Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Development

12 Key excerpts on "Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Development"

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  Character Psychology And Character Education

  • Daniel K. Lapsley, F. Clark Power, Daniel K. Lapsley, F. Clark Power(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • University of Notre Dame Press

    (Publisher)

  o n e Moral Psychology at the Crossroads Daniel K. Lapsley and Darcia Narvaez t h e k o h l b e rg pa r a d i g m Until recently the study of moral development has been dominated by stage theories in the cognitive developmental tradition. In this tradition moral reasoning is said to gradually approach an ideal form of perfected operation as a result of successive ac-commodations that are made over the course of development. These accommodations progressively extend, elaborate, and structure moral cognition, and are described as stages that possess certain sequential and organizational properties. The most vivid example of a moral stage sequence is, of course, Kohlberg’s well-known theory. In-deed, there are few theorists in the history of psychology who have had more influ-ence on developmental theory and educational practice than Kohlberg. His embrace of Piagetian constructivism, his writings on the developmental grounding of justice reasoning, and his educational innovations have left an indelible mark on develop-mental psychology and education. 18 Kohlberg claimed, for example, that his stage theory provided the psychological resources by which to defeat ethical relativism. His cognitive developmental research program mounted a profound challenge to behavioral and social learning views of so-cialization, and returned morality to the forefront of scientific study in developmen-tal psychology. The educational implications of his work are still evident in sociomoral curricula (e.g., “plus-one” dilemma discussion) and in efforts to reform the structure of educational institutions (e.g., just communities). Clearly, then, Kohlberg’s research program has had a salutary influence on two generations of scholars ( Lapsley 1996 , forthcoming). Yet it is also true that the authority of Kohlberg’s work has diminished signifi-cantly in the last decade. This can be explained, in part, by the general decline of Pi-aget’s theory in contemporary developmental research.

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  Fundamentals of Developmental Psychology

  • Peter Mitchell, Fenja Ziegler(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  Level 3, Stage 6: This is the highest stage of moral development according to Kohlberg. The individual may adhere to externally imposed rules much of the time, but now her behavior may also be governed by her own moral principles, independently of rules imposed from an external source. The individual functioning at Kohlberg’s Stage 6 has the capability to perceive higher moral principles, those which transcend any specific laws. These relate to justice, equality of human rights, and respect for the dignity of other people.

  According to Kohlberg, we gravitate toward Stage 6, but not everyone gets to the top of the hierarchy. Indeed, Kohlberg acknowledges that perhaps only a minority of the population progress all the way to the highest stage. So nobody can move down a stage, but on the other hand it is possible that a given individual might fail to move up into a higher stage. Another central point Kohlberg makes is that it is impossible for any of the stages to be skipped during the course of an individual’s moral development.

  Critically evaluate Kohlberg’s theory of moral development.

  Evaluation of Kohlberg's Stage Theory

  Many studies have been conducted to test the accuracy of Kohlberg’s description of moral development. In a review, Rest (1983) concludes that moral development does proceed in the way Kohlberg suggests, and that the sequence of stages maintains across a variety of cultures investigated throughout the world. There is, however, some concern that the definition of the stages is culturally biased toward Western society. In Western society the rights, freedom, and independence of the individual are highly valued. This is not the case to the same extent in more interdependent, community-focused cultures where the individual is perhaps not perceived to be as important as the group as a whole. In such a society, the higher levels of moral reasoning, as defined by Kohlberg, might then clash with the core values of the society an individual lives in. If we found that individuals from this more community-oriented society did not attain the highest level of moral reasoning, we might take this as a sign that their moral reasoning is underdeveloped. However, this conclusion might well be fallacious when we consider the important implications that different cultural values have. It might well be safer to assume that Kohlberg’s stages describe the moral reasoning development of children in Western societies, and that whilst some core moral values are shared between people of all cultures, there also exist differences that do not so easily translate. In that sense Kohlberg’s stage model has contributed much to the thinking about moral development, but does not present a universal account of development (Gibbs, Basinger, Grime, & Snarey, 2007

