Abstract
Jonathan J. O'Brien argues that when we leave students to deal with ethical challenges on their own, we are abandoning an important aspect of their learning and development. Instead, he challenges us to provide meaningful opportunities to engage students in dialogue about moral choices.
Recently, I was invited to speak about conflict management at a fraternity leadership conference. I gladly accepted the invitation because I knew that this fraternity explicitly promoted progressive values, and their brotherhood was open to all men, regardless of gender expression or sexual orientation.
A lively group of about 30 leaders from a dozen chapters in six states was at the presentation. After introductions, I wanted to get a sense of what drew them to the session, so I asked them to share examples of some conflicts they had experienced in their chapters. Stories of poor communication, negative attitudes, and apathy filled the room. I tend to worry a bit when I present at conferences, unsure if I will meet the needs of my audience. However, these were familiar experiences, and I relaxed a bit, basking in the assumption that my presentation would all go according to plan.
Then, it happened. A student in the front row stated bluntly, “My biggest conflict is enforcing the NCR!” At that, every head in the room nodded in agreement. There were a few groans and disgusted eye rolls as well. I asked him to tell me more. “NCR is the No Contact Rule,” he replied. Clearly, this topic struck a collective nerve, so I asked him to elaborate. The student next to him interjected, “It's a fraternity rule that prohibits any contact of a sexual or romantic nature between probationary and full members of the chapter.”
Over the next few minutes, I learned that the NCR was a prime directive to all chapters. The rule prohibited cuddling, kissing, or sexual activity of any kind between pledges and active members of a chapter. It even applied to active brothers when they were in public, like rush events. The stakes were high: violating NCR could get a brother expelled. On its face, the rule made perfect sense: I figured that the fraternity's lawyers instituted the rule as a risk management procedure to reduce liability in the event of a sexual harassment lawsuit. Bottom line, the official stance from headquarters was zero–tolerance for NCR violations and enforcing it was the responsibility of the men in the audience before me.
Setting aside my presentation agenda for a moment, I engaged them in a discussion on the moral aspects of implementing the rule. On one hand, each man was a leader who accepted the duty to enforce the fraternity's rules, including the NCR. On the other hand, his chapter brothers were adult men of diverse sexual, gender, racial and other identities who were free to act on their desires, emotions, and behaviors. Moreover, they did so while struggling with social and cultural norms that defined these acts (and them) as immoral. This dilemma was all the more compelling to me because it was clear from our exchanges that they were oblivious to this quandary or they simply chose not to question it.
Regaining my focus, I completed my presentation as planned, but my mind ruminated on our discussion for several days afterward. Their experience struck me as some kind of sexual double jeopardy: While living in a society where there was already plenty of moral condemnation and policing of their sexual and romantic desires, these men were obliged to enforce a rule that made them forbidden. The NCR was more than a conflict for these leaders; it was a moral dilemma that touched on deeply personal aspects of their lives, whether they acknowledged it or not.
In the broader context of higher education, college campuses are home to individuals with diverse identities and beliefs, where the vigorous exchange of ideas can produce valuable learning opportunities or lead to personal attacks and violence. As educators, our calling is to prepare the next generation of scholars and leaders; yet, many of us lack the confidence to facilitate the moral maturity of our students. I often avoided this responsibility myself, with the best intentions, for fear I was inflicting my ethical code on students. I thought I was taking the moral high ground by allowing them to find their own way.
I realize now that my apprehension is no longer defensible. Every day, I see examples of unethical conduct and exploitation, such as public servants who cite their private beliefs as the reason to refuse service to others with whom they disagree or political figures of all stripes who incite public support for their political gain at the expense of minoritized and oppressed people. Our students need guidance about their moral choices and their impact on others. To be effective, character education must come from multiple sources in response to real–life situations. My presentation to the fraternity was an unexpected but critical opportunity to engage students in the important work of moral development.
