Kohlberg's Theory of Moral Reasoning

11 Key excerpts on "Kohlberg's Theory of Moral Reasoning"

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  Child Psychology

  A Canadian Perspective

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

    (Publisher)

  Moral reasoning is based on the assumption that individuals must serve their own needs. Conventional level Kohlberg’s third and fourth stages of moral development. Moral reasoning is based on the view that a social system must be based on laws and regulations. Postconventional level Kohlberg’s final stages of moral development. Moral reasoning is based on the assumption that the value, dignity, and rights of each individual person must be maintained. 525 Theories of Moral Development the moral content component, which is assumed to be more strongly influenced by the child’s experiences with moral situations. Kohlberg’s theory thus resembles Piaget’s in assuming that mor- al development results from a combination of improving cognitive skills and repeated encounters with moral issues. Movement from stage to stage in Kohlberg’s model closely follows the Piagetian process of accommodation. Movement occurs when the child can no longer handle new information with- in his or her current view of the world—or, in Piagetian terms, when the child can no longer assimilate new information within his or her existing structure of schemes. Kohlberg’s model TABLE 14.1 KOHLBERG’S STAGE MODEL OF MORAL REASONING Social Perspective Moral Content LEVEL I PRECONVENTIONAL Stage 1: Heteronomous morality (“Morality derives from power and authority.”) Children cannot consider more than one person’s perspective. They tend to be egocentric, assuming that their feelings are shared by everyone. This stage is equivalent to Piaget’s moral realism. Evaluations of morality are absolute and focus on physical and objective characteristics of a situation. Morality is defined only by authority figures, whose rules must be obeyed. Stage 2: Individualism and instrumental purpose (“Morality means looking out for yourself.”) Children understand that people have different needs and points of view, although they cannot yet put themselves in the other’s place.

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  Sports, Games, and Play

  Social and Psychological Viewpoints

  • Jeffrey H. Goldstein(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  Kohlberg’s (1981, 1984) work is well known and is only briefly summarized in this chapter. His ground-breaking theory of moral development is rooted in the cognitive developmental approach to psychology most prominently associated with Piaget. Accordingly, the concept of universal stages occupies a central place in Kohlberg’s work. Within the Piagetian framework, stage progression is hypothesized to reflect an interactive process between the innate tendency of the developing child to actively organize information and an environment that demands accommodation to its features.

  Basic Concepts

  Four key concepts can help us understand Kohlberg’s theory of moral development: moral issues, orientations, principles, and stages. Kohlberg believes that certain moral issues or values are universally recognized as important. These issues include the values of life, property, truthfulness, civil liberties, conscience, rules and laws, affiliation, authority, contract, and trust (Kohlberg, 1976). The content of moral thinking is about these moral values. Sometimes, however, one person’s claim on a particular value may come into conflict with those of others. Kohlberg (1969) wrote, “the area of conflicting claims of selves is the area of morality.” Thus, for example, if a player is asked by a coach to violate a rule, the coach’s claim of authority may conflict with the player’s claim to rule obedience.

  To help clarify what is involved in moral thinking, Kohlberg turns to what he calls the four universal moral orientations (Kohlberg, 1976). A moral orientation is a general approach for dealing with moral conflicts. Each moral orientation focuses on a critical element to help decide right and wrong. The first, the normative order orientation, focuses on prescribed rules and roles; decision making is guided by a consideration of rules. The consequence orientation focuses on the impact of various actions on the welfare of others and/or the self; decision making is guided by beliefs about the outcome of various behavioral options. The justice orientation focuses on the relations of liberty, equality, reciprocity, and contract between people. In decision making, this orientation is characterized by a concern for impartiality and fairness. Finally, the ideal-self

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  Social Problem Solving and Offending

