Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development

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, however, led him to emphasize the speculative nature of his seventh stage. ==Theoretical assumptions (philosophy)==

Kohlberg's stages of moral development are based on the assumption that humans are inherently communicative, capable of reason and possess a desire to understand others and the world around them. The stages of this model relate to the qualitative moral reasonings adopted by individuals and do not translate directly into praise or blame of any individual's actions or character. Arguing that his theory measures moral reasoning and not particular moral conclusions, Kohlberg insists that the form and structure of moral arguments is independent of the content of those arguments, a position he calls "formalism". Kohlberg's theory follows the notion that justice is the essential characteristic of moral reasoning. Justice itself relies heavily upon the notion of sound reasoning based on principles. Despite being a justice-centered theory of morality, Kohlberg considered it to be compatible with plausible formulations of deontology and eudaimonia. Kohlberg's theory understands values as a critical component of "the right". Whatever the right is, for Kohlberg, it must be universally valid among societies (a position known as "moral universalism"): there can be no relativism. Morals are not natural features of the world; they are prescriptive. Nevertheless, moral judgments can be evaluated in logical terms of truth and falsity. According to Kohlberg, someone progressing to a higher stage of moral reasoning cannot skip stages. For example, an individual cannot jump from being concerned mostly with peer judgments (stage three) to being a proponent of social contracts (stage five). On encountering a moral dilemma and finding their current level of moral reasoning unsatisfactory, an individual will look to the next level. Realizing the limitations of the current stage of thinking is the driving force behind moral development, as each progressive stage is more adequate than the last. The process is therefore considered to be constructive, as it is initiated by the conscious construction of the individual and is not in any meaningful sense a component of the individual's innate dispositions or a result of past inductions. Formal elements Progress through Kohlberg's stages happens due to the individual's increasing competence, psychologically and in balancing conflicting social-value claims. The process of resolving conflicting claims to reach an equilibrium is called "justice operation." Kohlberg identifies two of these justice operations: "equality," which involves impartial regard for persons, and "reciprocity", which means regard for the role of personal merit. For Kohlberg, the most adequate result of both operations is "reversibility," in which a moral or dutiful act within a particular situation is evaluated in terms of whether or not the act would be satisfactory even if particular persons were to switch roles within that situation, also known colloquially as "moral musical chairs". Knowledge and learning contribute to moral development. Specifically important are the individual's "view of persons" and their "social perspective level", each of which becomes more complex and mature with each advancing stage. The "view of persons" can be understood as the individual's grasp of the psychology of other persons; it may be pictured as a spectrum, with stage one having no view of other persons at all, and stage six being entirely socio-centric. The social perspective level involves the understanding of the social universe, differing from the view of persons in that it involves an appreciation of social norms. ==Examples of applied moral dilemmas==

Kohlberg established the Moral Judgement Interview in his original 1958 dissertation. During the roughly 45-minute tape recorded semi-structured interview, the interviewer uses moral dilemmas to determine which stage of moral reasoning a person uses. The dilemmas are fictional short stories that describe situations in which a person has to make a moral decision. The participant is asked a systemic series of open-ended questions, like what they think the right course of action is, as well as justifications as to why certain actions are right or wrong. The form and structure of these replies are scored and not the content; over a set of multiple moral dilemmas an overall score is derived. A dilemma that Kohlberg used in his original research was the druggist's dilemma: Heinz Steals the Drug In Europe. Other stories on moral dilemma that Kohlberg used in his research were about two young men trying to skip town, both steal money to leave town but the question then becomes whose crime was worse out of the two. A boy, Joe, saving up money for camp and must decide whether to use his money for camp or give it to his father who wants to use the money to go on a trip with his friends. And a story about Judy and Louise, two sisters, and whether Louise should tell their mother the truth about Judy telling a lie to their mother, that she didn't have money to spend on clothes because she went to a concert. ==Critiques==

Androcentrism A critique of Kohlberg's theory is that it emphasizes justice to the exclusion of other values and so may not adequately address the arguments of those who value other moral aspects of actions. Carol Gilligan, in her book In a Different Voice, has argued that Kohlberg's theory is excessively androcentric. 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. ==See also==