly than to that of due and improper, and accordingly, the best means for its development are to be found not in logic and law but in the field of humanities. In his earlier work «The Science of Education and the Aesthetic Revelation of the World» he particularly focuses on this connection between ethics and aesthetics and on the role of humanities in moral education. The quality of moral judgment in complex situations depends on how rich, balanced, and comprehensive personal perceptions are. And humanities widening the horizon of a learner are able to prevent at the same time the one-sidedness of this judgment. Furthermore in Herbart’s system «the one-sided person approximates the egoist, even when he will not notice it himself, because he relates everything to the small circle of his own life and thought» (Meijer 2006). We have here a clear antecedent of Piaget’s theory that relates the moral development of a person to a process of successive decentration of ego and also a historical bridge from Socrates’ doubts about the morality of the morally ignorant to those modern scholars who base their evaluations of morality on concepts of moral competences.

According to Piaget, changes in mental abilities accompanying maturation are a key for all aspects of personal development. Processes of moral (and spiritual) development are paralleled in this approach with processes taking place in the cognitive domain. To become more moral means first of all to acquire more elaborated cognitive tools and to operate logical schemas of growing complexity that ensure more comprehensive awareness of the existence of another ego. While the substantial aspect of moral development is described as assimilation or interiorisation of external matter, its formal aspect appears as accommodation, that is, the transformation of cognitive structures (schemas in Piaget’s terms) under the influence of external matters for their better assimilation. Accommodation is generally directed toward decentration of ego, that is, toward successive unlocking of egocentric schemas.

Thus Piaget and later his disciple Lawrence Kohlberg reduce the development of moral consciousness to the progress in a subject’s ability for moral judgment. Certainly, it is a serious simplification, but it opens a door for using quantitative methods in diagnostics. Theoretically established a developmental vector constitutes a reference axis for the coordinated measurement and comparability of its results. However conventional it is, this coordination is better than nothing. In the situation of diverse axiological systems and pedagogical ideals it provides an opportunity to convert a highly nonproductive controversy about the priority or appropriateness of different systems of values into a more productive discussion about levels of consistency of empirically detected values with the conventional scale.

Using a mathematical analogy, evaluation of moral achievements on the personal way to excellence may be compared to the measurement of lengths of multidirectional vectors. As an ideal, to achieve a formal evaluation strictly abstracted from substantial aspects we need to supply each vector with units dividing it into a certain number of equal segments. In the situation of the multitude of directions we anticipate that the comparison of results will be a highly impracticable task. However, the powerful tools of statistics available today grant researchers courage that overcomes fears. Moreover, a number of procedures that proved their effectiveness, such as a factor analysis, function exactly via the projecting of multidirectional vectors to different axes. We can start at least with marking one chosen direction. And it is what Kohlberg did in 1964 when he offered a first quantified scale for comparison of moral abilities. The worth of the scale was to a large extent determined by a good choice of the vector direction, the joint merit of Kohlberg and Piaget.

L. Kohlberg’s structural model of moral development will be discussed later, in chapter 4. For the moment it is worth noticing that despite its heuristic significance it seems as though it is not the model itself that constitutes the main historical achievement of Kohlberg but rather the attached method that has proved the validity of his theory. This method widely known as moral dilemma method was the first to base evaluation of the level of moral consciousness not on self-assessments or declarations showing the awareness of the respondent about social demands but on the ability to understand moral situations. The idea was to reveal the motivation standing behind the moral decision of a respondent in a certain situation. It was expected to reflect the development of moral consciousness not at the level of theoretical knowledge about ethical norms and rules but at the level of their implementation. Moreover, the identification of higher stages of moral development with the ability for «post-conventional’ moral judgment meant the demand for the respondent to exhibit some signs of autonomy in order to show good results in the test.

Kohlberg’s methodological approach met extensive criticism. Besides the axiomatic objection against the reduction of morality to cognitive aspects, the main points of his critics may be presented as follows:

– The scheme of successive moral development embedded into the method groundlessly claims to be universal. It does not take into account the socio-cultural determinacy of morality.

– The method is time consuming and non-effective. As interpretation of interviews is a complicated procedure not apt for unification, the risk of impartiality and subjectivism of diagnoses is too high.

– Successful execution of the test depends a great deal on the linguistic and communicative abilities of a child. In fact, the method misses its target.

Despite its reasonableness the criticism did not discredit the dilemma method, but on the contrary stimulated attempts at its improvement and became a powerful factor that helped to spread quantitative approaches in the field of personal moral development studies. The conversion of the interview into the form of a written standardised test may be regarded as the most important result of the international movement for the rehabilitation of Kohlberg that started already in his lifetime. Among the most successful implementations of his idea one should point out the Moral Judgment Test (MJT), designed in 1975 by Georg Lind, a German researcher from the University of Constance, and the Defining Issues Test (DIT) designed in 1974 by a group of scholars from Minnesota University (USA) under the leadership of a Kohlberg’s disciple James Rest. Both tests are recommended by their authors as instruments for measuring the level of development of moral consciousness and for assessment of efficiency of educational institutions and programmes in moral education. Tests proved their validity on samples that included in total more than 800 000 respondents all over the world. Their results are published in dozens of papers. ONYX is a product of a deep modification of these two foreign analogues.