Lawrence Kohlberg

Heinz dilemma
1. In Europe, a woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to make. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman's husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $ 1,000 which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said: "No, I discovered the drug and I'm going to make money from it." So Heinz got desperate and broke into the man's store to steal the drug-for his wife. Should the husband have done that? (Kohlberg, 1963)."
2. Kohlberg was not interested so much in the answer to the question of whether Heinz was wrong or right, but in the reasoning for the participants decision. The responses were then classified into various stages of reasoning in his theory of moral development.
Stages
1. Stage one - Obedience and Punishment
  1. The child assumes that powerful authorities hand down a fixed set of rules which must be unquestioningly obeyed
  2. Child thinks - "It's against the law"
2. Stage 2 - Individualism and Exchange
  1. Children recognize that there is not just one right view that is handed down by authorities.
  2. Child thinks - "Since everything is relative each person is free to pursue their individual interests"
  3. "If you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours"
  4. Still no identification with the values of the family or community
3. Stage 3 - Interpersonal Relationships
  1. Children entering teens
  2. Believe that people should live up to the expectations of the family and community and behave in "good" ways.
  3. Child thinks - "His intentions were good and in the best interest of family or community"
  4. Conventional morality
4. Stage 4 - Maintaining Social Order
  1. Person concerned with society as a whole
  2. Emphasis is on obeying laws, respecting authority, and performing one's duties so that the social order is maintained.
  3. Subjects make moral decisions from the perspective of society as a whole, they think from a full-fledged member-of-society perspective.
  4. Person has a conception of the function of laws for society as a whole
5. Stage 5 - Social Contract and Individual Rights
  1. "What makes for a good society?"
  2. A good society is best conceived as a social contract into which people freely enter to work toward the benefit of all
  3. all rational people would agree on two points
    1. basic rights - liberty and life
    2. democratic procedures
  4. Persons talk about "morality" and "rights" that take some priority over particular laws
  5. People are thinking about what society ought to value
6. Stage 6 - Universal Principles
  1. Defines the principles by which we achieve justice.
  2. We can reach just decisions by looking at a situation through one another's eyes.
  3. few people recorded at this stage
  4. considered a theoretical stage by kohlberg
  5. A commitment to justice makes the rationale for civil disobedience stronger and broader.
Biographical Information
1. October 25, 1927 - January 19, 1987
2. Born in Bronxville, New York
  1. Wealthy family
  2. Attended renowned private high school - Phillips Acadamy
    1. Founded 1778
    2. Top 20 prep school in the U.S.
    3. $770 million endowment today - second largest prep school endowment
  3. Joined the Merchant Marines - served in Europe
    1. Volunteerted to smuggle Jewish refugees out of Europe into Palestine
    2. Captured and held in a detention center on Cyprus
    3. Rescued by Haganah, a Jewish fighting force
3. Enrolled at the University of Chicago in 1948 and graduated the same year
4. Earned his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1958
5. Subtopic 10
6. Assocuate professor of psychology at Yale 1959-61
7. Professor at University of Chicago '62 and Harvard University '68
8. American psychologist
9. Interested in child psychology
10. Close follow of Jean Piaget's theory of Cognitive development
11. Best Known for his theory of stages of moral development
12. According to Haggbloom, found to be the 30th most eminent psychologist of the 20th Centry
Publications
1. "A Cognitive-Developmental Analysis of Children's Sex-Role Concepts and Attitudes." In E. E. Maccoby ed., The Development of Sex Differences. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966.
2. The Psychology of Moral Development: The Nature and Validity of Moral Stages. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984.
3. Child Psychology and Childhood Education: A Cognitive Developmental View. New York: Longman, 1987.
"My own interest in morality and moral education arose in part as a response to the Holocaust, an event so enormous that it often fails to provoke a sense of injustice in many individuals and societies."
Cluster Schools
1. "Just Communities"
2. Created after visiting a kibbutz in Israel
  1. Notice how students in kibbutz were more developed morally
  2. Made him revisit his theory
3. Students use democracy to make all school decisions
4. Under the umbrella of the National Federation of Just Communities
Lawrence Kohlberg.jpg
Stage Theory of Moral Development
1. Was his dissertation in 1958
2. An adaptation of a Jean Piaget psychological theory
  1. Two stage theory of moral judgment - younger than 10 yrs old think one way and older think another
  2. Younger - rules are fixed/absolute; Older - more relavitistic, rules can be changed if everyone agrees
3. Interviewed children and adolescence
4. Six Stages embedded in the three levels - two stages per level
5. Every individual passes through each stage one at a time
6. Three Levels
  1. Pre-conventional
    1. Children's decisions are based on avoiding punishment and receiving rewards
    2. "egocentric point of view"
    3. Kohlberg calls stage 1 thinking "preconventional" because children do not yet speak as members of society
  2. Conventional
    1. Upholding the rules of society is the highest value
    2. "member-of-society" perspective
  3. Post-Conventional
    1. Individuals follow universal moral principles that may be more important than the rules of a particular country or group
    2. "prior-to-society" perspective
7. Children always go from stage 1 to stage 2 to stage 3 and so forth. They do not skip stages or move through them in mixed-up orders. Not all children necessarily reach the highest stages; they might lack intellectual stimulation. But to the extent they do go through the stages, they proceed in order.
Debate
1. Carol Gilligan
  1. Women's morality differs from men - Kohlberg's theory focuses primarily on men
  2. Devalues the morality of care and community
2. The use of hypothetical situations skews the results because it measures abstract rather than concrete reasoning
3. Children base their answers on rules of "right" and "wrong" they have learned from parents and teachers
4. Children who behave in immoral ways may be able to answer hypothetical moral dilemmas in a more advanced fashion than better-behaved children who think less abstractly
5. Does moral reasoning necessarily lead to moral behavior? Kohlberg's theory is concerned with moral thinking, but there is a big difference between knowing what we ought to do versus our actual actions.
6. Does Kohlberg's theory overemphasize Western philosophy? Individualistic cultures emphasize personal rights while collectivistic cultures stress the importance of society and community. Eastern cultures may have different moral outlooks that Kohlberg's theory does not account for.
Resources
1. http://social.jrank.org/pages/351/Kohlberg-Lawrence-1927-1987.html#ixzz0NGOsbsL5
2. http://psychology.about.com/od/developmentalpsychology/a/kohlberg.htm
3. http://faculty.plts.edu/gpence/html/kohlberg.htm
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg
5. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_g2602/is_0003/ai_2602000337/