Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development

Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development constitute an adaptation of a psychological theory originally conceived by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. Kohlberg began work on this topic as a psychology graduate student at the University of Chicago in 1958 and expanded upon the theory throughout his life.

The theory holds that moral reasoning, a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for ethical behavior, has six developmental stages, each more adequate at responding to moral dilemmas than its predecessor. Kohlberg followed the development of moral judgment far beyond the ages studied earlier by Piaget, who also claimed that logic and morality develop through constructive stages.

There have been critiques of the theory from several perspectives. Arguments have been made that it emphasizes justice to the exclusion of other moral values, such as caring; that there is such an overlap between stages that they should more properly be regarded as domains; and that evaluations of the reasons for moral choices are mostly post hoc rationalizations (by both decision makers and psychologists) of intuitive decisions.

A new field within psychology was created by Kohlberg's theory,<!-- incomplete citation: "Kohlberg's Theory of Moral Reasoning

Encyclopedia of Childhood and Adolescence" Dianne K. Daeg de Mott --> and according to Haggbloom et al.'s study of the most eminent psychologists of the 20th century, Kohlberg was the 16th most frequently cited in introductory psychology textbooks throughout the century, as well as the 30th most eminent. Kohlberg's scale is about how people justify behaviors and his stages are not a method of ranking how moral someone's behavior is; there should be a correlation between how someone scores on the scale and how they behave. The general hypothesis is that moral behaviour is more responsible, consistent and predictable from people at higher levels.

Stages

Kohlberg's six stages can be more generally grouped into three levels of two stages each: pre-conventional, conventional and post-conventional. Stages cannot be skipped; each provides a new and necessary perspective, more comprehensive and differentiated than its predecessors but integrated with them. This can give rise to an inference that even innocent victims are guilty in proportion to their suffering. It is "egocentric", lacking recognition that others' points of view are different from one's own. There is "deference to superior power or prestige". This involves an individual imagining what they would do in another's shoes, if they believed what that other person imagines to be true. The resulting consensus is the action taken. Kohlberg's difficulties in obtaining empirical evidence for even a sixth stage,

Kohlberg stated that women tend to get stuck at level 3, being primarily concerned with details of how to maintain relationships and promote the welfare of family and friends. Men are likely to move on to the abstract principles and thus have less concern with the particulars of who is involved.

Consistent with this observation, Gilligan's theory of moral development does not value justice above other considerations. She developed an alternative theory of moral reasoning based on the ethics of caring.

Cross-cultural generalizability

Kohlberg's stages are not culturally neutral, as demonstrated by its use for several cultures (particularly in the case of the highest developmental stages). Although they progress through the stages in the same order, individuals in different cultures seem to do so at different rates. Kohlberg has responded by saying that although cultures inculcate different beliefs, his stages correspond to underlying modes of reasoning, rather than to beliefs.

Most cultures do place some value of life, truth, and law, but to assert that these values are virtually universal requires more research.

According to Snarey and Kelio, Kohlberg's theory of moral development is not represented in ideas like Gemeinschaft of the communitive feeling. While there had been criticism directed towards the cross-cultural universality of Kohlberg's theory, Carolyn Edwards argued that the dilemma interview method, the standard scoring system, and the cognitive-development theory are all valid and productive in teaching and understanding of moral reasoning across all cultures.

Inconsistency in moral judgments

Another criticism of Kohlberg's theory is that people frequently demonstrate significant inconsistency in their moral judgements. This often occurs in moral dilemmas involving drinking and driving and business situations where participants have been shown to reason at a subpar stage, typically using more self-interested reasoning (stage two) than authority and social order obedience reasoning (stage four). Kohlberg's theory is generally considered to be incompatible with inconsistencies in moral reasoning. Immanuel Kant "predicted" and rebutted that argument when he considered such actions as opening an exception for ourselves in the categorical imperative.