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  Developmental Psychology

  Revisiting the Classic Studies

  • Alan M Slater, Paul C Quinn, Alan M Slater, Paul C Quinn(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Kohlberg’s typology included six stages grouped into three levels. Individuals begin at the lowest level and later move to higher levels, but only rarely reach the highest levels. Kohlberg referred to the first level as the Pre-Moral Level, with judgments characterized by self-interest. Within this level, a Stage 1 orientation focuses on avoiding punishment and demonstrating obedience for its own sake, and a Stage 2 orientation focuses on what Kohlberg called “naive instrumental hedonism” which is often characterized as “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.” Kohlberg referred to the second level as the Morality of Conventional Role-Conformity, in which judgments are characterized by an emphasis on social relationships and an appreciation of norms and conventions. Within this level, a Stage 3 orientation focuses on maintaining positive relations with others by following expected societal standards for being good, and a Stage 4 orientation focuses on respecting laws in order to maintain social order. Kohlberg referred to the third level as Morality of Self-Accepted Moral Principles, with judgments characterized by a focus on the internally held moral principles. Within this level, a Stage 5 orientation focuses on coordinating the interest of the group with important universal values such as the need to preserve life, and Stage 6 focuses on acting according to conscience in relation to basic principles of fairness such as equality and human rights.

  Kohlberg found evidence of age-related change associated with the stages. The prevalence of reasoning associated with the first two stages decreased with age, reasoning associated with the second two stages increased with age and reached a plateau at age 13, and reasoning associated with the final two stages increased over time. He argued that it was necessary for individuals to pass through the stages in sequence, and that the pattern of intercorrelations he observed among the different types of moral judgments supported the notion that the higher levels of moral reasoning replace the lower levels as children develop.

  Kohlberg discussed points of agreement and disagreement with Piaget. He agreed with Piaget that moral development involves the construction of belief systems within the context of social interactions, rather than a passive process of internalizing external rules. He also described the relations between his stages and some of Piaget’s. For example, Kohlberg viewed his Stage 1 as closely corresponding to Piaget’s heteronomous stage, with each describing an emphasis on outcomes versus intentions and each defining what is morally right in terms of obedience to authority. Piaget viewed this account of morality as reflecting the level of respect children have for authority figures, and argued that it leads children to believe it is appropriate for adults to define what is right and wrong. In contrast, Kohlberg argued that children’s reasoning at this stage is grounded in a hedonistic desire to avoid punishment rather than respect for adult authority. Kohlberg also drew parallels between his Stage 5 and what Inhelder and Piaget (1958) described as formal operations, the most mature level in his account of cognitive development, in which reasoning is characterized by the capacity to engage in abstract thinking and deductive reasoning. Kohlberg believed that the cognitive advances associated with this stage allow children to engage in the type of hypothetical and logical reasoning that is necessary to contemplate alternative systems of social norms and think through the implications of abstract moral principles such as humanitarianism and democracy.

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  Child Psychology

  A Canadian Perspective

  • Alastair Younger, Scott A. Adler, Ross Vasta(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  They understand that not everyone shares their own values and ideas, but that all have an equal right to exist. Morality is based on protecting each individual’s human rights. The emphasis is on maintaining a social system that will do so. Laws are created to protect (rather than restrict) individual freedoms, and they should be changed, as necessary. Behaviour that harms society is wrong, even if it is not illegal. Stage 6: Universal ethical principles (“Morality is a matter of personal conscience.”) People view moral decisions from the perspective of personal principles of fairness and justice. They believe each person has personal worth and should be respected, regardless of ideas or characteristics. The progression from Stage 5 to Stage 6 can be thought of as a move from a social-directed to an inner-directed perspective. It is assumed that there are universal principles of morality that are above the law, such as justice and respect for human dignity. Human life is valued above all else. Source: Based on information from L. Kohlberg, “Moral Stages and Moralization: The Cognitive-Development Approach,” 1976, in T. Likona (Ed.), Moral Development and Behavior: Theory, Research, and Social Issues (New York Holt, Rinehart and Winston). 526 Chapter 14 – Moral Development places particular importance on role-taking opportunities, which occur when children participate in decision-making situations with others and exchange differing points of view on moral ques- tions. The contrasting viewpoints produce cognitive conflict, which the children eventually resolve by reorganizing their thinking into a more advanced stage of reasoning. This process occurs grad- ually. Thus, although a person’s general level of moral reasoning can be generally classified into one of Kohlberg’s stages, the individual may approach certain specific issues at a higher or lower stage of reasoning. Several other characteristics of Kohlberg’s stage model are similar to Piaget’s theory.