  Evidence, Evaluation and Evolution

  • Mary McMurran, James McGuire, Mary McMurran, James McGuire(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  At this level of moral reasoning we can expect individuals to have an egocentric and pragmatic world-view with little understanding of the needs of others. For example, Palmer and Hollin (1996, 1997) found a strong association between immature levels of moral reasoning (in terms of Kohlberg’s stages) and self-reported delinquency in young offenders. Similarly, Lee and Prentice (1988) found a significant correla-tion between the capacity to take the perspective of others and stages of moral reasoning among a group of male offenders. A meta-analysis by Nelson, Smith, and Dodd (1990) confirms this view, concluding that young aggressive offenders were delayed in social moral development, using preconventional reasoning as a basis for their moral decision making compared with matched non-offending peers (who used conventional reasoning). Stage 1: Moral reasoning is based on the avoidance of punishment and obedience to perceived authority figures. Level One: Preconventional reasoning Stage 2: Moral reasoning is egocentric and based on the needs of the individual after consideration of rewards and punishment. Stage 3: Moral reasoning begins to be grounded by recognition of the needs of others and recognition of the importance of relationships. Level Two: Conventional reasoning Stage 4: Moral reasoning becomes concerned with upholding society’s rules and laws for the sake of maintaining society itself. Stage 5: The individual understands that under certain circumstances laws can be broken. This is underpinned by a belief that society’s laws are a contract between each individual and society. Level Three: Post-conventional reasoning Stage 6 : Self chosen ethical principles guide behaviour and these are consistent over situations and time. These principles may overrule society’s laws when they come into conflict. Figure 14.1 Kohlberg’s stages of moral reasoning MORAL REASONING 269

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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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  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)

  The constructive process, whatever its precise nature, does not take place in a vacuum. In the course of their everyday experience, children encounter all sorts of implicit or explicit examples of the higher level concepts which they themselves will acquire. That does not imply that they internalize the examples to which they are exposed in any direct or automatic way. But it is equally unlikely that they systematically ignore them…. The objective … must be to understand the specific ways in which the individual’s constructive activity utilizes these external data. (Kuhn, 1988, p. 229)

  Maturity in Kohlberg’s Theory. Not only Kohlberg’s apparent allowance of internalization but also his interpretation of moral judgment maturity are entailed in the preconventional-conventional-postconventional trichotomy. As we have seen, Kohlberg strongly implies that moral judgment maturity is most properly defined by the postconventional level. It is time finally to discard this trichotomy so that a more valid understanding of moral judgment maturity can emerge. As I argue below, the so-called conventional level already entails moral judgment maturity. I suggest that the so-called postconventional or “principled” level should not be regarded as the exclusive repository of moral judgment maturity or even as a part of a standard stage sequence. On the other hand, philosophical reflection is helpful in the elucidation of one’s implicit normative ethics.

  The moral judgment maturity of at least some aspects of stages 3 and 4 was identified by Kohlberg (1984) himself. Interestingly, the contemporary version of stages 3 and 4 contains moral judgment designated by Kohlberg in the 1950s as stage 5 or 6, for example, the “principled-sounding” moral judgment of high school students who conceptualized “the moral value of life as taking precedence over obedience to laws or authority” (p. 447). During his longitudinal work in the 1960s, Kohlberg discovered a theoretical problem: subjects whose moral judgment was designated “postconventional” or “principled” in high school evidenced regression to stage 2 reasoning when they were reinterviewed during the college years. The regression involved approximately 20% of his sample, a major violation of the theory-based expectation of progressive stage sequence (Kohlberg & Kramer, 1969). Hence, Kohlberg reclassified such “principled-sounding” moral judgment as actually indicative of stages 3 and 4. Kohlberg (1984) thereby solved his theoretical problem (i.e., restored progressive stage sequence), but also created a new one: a contradiction between the principled-sounding moral ideality now included within stages 3 and 4 and the traditional designation of those stages as “conventional.” Specifically, how could a subject whose moral judgment represents an internalization of and conformity to “the rules and expectations of others, especially those of authorities” (quoted earlier), produce moral judgment conceptualizing “the moral value of life as taking precedence over obedience to laws or authority”?

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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 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).

  Kohlberg also intended for his theory to be applied to society, that is, to laws, roles, institutions, and general practices, rather than to personal, face-to-face relationships (Rest et al., 1999a). This type of macro-morality addresses relations between strangers, competitors, diverse ethnic groups, and religions, not just the micro-morality of family, friends, neighbors, and acquaintances. His is a psychologically-based theory of social justice—a society-wide system of cooperation among strangers, not only friends.

  Kohlberg theorized that people progress through the six stages in hierarchical linear fashion with no slipping backward. People are fully “in” one stage or another, and move up the staircase one step at a time.

  These hard stages based on a staircase metaphor have since been modified by a group of scholars known as Neo-Kohlbergians to reflect a softer model based on the concept of schematic thinking (Giammarco, 2016; Rest et al., 1999a). Schemas, which are expectations about the ways events usually unfold, are developed through previous interactions (Fiske & Taylor, 1984). ­People hold schemas for ethical problems that they use when making decisions about new dilemmas (Rest et al., 1999a). Schemas activate understandings from long-term memory to help people process new information; moral schemas are activated from long-term memory to help people understand and process information that arises from new ethical problems. That is, if a person has acquired the highest quality schema, it will be activated; otherwise, less developed schemas are used. In this model, people can reason using multiple stages at one time. They can regress and use lower stages at the same time they use the higher ones; however, generally, people will show more propensity to use the higher stages more often as they grow and develop.

