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Kohlberg and Moral Development

Lawrence Kohlberg (1927–1987) formulated the stage theory of six culturally universal stages of moral development in his 1958 University of Chicago dissertation. This was as an elaboration of Jean Piaget's (1896–1980) moral development study (1932). In his dissertation, Kohlberg extended Piaget's work based on insights from philosophers George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) and James Mark Baldwin (1861–1934).

Universal Stages

Kohlberg's account referred to children's engagement in increasingly complex interaction patterns, with three types of associated cognitive development: developing concepts of self, other, and society; a developing concept of justice in interaction; and a developing concept of the ideal self. The young child's self is constituted in interactions with others and develops as it becomes able to function adaptively in increasingly broad social contexts, from primary caregivers to peer groups, local communities, and intercommunity contexts. Children construct their understandings of self, other, and society and of justice in interactions as cognitive schemas representing these emerging interaction patterns.

These concepts develop through an invariant sequence of stages adapted for dyadic, interpersonal, social, intersocial, and cross-cultural interactions. Individuals construct moral ideals they learn from their interactions, especially from salient role models who work to measure up to their own ideals. Finally, a minority achieves a perspective of universal principles of justice and benevolence and a concept of the ideal self as modeled by leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) and Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948).

Kohlberg grouped the six stages into three pairs, which he called “pre-conventional,” “conventional,” and “post-conventional”—where conventional refers to the concrete moral standards of local communities on issues such as capital punishment and poverty. His moral judgment interview (MJI) is a clinical diagnostic instrument used in interaction with a trained interviewer to discern the dominant stage-level of a respondent's answers to a set of moral dilemmas. Kohlberg corroborated his initial findings about developing concepts of justice with minor modifications through three decades of longitudinal and other studies. During the 1970s, Kohlberg put the stage theory into practice in the democratic Just Community Schools, returning explicitly to the Chicago School pragmatism of Mead and John Dewey (1859–1952).

Kohlberg's Influence

Kohlberg's cognitive-developmental account of stages of justice reasoning achieved notoriety in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, as the country experienced a civil rights and voting rights movement, a “war on poverty,” a women's rights movement, and anti-Vietnam War protests. It was also attractive to Europeans as they continued to come to terms with the aftermath of World War II. Though Kohlberg and Harvard colleague John Rawls (1921–2002), with his Theory of Justice (1971), seemed to have much in common theoretically, Kohlberg formed a closer working relationship with Jürgen Habermas, an important German moral philosopher who discussed Kohlberg's theory at length in his own work,Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (1990).

The Association for Moral Education, which Kohlberg helped to establish, and which began in the mid-1970s as a group focused on his research program, continues as an international professional organization for new work in the field. Kohlberg trained and worked with many of the most influential figures in moral development research. Elliot Turiel developed the domains approach to social cognition. James Rest developed the defining issues test (DIT). Carol Gilligan set out a feminist critique of Kohlberg and Erik Erikson, which was widely discussed in the mid-1980s. Robert Selman combined insights from clinical and developmental psychology to form an account of the development of social awareness as a basis for educational practice.

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