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  Moral Development and Reality

  Beyond the Theories of Kohlberg and Hoffman

  • John C. Gibbs(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  3 Kohlberg's Theory A Critique and New View L awrence Kohlberg's contribution to the field of moral development has been enormous. Indeed, Kohlberg almost single-handedly innovated the field of cognitive moral development in American psychology. Such work scarcely existed in the early 1960s when Kohlberg began to publish his research: His choice of topics [namely, 'morality'] made him someth-ing of an 'odd duck' within American psychology. . . . No up-to-date social scientist, acquainted with [the relativism of] psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and cultural anthropology, used such words [as moral judgment develop-ment] at all (Brown & Herrnstein, 1975, pp. 307-308). Yet these scientists could not ignore Kohlberg's claim—and supporting evidence—that moral-ity is not basically relative to culture, that is, that across diverse cultures one can discern a qualitative sequence of progressively more adequate modes of moral judgment. Kohlberg became one of the most frequently cited psy-chologists in the social and behavioral sciences (Haggbloom et al., 2002). His work is described and discussed in virtually every major developmental psychology textbook on the current market. Kohlberg's claim had its precedent in Piaget's. Piaget had challenged Durkheimian and other sociological views of morality as simply a matter of culturally relative, internalized norms. The challenge consisted chiefly of these claims: (a) that the essence of mature or profound moral judgment is not a socialized or internalized norm but instead a logical ideal that is 57 58 Moral Development and Reality constructed in part through exchanges of perspective with others, (b) that the progressive age trend in the succession of phases toward this ideal is essentially the same in any culture (invariant sequence and cross-cultural universality) , and (c) that mature moral judgment can in its own right motivate mature moral behavior (cognitive primacy).

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  Ethical Issues in Developmental Disabilities

  • Moore, Stephen, Hayes, Linda J., Hayes, Gregory(Authors)
  • 1(Publication Date)
  • Context Press

    (Publisher)

  Analysis. There are two major points here, both of which are readily analyzed from our point of view: the move from concern over adult authority to personal autonomy, and the move from an egocentric to a social focus. Point one reiterates the sequence from pliance to tracking and augmenting; points two emphasizes the emergence of Group 2 activities. 60 Steven C. Hayes and Gregory J. Hayes Lawrence Kohlberg Perhaps the most influential of modern moral development theorists, Kohlberg’s work was empirically based and multi-cultural in nature. From his studies he concluded there were universal stages of moral development, which were consistent across cultures. These stages, shown in Table 3, ranged from the most primitive in which rules were obeyed in order to avoid punishment, to mid-level stages in which a child (or adult) conformed in order to avoid disapproval or acted in accordance with the belief that right behavior meant doing one’s duty and adhering to the rules of society, to a stage in which morally correct acts were a function of conscience in accordance with universally applied ethical principles (Kohlberg, 1980; 1983). Kohlberg objected to efforts to implant the norms of the majority in a society in the young and others. Rather, he viewed the goal of moral education as facilitating the process of individual moral development by stimulating “the ‘natural’ develop- ment of the individual child’s own moral judgment and capacities, thus allowing him to use his own moral judgment to control his behavior” (Kohlberg, 1980, p. 72). If development is stimulated rather than imparted via fixed rules, the child will naturally move to higher stages of moral development.

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  Theories of Development

  Concepts and Applications

  • William Crain(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 7

  Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development

   

  BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION

  An outstanding example of research in the Piagetian tradition is the work of Lawrence Kohlberg (1927–1987). Kohlberg focused on moral development and provided a stage theory of moral thinking that goes well beyond Piaget’s initial formulations.

  Kohlberg1 grew up in Bronxville, New York, and attended Andover Academy in Massachusetts, an academically demanding private high school. He did not go straight to college but instead went to help the Israeli cause, serving as the second engineer on an old freighter carrying European refugees through British blockades to Israel. After this, in 1948, Kohlberg enrolled at the University of Chicago, where he scored so high on admission tests that he only had to take a limited number of courses to earn his bachelor’s degree. This he did in one year. He stayed on at Chicago for graduate work in psychology, at first thinking he would become a clinical psychologist. But he soon became interested in Piaget and began interviewing children and adolescents on moral issues. The result was his doctoral dissertation (1958a), the first rendition of his new stage theory. Kohlberg taught at the University of Chicago from 1962 to 1968 and at Harvard University from 1968 until his death in 1987.

  Kohlberg was an informal, unassuming man. When he taught, he frequently came to class dressed in a flannel shirt and baggy pants—as if he had thought it was his day off. He usually began asking questions in an off-the-cuff manner. In the first days of the school year, students didn’t always know what to make of him. But they soon saw that they were in the presence of a true scholar, a man who had thought long and deeply about critical issues in philosophy and psychology, and Kohlberg was inviting them to ponder these issues with him. In his lectures and writings, he did much to help others appreciate the wisdom of the “old psychologists,” writers such as Rousseau, John Dewey, and James Mark Baldwin.