Moral Development and Maturity in College Students
To understand the NCR dilemma, I turned to the theories of moral development I learned in graduate school. Probably the most well–known is Lawrence Kohlberg's three–stage theory, which centers on the development of intellectual reasoning in the pursuit of justice as a universal moral value. Whenever I think of Kohlberg, I recall his most notable critic, Carol Gilligan, who observed that women tend to resolve ethical dilemmas based on relationships and the situation rather than abstract principles like justice. By privileging justice over care and context, Gilligan argued that Kohlberg's theory invalidated women's moral reasoning, rendering them incapable of reaching the highest stages of morality. While the voices of care and justice are significant insights, I was always put off by the highly structured and invariant progression through stages, not to mention the simplistic, sex–based binary they create. This fails to account for the fluid sexuality and gender identities of the fraternity men I met. Moreover, the theories downplay the importance of personal integrity and authenticity in making moral decisions.
Now that I teach ethics in a student affairs graduate program, I started using James Rest's moral maturity framework, which is a welcome departure from earlier theories. As Debora Liddell, Diane Cooper, and their associates have shown, the framework has many applications to mentoring college students in a variety of campus contexts, such as service learning, sustainability, and conduct. Rest's framework is comprised of four components: sensitivity, judgment, motivation, and character. Each is necessary for moral action to occur. Moral sensitivity is the ability to recognize a situation as a compelling moral problem requiring action. Using moral judgment, one discerns the best course of action by weighing the consequences among principles like justice and care. Motivation describes the feelings, beliefs, and assumptions that drive moral action. And moral character, the courage to act based on one's reasoning and beliefs, builds on all the other components.
Moral maturity is a promising framework, but it is limited in its ability to describe how students who are positioned outside sexual and gender norms make moral decisions while they live within political and social structures that delimit who and what is good.
Moral Maturity in LGBTQ College Student Populations
The existing theories of moral development are not wrong, but they do not make room for the experiences of all students, like the men I met at the fraternity conference. Discussion of moral maturity in LGBTQ college students is exceptionally rare, largely because the lives of sexual and gender minorities are still considered deviant and, by definition, immoral. Likewise, students who identify outside sexual and gender norms often recognize that they are not well served by theories that assume they are abnormal in the first place.
In this discussion, I will use queer theory to scrutinize the notion of moral maturity as well as the assumptions that heterosexuality and traditional gender roles are essential to upright character. Queer theory can be accused of focusing too much on sex and gender while ignoring the negative impact of race and ethnicity on people's lives. Mitsunori Misawa responded to this omission with QueerCrit, a theoretical perspective that combines critical race theory and queer theory to explore the intersections of sexual orientation and homophobia with race and racism for people of color who are sexual minorities. Accordingly, I will use an inclusive, queer perspective that incorporates the intersections of race, sexuality, and gender in the context of students’ moral conduct.
Queer theory is useful for illuminating ideas and assumptions that we take for granted. For example, David Buchbinder explained how, among its many uses, queer theory is an analytical lens used to
read the culture and its artifacts (social behaviors, literary texts, movies and TV, and so on) against the grain by questioning the meaning preferred by dominant discourse, and/or juxtaposing to it another response or understanding that does not cancel the preferred meaning but rather runs parallel to it while at the same time contesting it. (p. 116)
A queered interpretation of James Rest's moral maturity framework does not reject it; rather, it opens up new possibilities for how moral maturity can be applied to students in many contexts. I do this using four tenets of queer theory that Susan Jones, Elisa Abes, and David Kasch identified in their work on LGBTQ college student identity: heteronormativity, desire, performativity, and becoming. By combining these tenets with the four components of Rest's moral framework, I gained new insights for applying moral maturity in practice.
Introducing Rami
To bring life to this queer interpretation of moral maturity, I use the words of one of the presidents I met at the conference. Rami is a 22–year–old senior, majoring in political science at a state university. We talked at length about leadership, morality, and the NCR dilemma he experienced involving his fraternity brothers, Carlos and Josh, after they revealed, during a chapter meeting, that they were in a romantic relationship. I began by asking Rami what it was like to enforce the NCR and police the private lives of his friends. He replied:
It sucks that I have to be in everybody's business. I've had a lot of awkward discussions with brothers, asking why they are spending so much time with a pledge or a brother. They get really defensive. I'm not trying to slut–shame them. I'm just trying to avoid perpetuating an image that we're trying to fight against.
