#I can't go on rn it's 2am I might have written a paper on it at some point but I don't want to find it

[suncaptor]

i feel like i almost understand ur points on cas and his sense of morality and consequences but maybe im just like too tired rn i think im not quite grasping it. but like i do love to think about cas and morality and like. personally i think of cas as not reaching full moral development. like as in kohlberg’s theory of moral development, where cas does have a sense of morality that he follows but it might not be as complex as human beings that grow up learning about right and wrong. like it is very. rule based. and something is the right course of action, until it causes “bad” consequences or he receives some kind of punishment for it, and then it flips to being a wrong course of action. like it is all about consequence. if the consequence is bad, even if you couldn’t possibly have expected it from your actions, the actions are now bad, and you are bad, too, and now punishment is necessary. and i think what counts as a consequence might change for him before the reasoning does. like as an angel the only consequence was punishment by superiors, but by season 5, the destruction of humanity becomes a “bad” thing, and to some degree dean’s opinion of him is a consequence too. but more importantly it’s deans safety that is a consequence that matters. like if cas can’t stop dean from saying yes to michael, that will lead to dean being in danger, which would be bad, and cas should be punished for it. this is rambely im sorry abt that but yeah. i would love to hear more of ur thoughts on cas and his sense of consequences and punishment tho :)

I am extremely hesitant to judge morality that way because I think it lends to ethnocentricism. This isn’t to say I disagree with your interpretations, I just don’t personally like looking at it through that framework for various reasons.

I do really agree with this statement, “if the consequence is bad, even if you couldn’t possibly have expected it from your actions, the actions are now bad, and you are bad, too, and now punishment is necessary,” which I think is very core to the ways in which angels perceive morality which is why believing in grand design is so essential. And that was very much what I was also getting at within my response on this post. I do think that like consequence being created by authority does lend into a moral development of law/rules not to abstract individualism and so forth, but I don’t think that it’s a matter of lack of development, and having those consequences in place don’t negate like consequence being something that goes against your own abstract moral reasoning (but then if you doubt that is immoral) which then does leave the later states of Kohlberg’s theory of moral development out unless very specifically your fall from the system, so I would agree with that, but I’m not fond of the framework because it’s more about cultural differences and putting that into stages of development implies lesser/higher which means we are fundamentally judging it from our human perspective which is different but not superior.

They have different moral standards that are also based around the unfathomable amount of time, through many mass extinctions and times of great distress, they’ve been alive.

I honestly believe that Cas sees any suffering as a negative consequence, he just keeps it more calculated in his head (the trolley problem wouldn’t be a conundrum to him) unless it becomes something personal (keeping the Winchesters safe, for example, regardless of who else it could hurt). There are other consequences, such as Dean’s perspective of him, that guide this, but he like fundamentally does not want any living creature to suffer. So I wouldn’t put that sort of consequential way of perceiving at a lesser standpoint in terms of like morality of right and wrong? But also I do think he associates violence against himself as response to his own fallacy. 

But if you’re looking at narrative in terms of this transition from angelic morality to human morality, yes Cas would then struggle within that new framework. This automatically also means he’s failed within his own which therefore implies rejecting rules through that doubt. So he runs into these issues of fundamentally shifting from one paradigm to another which then means he will be less capable of working within that new framework. 

Which like, the biggest issue for him I think lies that inability to differentiate consequence and actual capability of action. He therefore blames himself when he shouldn’t without being able to actually pinpoint where his impact went wrong. Which would make sense in the way of seeing moral development because he’s changing to action being of his own free will and all, so yeah, I agree to some extent. It’s more that he just then continues making the same mistakes that end with consequences against his morality which in turn means he can’t better himself.

“ Kohlberg’s final level of moral reasoning is based on universal ethical principles and abstract reasoning. At this stage, people follow these internalized principles of justice, even if they conflict with laws and rules.”

I would however disagree he doesn’t reach this point because the very act of doubting a system that brainwashing, lobotomises, and tortures you by having doubt based on your internalised principles of justice and dying for your own ethical principles that would deem you unethical by that standard would definitely be this point. It just doesn’t undo the fact the way he perceives action/inaction especially regarding himself and his own sense of self-blame won’t remain ingrained in how he was for hundreds of millions of years.

So like, in short, I definitely agree that shifting from one cultural standard of morality to another (which I personally would not like to judge by humanity’s standard’s) would mean Cas would have deficiencies in how to utilise his moral reasoning because it’s a framework contrary to what he’s known his entire life, even if he is willing to go against any set of laws or societal norms imposed upon him. But the very act of shifting from a moral set that requires complete faith in law to doubt it in itself would require strong abstract moral reasoning which he dies for in the first season, and from like the beginning of his introduction he is pushing the limits of what he should.