Kohlberg

• Morality


  Principles for how individuals ought to treat one another, with respect to justice, others' welfare, and rights
• Psychoanalytic theory of moral development

  • Moral development proceeds when selfish desires are repressed and replaced by the values of important socialising agents
• Behaviourist theory of moral development

  • Focuses on the power of external forces (reinforcement contingencies) to shape an individual's development
• Cognitive theory of moral development


  • To understand adult morality, Piaget believed that it was necessary to study how morality manifests in the child's world and the factors that contribute to the emergence of central moral concepts such as welfare, justice and rights
• Preconventional stage

  1. Punishment & Obedience - rules are kept to avoid punishment
  2. Instrumental-relativist Orientation - 'Right Behaviour is that which ultimately brings rewards to oneself
• Conventional Stage:

  1. Good boy - good girl orientation - 'Good' behaviour is what pleases others. Conformity to goodness
  2. Law and order orientation - Doing one's duty, obeying laws is important
• Post conventional stage:

  1. Social contract orientation - 'Right' is what is democratically agreed upon
  2. Universal principles orientation - Moral action is taken based upon self-chosen principles
• Aim: To show how, as young adolescents develop into young manhood, they move through the distinct levels and stages of moral development proposed by Kohlberg in his theory of moral development.
• Sample: 75 American boys who were aged 10-16 at the start of the study were followed at three-year intervals through to ages 22-28.
• Research design:

  Longitudinal study following the development of a group of boys for 12 years by presenting them with hypothetical, philosophical moral dilemmas
• Method


  1. Participants were presented with hypothetical moral dilemmas in the form of short stories to solve

  2. The stories were to determine each participant's stage of moral reasoning for each of 25 moral concepts/aspects
• Moral concepts/aspects assessed


  • Motive Given for Rule Obedience or Moral Action
  • The value of human life
• The value of human life

  • Aged 10: "Is it better to save the life of one important person or a lot of unimportant people?"
  • Aged 13, 16, 20 and 24: "Should the doctor 'mercy kill' a fatally ill woman requesting death because of her pain?"
• Young boys in Great Britain, Canada, Mexico and Turkey were tested in a similar way
• Moral reasoning stages


  • Participants demonstrated each stage
  • About 50% of each of the six stages a participant's thinking was at a single stage, regardless of the moral dilemma involved
  • Participants showed progress through the stages with increased age
• Not all participants progressed through all the stages and reached Stage-6
• Developmental sequence


  In an individual's moral development
• Each stage of moral development comes one at a time and always in the same order
• An individual may stop at any given stage and at any age
• Moral development


  Fits with Kohlberg's stage-pattern theory
• There is a cultural universality of sequence of stages
• Middle-class and working-class children


  Move through the same sequence but middle-class children move faster and further
• This 6-Stage theory of moral development is not significantly affected by widely ranging social, cultural or religious conditions
• The only thing that is affected is the rate at which individual's progress through the sequence