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  The Routledge Handbook of Mass Media Ethics

  • Lee Wilkins, Clifford G. Christians, Lee Wilkins, Clifford G. Christians(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  While Piaget (1965) did his work on children, the applicability of his insights to adult moral behavior is straightforward. Adults sometimes do ethically questionable things (driving a car very fast just for the experience of speed) to see “what it would feel like.” Cooperation is the work of adult life—in families and on the job. Adults placed in novel situations—first-time parents, college graduates at the start of a career—often search for the “rule book” as a way of guiding themselves through a bewildering set of options and unanticipated need for decisions. Comfort, experience, and good cognitive skills ultimately allow most adults to internalize some universal understandings—even if those understandings are unevenly and irregularly applied. Adult life mirrors the moral judgments of the child in often uncanny and insightful ways.

  Piaget’s work stood for more than two decades before psychoanalyst Erik Erikson (Erikson, 1950/1963) expanded on it. Erikson’s work will be dealt with in more depth later in this chapter, but it is important to note that Erikson focused on the entire adult life cycle, not just childhood. Furthermore, Erikson postulated that each stage of moral development depended to an important degree on how the issues raised in previous stages had been resolved. Based on the work of these two psychologists, scholars accepted that moral development was both sequential and hierarchical.

  While many scholars have contributed to the theory of moral development, it is Harvard psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg’s six stages of moral development that is one of the most widely used today. Kohlberg (1981, 1984), who tested Piaget’s framework on undergraduate men at Harvard, proposed that these stages reflect progressively higher quality ethical reasoning, based on principles of ethical philosophy, with the higher the stage the better the reasoning. His theory rests on the assumption that some reasons used to decide ethical quandaries are better than others; good ethical thinking is not relativistic. He said that some reasons for choosing a course of action represent more comprehensive, coherent, elaborated or developed ideas, and described the course of moral development as evolving from simpler ideas to more complex ones (Rest, Narvaez, Bebeau, and Thoma, 1999a).

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  Cognitive Development and Epistemology

  • Theodore Mischel(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  Many highly sophisticated theologians, for example, have espoused a subjection-to-the-will-of-God morality that I suppose would be classed by Kohlberg as stage 4. What is Kohlberg to say about such cases? He might suggest that the moral philosophy of these people does not accurately reflect their actual moral reasoning, which would be classi- fied as stage 6. Or he might treat them as cases of "culturally induced regression," that is, cases that had reached stage 6 in both respects (con- 276 WILLIAM P. ALSTON cepts and habits of reasoning), and then had regressed to stage 4 in habits of reasoning because of cultural pressure or emotional needs. It would certainly be interesting to test such suggestions. Suppose it could be shown that, with appropriate subsidiary explanations of deviant cases, conceptual development does proceed in tandem with the dominance of modes of reasoning. Stage 6 moral reasoning would then, by hypothesis, "involve" the most finely articulated conceptual scheme. Is this a moral recommendation? Does the cognitive superiority of a more elaborate conceptual scheme imply the moral superiority of the associated mode of resolving moral problems? Kohlberg's argument for the moral superiority of the more differentiated stage is tied to his account of what makes a moral judgment a moral judgment, as distinguished from factual judgments, as well as from other species of value judgments. He seems to be of two minds about this, but one of his inclinations is to take a "formalist" approach and separate out moral judgments in terms of their prescriptivity and universality, and it is this view that plays a role in the "is" to "ought" argument. The increasingly prescriptive nature of more mature moral judgments is reflected in the series of differentiations we have described, which is a series of increased differ- entiations of "is" and "ought" (or of morality as internal principles from external events and expectations).

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  Following Kohlberg

  Liberalism and the Practice of Democratic Community

  • Donald R. C. Reed(Author)
  • 1998(Publication Date)
  • University of Notre Dame Press

    (Publisher)