As president, Rami is obliged to monitor the private lives of his brothers to prevent a violation of fraternity policy. His last comment was noteworthy, reflecting his concern about reinforcing a negative stereotype that queer people are hyper–sexual and promiscuous.
Heteronormativity
Negative perceptions of LGBTQ people are an indicator of heteronormativity, a key concept in queer theory that describes how dominant social groups (e.g., male, heterosexual, cisgender) define and regulate the sexuality and gender performance of people who do not live by heteronormative standards. Often, members of the dominant group exert their privilege without knowing it. For example, we implicitly promote heteronormativity when we assume that someone with a wedding ring has a spouse of the opposite sex or when we want to know if a transgender person has had reassignment surgery.
Heteronormativity is interwoven with other forms of oppression, such as racism, sexism, or transphobia, which magnifies the power of privileged groups and further compounds the oppression of queer individuals of color. Rami described himself to me in a way that revealed how this web of oppression affected him:
The first thing people assume is that I'm a Latino man. I am Mexican–American, but if I'm in a setting with no Latinos, then I'll identify as Latino to keep it simple. I usually don't come out as transgender, since I pass as male about 95 percent of the time. Also, I'm sexually attracted to men but romantically attracted to women. This confuses people, so most of the time I identify as queer. It's more inclusive of who I am. Really, I don't waste my time trying to explain who I am to people who aren't going to impact my life in a meaningful way. In their heads, I'm just a Latin dude that likes dudes.
Although Rami has a robust sense of personal agency surrounding how he presents himself to others, he is acutely aware of the impact that normative categories of race, sexuality, and gender have on his life and identity.
Heteronormativity persists because it is embedded in laws, policies, and codes that oppress people who live outside the norm. Persecution ranges from subtle, negative comments to public shaming and acts of violence. Rami felt that blatant displays of homophobia were rare on his campus “because anybody who says something homophobic would get a lot of backlash for being closed–minded.” Ironically, he claimed that the Interfraternity Council (IFC) refused to recognize his fraternity, mainly because of internalized homophobia. He explained:
Almost all the fraternities have gay brothers, but even the gays within those fraternities are homophobic. Our fraternity has rituals, we wear letters across our chest, all that, but IFC doesn't see us as a real fraternity. They think we're making a mockery of them.
Rami's moral sensitivity to heteronormativity, particularly in the fraternity community, was a critical factor in how he implemented the NCR. While he felt Carlos and Josh should openly express their desires in public, he was mindful that public affection between them would send mixed messages to new recruits and fuel campus gossip that his fraternity was a front for casual sex.
Although Rest's framework designates moral sensitivity as the gatekeeper for subsequent moral action, it does not address the existence of multiple moralities and the conflicts that exist among them. In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt explains how attitudes, values, and beliefs of a dominant group (the IFC in this case) form a coherent system or moral matrix that positively reinforces its morality and defends it from the immorality of outsiders (Rami's chapter). In reality, more than one morality exists in the same time and place and they usually clash. Rami's moral sensitivity was attuned to multiple moralities at once, including his own, his fraternity, the IFC, the campus, and society. As a leader afloat in this dynamic and conflicting sea of moralities, he could not remain ambivalent, so he looked within for the motivation to move forward.
Desire
Desire is a longing for people, things, and feelings we do not possess and that we are motivated to satisfy, even if we cannot always have them. From a queer perspective, homoerotic desires threaten heteronormativity, which insists that males must act in traditionally masculine ways and sexually desire females who act feminine. Rami acknowledged that some brothers in his fraternity were “thirsty,” flirting with others and pointing out which pledges were the cutest. “But let's be clear,” he said emphatically, “most brothers have never had sex with another brother, and they probably never will!”
At the chapter level, desire was manifest collectively, as a community of brothers who were free to live their lives authentically. As Rami put it, “more than sex, our sexual orientation affects how we interact with each other. We're in a safe environment where we share feelings easily and address problems right away. We definitely take care of each other.”
In Rest's framework, moral motivation is the emotional catalyst for moral action. Rami is a passionate person, and the NCR dilemma troubled him deeply. He said:
I am really close to Carlos and Josh, both as brothers and as a couple. They've been through a lot together, and we've all been humbled by their struggles. They show us every day that they are committed to building a life together. If I can't be passionate about defending their happiness and what I believe in, then what do I stand for?
