Kohlberg, Lawrence: Moral Development Theory

Lawrence Kohlberg's interest in moral decision making began with strong questions about why the German citizenry did not protest Nazi atrocities committed against Jewish and other minority [Page 509]populations during the 1930s and 1940s. With colleagues at Harvard University, this inquiry later expanded to a body of research and theory on the broader realm of moral decision making, or individual perceptions of justice, responsibility, fairness, and right courses of actions. This work is most noted for conceptualizing moral decision making according to a series of developmental stages that evolve to varying degrees over the course of a lifetime.

Kohlberg's theory of moral development is consistent with both ego and cognitive psychology. With psychodynamic ego developmental psychologists (e.g., Jane Loevinger), Kohlberg shared the notion that the ego becomes more mature with age. With cognitive psychologists (e.g., Jean Piaget), his writings held that the structure of one's reasoning or thought processes is fairly consistent across situations. Thus, if one type of moral decision (e.g., whether to steal) is viewed in self-serving, instrumental ways, other decisions will be justified in a similar manner. Piaget and Kohlberg also asserted that these cognitive templates (of sorts) changed with the evolution of one's perspective-taking abilities. Piaget's work, however, focused upon children, whereas Kohlberg's developmental perspective extended across the life span. The development theorists mentioned above shared the following notions of stages of cognitive or ego development:

• 1.
  Development involves changes in cognitive structures or qualitative patterns of cognition. Structures also have been referred to as stages, levels, types, and so on; and they range in complexity from concrete (good or bad; black or white) to very complex reasoning patterns, where the decision maker may “walk around a situation,” seeing it from the perspective of others, trying to resolve it for the good of most individuals involved, or trying to understand what the decision would be absent any self-interest.
• 2.
  Development occurs through an invariant sequence of stages which is the same for all persons.
• 3.
  Development occurs along a continuum in which the structures become increasingly more differentiated and complex.
• 4.
  Stages are clustered wholes. The underlying logic used in forming perceptions and making choices, in other words, appears to be similar across situations. Although the subject of the actual choices may differ, the structure of the cognitive processes is the same across situations.
• 5.
  Stages are hierarchical integrations. Individuals comprehend all stages below their functional level of moral judgment.
• 6.
  Development can cease at any point along a continuum of stages. Therefore, individuals differ from one another according to the complexity of their reasoning, and theoretically, a cross-section of the population would show a distribution of persons at all stages.