  Each stage logically absorbs the conceptual integrations made at the previous stage while incorporat-ing new conceptual distinctions (differentiations) that separate the moral from the nonmoral considerations that are relevant. Hence, each stage is logically more adequate than the previous stage in virtue of being more refined conceptually. Third, people in fact prefer the highest stage they comprehend. And finally, the best philosophical wisdom independently depicts Kohlberg's highest stage as the highest stage. Kohlberg claims that his highest stage converges with the moral philosophies of Kant, Hare, Baier, Frankena, and Rawls (Flanagan, 1 984, p. 1 64) . Flanagan quoted Kohlberg's claim that the philosopher's justification of a higher stage of moral reasoning maps into the psychologist's explana-tion of movement to that stage and vice versa (Kohlberg, l 973b, quoted in Flanagan, 1 984, p. 1 64) The moral theory presupposed by Kohlberg's conception of the terminus of moral development is the moral theory defended by the best moral philosophers. Flanagan offered some minor and some major objections. The mi-nor objections pertain to the first three strands of Kohlberg's argu-ment, as Flanagan interpreted it. First, Flanagan noted that the phe-nomena accounted for in the adequacy thesis can be explained by 1 4 6 The Cognitive and Moral Adequacy of Stage 6 an alternative, social learning account of moral development (a rein-forcement-based understanding of moral development ) . The fact that an individual happens to prefer the stage he or she is in over the stages he or she used to occupy (and the fact that individuals understand only the stages they are presently in or once occupied) does not entail that he or she prefers it because of its greater adequacy. Perhaps he or she simply prefers the type of moral reasoning for which he or she is most reinforced by his or her peers and environment in general.

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  Handbook of Moral Behavior and Development

  Volume 1: Theory

  • William M. Kurtines, Jacob Gewirtz, Jacob L. Lamb, William M. Kurtines, Jacob Gewirtz, Jacob L. Lamb(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  I have two aims in the following elaboration of my neo-Kohlbergian view. First, I elucidate through an example the “constructive” (as opposed to “internalization”) aspects of moral development in cognitive-developmental theory, and thereby identify an internal contradiction in Kohlberg’s writings. Second, I justify my designation of stages 3 and 4 as mature on the basis of a critique of the referents of moral judgment maturity in traditional Kohlbergian theory, namely, his “postconventional” or “principled” stages (5 and 6). Refinement of the referents for Kohlberg’s general theoretical contentions is a critical prerequisite to progress toward an integration of Kohlberg’s and Hoffman’s theories of morality.

  Difficulties in Kohlberg’s interpretation of developmental processes and maturity are best explicated in terms of the three levels by which he classifies his six stages. Kohlberg would seem to agree that moral maturity inheres in the discernment of underlying meaning. In Kohlberg’s theory, however, “underlying meaning” has as its referent a “principled” orientation to interpersonal relationships and society. Drawing upon certain early 20th-century writings (Dewey & Tufts, 1908; McDougall, 1908), Kohlberg (1984) characterized his first two stages as the understanding and acceptance of social conventions (preconventional level); stages 3 and 4 as “conforming to and upholding the rules and expectations of conventions of society or authority just because they are society’s rules, expectations, or conventions” (p. 172; conventional level); and stages 5 and 6 as “based on formulating and accepting the general moral principles that underlie these rules” (p. 173; postconventional level; emphasis added).

  The postconventional level is considered “internal,” however, not only because of the discernment of underlying moral principles, but also because the moral principles are “self-chosen” (p. 173), and independent of social approval or disapproval (p. 91).

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  Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action

  • Jürgen Habermas, Christian Lenhardt, Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Christian Lenhardt, Shierry Weber Nicholsen(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  stages of development.

  If there is no empirical evidence to suggest that we are dealing with more than one postconventional stage, Kohlberg’s description of stage 5 also becomes problematic. We may at least suspect that the ideas of the social contract and the greatest good for the greatest number are confined to traditions that hold sway primarily in England and America and that they represent a particular culturally specific substantive manifestation of principled moral judgment.

  Taking up certain misgivings of John Gibbs, Thomas McCarthy points out that the relation between a psychologist knowledgeable about moral theory and his experimental subject changes in a way that is methodologically significant as the subject reaches the postconventional level and takes a hypothetical attitude to his social world:

  The suggestion I should like to advance is that Kohlberg’s account places the higher-stage moral subject, at least in point of competence, at the same reflective or discursive level as the moral psychologist. The subject’s thought is now marked by the decentration, differentiation and reflexivity which are the conditions of entrance into the moral theorist’s sphere of argumentation. Thus the asymmetry between the prereflective and the reflective, between theories-in-action and explication, which underlies the model of reconstruction begins to break down. The subject is now in a position to argue with the theorist about questions of morality.47

  In the same essay McCarthy draws a useful parallel between sociomoral and cognitive development:

  Piaget views the underlying functioning of intelligence as unknown to the individual at lower stages of cognition. At superior levels, however, the subject may reflect on previously tacit thought operations and the implicit cognitive achievements of earlier stages, that is, he or she may engage in epistemological reflection. And this places the subject, at least in point of competence, at the same discursive level as the cognitive psychologist. Here, too, asymmetry between the subject’s prereflective know-how and the investigator’s reflective know-that begins to break down. The subject is now in a position to argue with the theorist about the structure and conditions of knowledge.48

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