Rami's desire for Carlos and Josh to be happy was motivated by anger that the NCR prevented his friends from living openly. His feelings motivated him to action.
Moral dilemmas like Rami's are resolved from a combination of motivation and judgment. Desire and reason work together to resolve a dilemma. In Rest's framework, moral judgment should ultimately prevail over the desires that motivate us to act. While this held true for Rami, the relationship between desire and judgment was much more nuanced, as illustrated by Jonathan Haidt, who uses the metaphor of an elephant (passion) and its rider (reason).
The elephant is a remarkably intelligent creature with the power to do what it wants. It moves wherever it desires as the rider cajoles it to move along a well–worn path. At first, the elephant resists, but with practice, the two learn to work together. Nonetheless, the rider never achieves complete control over the elephant. As Haidt explains:
Moral judgment is not a purely cerebral affair in which we weigh concerns about harm, rights, and justice. It's a kind of rapid, automatic process more akin to the judgments animals make as they move through the world feeling themselves drawn toward or away from various things. Moral judgment is mostly done by the elephant (p. 72).
The elephant of desire is a powerful motivating force that is, at best, managed by its rider, moral judgment. Rami felt deeply that Carlos and Josh were neither immoral nor were they subject to expulsion from the fraternity. Although anger was his immediate reaction, he admitted that “I don't want to be ruled by my emotions. As a leader, I try to keep myself in check. When things get the better of me, I ask myself if I'm being rational about the situation.” Rami's indignation about the NCR and the impulse to protect his brothers was tamed by his moral judgment. His passionate feelings of anger were subsequently justified as care for his friends and respect for the dignity of their relationship.
Rami is obviously not an animal, making decisions based solely on the heat of passion and rationalizing his actions after the fact using abstract principles like care and justice. An essential component of his judgment in this dilemma was a sense of personal integrity, which he described as “being consistent with what I believe and who I am as a queer man. I don't want to be saying things and doing things that I don't believe in.” Rami felt that his integrity and reputation was in jeopardy unless he acted in a way that was true to himself and those around him. If he expelled Carlos and Josh, he would be condemning as immoral their same–sex desires and his own as a trans* man.
Ultimately, Rami decided that he would not report Carlos and Josh for violating the NCR. Instead, he restricted their public displays of affection and barred them from disclosing their status as a couple when they attended chapter events or represented the fraternity in recruitment activities. He felt awkward asking them to hide an important part of their lives in public, and he conceded that “it was not the best way to deal with it I know, but as president, I thought it was the only way to keep them and not totally blow off the NCR.”
By allowing Carlos and Josh to stay but suppressing their displays of affection, Rami also knew he was capitulating to heteronormative morality. He lamented, “I like to take a stand. I don't want to be wishy–washy about anything. It was a challenge to separate my feelings as their friend from my professional responsibility to the fraternity.” The uncertainty Rami described reveals an important aspect of the nature of moral character. Far from rendering a decisive conclusion to his NCR dilemma, Rami's decision was a fluid performance.
Moral Character as Performance
When I asked Rami to clarify what “wishy–washy” meant, he explained, “I'd like to separate what I think from what the fraternity stands for, but it's really difficult to do that. I'm one person who occupies both roles at the same time.” He went on to identify one role as the chapter president who has a duty to implement fraternity policy and the other as a friend who refuses to castigate his brothers for publically expressing their desires. These competing roles indicate the unstable, fluid nature of moral character. Unlike categories of identity we assume are fixed, like gender or sexual orientation, our moral identity is an unending performance that is never stable or fully developed. Rami's reluctance to be wishy–washy is not something to avoid or condemn. Instability is the nature of moral character.
In fact, from a queer perspective, identity categories like sexual orientation and gender are always unstable. The conventional binaries that heteronormativity sets before us, like masculine/feminine, straight/gay, or cisgender/transgender, are inadequate to capture the essence of who we really are. Instead, they classify what the dominant culture demands us to be. Rami's frustration over finding the words to describe himself to others is an example of this. From earlier in our conversation, I recalled that he sometimes resisted heteronormativity by creating his own identity labels. At other times, he wanted to connect to others at a level they could understand, so he conformed to conventional labels. This also allowed him to conserve his energy for the people in his life who really mattered.