Reasoning vs. intuition

Other psychologists have questioned the assumption that moral action is primarily a result of formal reasoning. Social intuitionists such as Jonathan Haidt argue that individuals often make moral judgments without weighing concerns such as fairness, law, human rights or ethical values. Thus the arguments analyzed by Kohlberg and other rationalist psychologists could be considered post hoc rationalizations of intuitive decisions; moral reasoning may be less relevant to moral action than Kohlberg's theory suggests. The researchers utilized the moral judgement interview (MJI) and two standard dilemmas to compare the 23 exemplars with a more ordinary group of people. The intention was to learn more about moral exemplars and to examine the strengths and weaknesses of the Kohlberg measure. They found that the MJI scores were not clustered at the high end of Kohlberg's scale; they ranged from stage 3 to stage 5. Half landed at the conventional level (stages 3, 3/4, and 4) and the other half landed at the postconventional level (stages 4/5 and 5).

Apart from their scores, it was found that the 23 participating moral exemplars described three similar themes within all of their moral developments: certainty, positivity, and the unity of self and moral goals. The unity between self and moral goals was highlighted as the most important theme as it is what truly sets the exemplars apart from the 'ordinary' people. It was discovered that the moral exemplars see their morality as a part of their sense of identity and sense of self, not as a conscious choice or chore. Also, the moral exemplars showed a much broader range of moral concern than did the ordinary people and go beyond the normal acts of daily moral engagements.

Rather than confirm the existence of a single highest stage, Larry Walker's cluster analysis of a wide variety of interview and survey variables for moral exemplars found three types: the "caring" or "communal" cluster was strongly relational and generative, the "deliberative" cluster had sophisticated epistemic and moral reasoning, and the "brave" or "ordinary" cluster was less distinguished by personality.

Continued relevance

Kohlberg's bodies of work on the stages of moral development have been utilized by others working in the field. One example is the Defining Issues Test (DIT) created in 1979 by James Rest, originally as a pencil-and-paper alternative to the Moral Judgement Interview. Heavily influenced by the six-stage model, it made efforts to improve the validity criteria by using a quantitative test, the Likert scale, to rate moral dilemmas similar to Kohlberg's. It also used a large body of Kohlbergian theory such as the idea of "post-conventional thinking".

In 1999 the DIT was revised as the DIT-2. such as divinity, politics, and medicine.

William Damon's contribution to Kohlberg's moral theory

The American psychologist William Damon developed a theory that is based on Kohlberg's research. Still, it has the merit of focusing on and analysing moral reasoning's behavioural aspects and not just the idea of justice and rightness. Damon's methodology was experimental, using children aged between 3 and 9 who were required to share toys. The study applied the sharing resources technique to operationalise the dependent variable it measured: equity or justice.

The results demonstrated an obvious stage presentation of the righteous, just behaviour.

According to William Damon's findings, justice, transposed into action, has 6 successive levels:

Level 1 – nothing stops the egocentric tendency. The children want all the toys without feeling the need to justify their preference. The justice criterion is the absolute wish of the self;

Level 2 – the child wants almost all of the toys and justifies his choice in an arbitrary or egocentric manner (e.g., "I should play with them because I have a red dress", "They are mine because I like them!");

Level 3 – the equality criterion emerges (e.g., "We should all have the same number of toys");

Level 4 – the merit criterion emerges (e.g., "Johnny should take more because he was such a good boy");

Level 5 – necessity is seen as the most important selection criterion (e.g., "She should take the most because she was sick", "Give more to Matt because he is poor");

Level 6 – the dilemmas begin to come up: can justice be achieved, considering only one criterion? The consequence is the combining of criteria: equality + merit, equality + necessity, necessity + merit, equality + necessity + merit.

The final level of Damon's mini theory is an interesting display, in the social setting, of the logical cognitive operationalisation. This permits decentration and the combination of many points of view, favouring allocentrism.

References

External links

Moral Development and Moral Education: An Overview
Kohlberg's Moral Stages
Do the Right Thing: Cognitive science’s search for a common morality (Boston Review)
A Summary Of Lawrence Kohlberg's Stages Of Moral Development