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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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  Altruistic Emotion, Cognition, and Behavior

  • Nancy Eisenberg(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  As was mentioned previously, the most detailed and influential model of moral judgment is that of Kohlberg and his colleagues (e.g., Colby, Kohlberg, & Kauffman, in press; Kohlberg, 1969, 1976). Kohlberg has outlined a number of specific assertions regarding the nature of the development of moral judgment, and the characteristics of developmental stages. Because of the familiarity of Kohlberg’s model to all researchers and theorists in the area of moral development and the role it has played in this domain of study, our thinking will be compared with that of Kohlberg, Colby, and their colleagues. As will become clear, there are both important similarities and differences between Kohlberg’s and our assumptions.

  To conduct the proposed comparison, it is necessary to briefly outline both Kohlberg’s theory and his coding system. The latter is important because the manner in which moral reasoning is measured has a direct effect on the degree to which some theoretical assertions are supported. Moreover, differences in the ways in which Kohlberg and we have assessed moral reasoning have resulted in somewhat disparate views concerning the development of moral reasoning.

  KOHLBERG’S CONCEPTUAL MODEL

  Assertions

  In Kohlberg and his colleagues’ view, moral judgments are interpreted as the individual’s perceptions of moral reality. Thus, individuals’ thinking about moral questions and their interpretation of moral issues are perceived as important determinants of moral conduct (Colby et al., in press).

  An important distinction in Kohlberg’s theory is between content of moral judgment (specific moral beliefs or opinions) and structure of reasoning (the general organizing principles or patterns of thought). Kohlberg has focused primarily on structure because it is the structure, not the content, that is believed to exhibit developmental regularity and generalizability within and across individuals. Moreover, the meaning of an individual’s moral beliefs is viewed as dependent on an understanding of the individual’s general moral view or conceptual framework (Colby et al., in press). According to this model, people construct meaning as a result of the process of dealing with various situations; however, the individual’s meaning structure is limited by his or her current developmental level of structure, as well as the individual’s prior history.

  Kohlberg has differentiated between what he labels as hard structural and soft structural stage models. As discussed in Chapter 2 , the criteria for hard stages (borrowed from Piaget) are as follows:

  1. Stages imply a distinction of qualitative difference in structures (modes of thinking) that still serve the same basic function (for example, intelligence) at various points in development.

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  Theories of Development

  Concepts and Applications

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

    (Publisher)

  why the subject thinks Heinz should or should not have stolen the drug. The interview schedule then asks new questions that help us understand the child’s reasoning. For example, children are asked if Heinz had a right to steal the drug, if he was violating the druggist’s rights, and what sentence the judge should give him once he was caught. Once again, the main concern is with the reasoning behind the answers. The interview then goes on to give more dilemmas in order to get a good sampling of a subject’s moral thinking.

  Once Kohlberg had classified the various responses into stages, he wanted to know whether his classification was reliable . In particular, he wanted to know if others would score the protocols in the same way. Other judges independently scored a sample of responses, and he calculated the degree to which all raters agreed. This procedure is called interrater reliability . Kohlberg found these agreements to be high, as he did in his subsequent work, but whenever investigators use Kohlberg’s interview, they should also check for interrater reliability before scoring the entire sample.2

  KOHLBERG’S SIX STAGES

  Level I. Preconventional Morality

  Stage 1. Obedience and Punishment Orientation.

  Kohlberg’s stage 1 is similar to Piaget’s first stage of moral thought. The child assumes that powerful authorities hand down a fixed set of rules that she must unques-tioningly obey. To the Heinz dilemma, the child typically says that Heinz was wrong to steal the drug because “it’s against the law” or “it’s bad to steal,” as if this were all there were to it. When asked to elaborate, the child usually responds in terms of the consequences involved, explaining that stealing is bad “because you’ll get punished” (Kohlberg, 1958b).

  Although the vast majority of children at stage 1 oppose Heinz’s theft, it is still possible for a child to support the action and still employ stage 1 reasoning. A child might say, “Heinz can steal it because he asked first and it’s not like he stole something big; he won’t get punished” (see Rest, 1973). Even though the child agrees with Heinz’s action, the reasoning is still stage 1; the concern is with what authorities permit and punish.

  Kohlberg calls stage 1 thinking preconventional

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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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