Performances of Resistance and Conformity
Rami's refusal to report Carlos and Josh for violating the NCR was a moral performance of resistance similar to his refusal to accept the conventional labels that classify him. Resisting heteronormative morality in these ways gave him freedom to reflect on his integrity, values, and motives before taking moral action. When I asked him how he did this, he exclaimed, “I have a really big mouth, and I don't use it enough! I've spent most of my life hiding, but now I have confidence to speak out if something is wrong.” Everyone should live their life fully, he declared, without feeling suppressed or oppressed by policy, culture, or internalized shame.
Resistance performances make for great stories of valiant leaders, but I was curious what would compel Rami, as a leader, to conform to heteronormative expectations like he did when he described himself using conventional identity labels. He told me about a dilemma he faced as an intern for a local politician. While writing a press release, Rami used the abbreviation “LGBTQ,” which his supervisor changed to “gay and lesbian community” instead. Rami countered, asserting that the former was an outdated phrase, representing a binary view of sexuality and gender. He recalled how “something like this may be small to most people, but to me, it is a milestone for my generation. We see LGBTQ as more inclusive than our older, mostly white predecessors do.”
Rami wanted to run for public office someday, and in that moment, he wanted to keep his internship, so he accepted his supervisor's decision. He confessed that “respectability politics” ultimately led him to conform to workplace customs, including language, speech patterns, and dress. “There are times when I'm willing to compromise some of my principles and mannerisms for my long–term professional goals,” Rami said. Flashing a big grin, he added, “You can best believe I will put my unique twist on it when I can!” Here, professionalism is a proxy for heteronormativity, and Rami's awareness of the situation, coupled with his desire for greater access and influence in the future, led him to choose a performance of moral conformity that preserved his dignity in spite of a less than desirable outcome.
There is nothing inherently wrong or preferred about these shifting performances of resistance or conformity. They reflect the true instability of moral character that is a unique combination of each individual's moral sensitivity, motivation, and judgment. This instability is likely to produce internal conflict in students, which is typically happening in other aspects of their lives. Over time, however, through countless performances of resistance and conformity, students enact a relatively stable pattern that others perceive as their character or reputation.
Moral Maturity: An Ethic of Becoming
As our conversation drew to a close, I asked Rami if his experience with the NCR dilemma changed how he made decisions in the future. After a short pause he stated, “I will always be developing my ethics, my way of thinking, and my principles of right and wrong as I try to maintain the best circumstance for all involved.” Rami described an endless cycle of performances, reflecting his desire to reach a moral ideal in service to the greater good. He envisioned this as an ongoing practice that would change over time.
Consistent with a queer perspective, moral maturity is an evolution, a fluid state of becoming ethical, rather than a fixed goal or identity to achieve. Susan Jones, Elisa Abes, and David Kasch describe becoming as “both the process and the product of action” that “allows the individual to have a fluid and changing identity as well as a coherent identity that is able to resist well–established social norms” (p. 202). We produce these performances while living in a world that regulates what we're supposed to be and how we're supposed to act. We never reach moral maturity, but we keep on trying, in a constant state of becoming moral.
An ethic of becoming is about a lifetime of moral decisions in which integrity and respect for self and others play a critical role in the final outcome. It does not replace principles like justice or care in making moral judgments. However, it also does not discount the powerful influence of desire in motivating us to take action and our integrity in validating the outcome. Becoming is taking moral action in ways that are consistent with the best vision of our inner selves while we give others the grace to be where they are in their own ethic of becoming. As Rami observed, “It's like a chess game. You try to look ahead and see what repercussions your actions may have on yourself and others, both negatively and positively.”
If we can accept that a fixed and stable form of character is illusory, then Rami's dilemma is not an anomaly that only impacts a tiny segment of the population. Rather, it represents one of many opportunities each of us has to engage in dialog with students and colleagues about variations in our moral performances and how, despite these awkward moments, we continue to strive for the best in ourselves through an ethic of becoming.
So What Did I Learn?
My reinterpretation of Rest's moral maturity framework through the lens of queer theory would have been hopelessly disconnected from reality without Rami's experience to bring the NCR dilemma to life. Our discussion produced three insights, which I offer to educators who wish to promote an ethic of becoming in students. As Margaret Healy, James Lancaster, Debora Liddell, and Dafina Lazarus Stewart explain, when we have frank and caring discussions with students, we become “moral mentors” who challenge their thinking and model critical reflection on important choices. They wisely counsel mentors that “our first obligation is not to offer an answer for the student but to offer the student questions by engaging in thoughtful dialogue and by our own example” (p. 90). To this end, I provide prompts to facilitate dialog and reflection toward an ethic of becoming.
Sensitivity Includes Distinguishing among Multiple Moralities
Moral sensitivity begins by acknowledging that heteronormativity is ubiquitous and that there are, at any time, multiple moralities in conflict with each other. Rami considered the ethicality of his decision in the NCR dilemma across multiple moralities simultaneously. No matter what he decided, his morality would be questioned. For example, the fraternity headquarters could see his decision as a dereliction of duty, his brothers would praise him for fighting injustice, and the IFC would view him as protecting the immorality of his own kind.
Mentors can help students to identify the moral matrix operating in their environment and recognize how racism, sexism, and other forms of bias work through individuals and policies that, intentionally or not, sustain the norms that oppress subordinate moralities. The following questions promote sensitivity to the moral matrix that impacts our character:
Who has moral authority here and why? Who does not? Why? What does it mean to be a good person or leader in this context?
Judgment and Motivation Are Influenced by Integrity
Moral judgment and motivation are a team. Motivation, the more potent of the two, is an inherent desire that is focused by moral judgment into action. At first, Rami was furious about the NCR and the actions it would force him to take against Carlos and Josh. Then, his judgment intervened, balancing his passion with principles of justice and care. Most importantly, Rami's decision was authorized by his sense of moral integrity. While heteronormativity may have pressured Rami to restrict public displays of affection between his friends, his actions were aligned with his integrity and understanding of the principles of justice and care.
Through their behavior, mentors model for students how moral character is a distinctive blend of passion and reason that reflects the individual's integrity and self–respect. They call attention to the duplicity of self–styled leaders who publically command followers to obey the rules, while they appropriate for themselves a set of personal moral exceptions. The following questions explore the role of motivation, judgment, and integrity in moral conduct:
How does my passion influence my choices and goals? What values and principles are at stake in this situation? How am I inclined to act in similar situations? Is it the right thing to do here? Why? What are the benefits and costs of being authentic in this situation?
Character is an Inherently Unstable Performance
Heteronormativity and other forms of bias assign a moral value to our desires and behavior. In response to this evaluation, we engage in limitless performances of resistance and conformity. Although Rami resisted and conformed through a range of thoughts, actions, and feelings in different contexts, the larger pattern that emerged over time was his moral character, a creation he fashioned into a fluid performance as an ethical leader with integrity and a desire to protect those he served.
Mentors emphasize that reducing moral conduct to simplistic terms or stages denies the full range of human potential, particularly our ability to express ourselves honestly and ethically. Mentors explain that character is a highly individualized, on–going performance in which moments of moral instability must be embraced as an ethic of becoming. The following questions focus on moral performativity as a process of becoming:
How do my actions in this situation reflect my desires? Is it best to take a risk or to conform to the status quo in this situation? Why? What does my future hold? How will I build authentic relationships with others?
As becoming is a highly individualized, creative process, mentors reinforce the idea that character is the sum of countless performances of resistance and conformity. They continue to support students as they push back on heteronormativity, guiding them beyond conformity and resistance to a diverse array of performances reflective of an ethical leader.
Conclusion
This discussion of moral maturity began with a dilemma that emerged unexpectedly during my presentation to a group of fraternity presidents. The impromptu discussion about the NCR dilemma, which I later explored in depth with Rami, led me to conclude that there are precious few spaces, save an ethics class or a conduct hearing, where students can engage with mentors in meaningful dialog about moral quandaries that are relevant to their lives. During the presentation, I felt we had unintentionally created a space to explore what it means to be an ethical leader in the real world. My hope is that we, as educators, will be open to random opportunities like these and start becoming the moral mentors that our students need.