Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Development

Kohlberg's stages of moral development is a theory of moral reasoning developed by the psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, building on and extending Jean Piaget's earlier account of how children's sense of morality develops through constructive stages. Kohlberg began the work as a graduate student at the University of Chicago in 1958 and continued to expand it throughout his life. The theory holds that moral reasoning, which Kohlberg treated as a necessary but not sufficient condition for ethical behavior, develops through six stages grouped into three broader levels, pre-conventional, conventional and post-conventional morality, with each stage more capable of responding to a moral dilemma than the one before it. Kohlberg studied moral reasoning using stories such as the Heinz dilemma, presenting subjects with a moral conflict and analyzing the form of the reasoning they used to justify their answer rather than the answer itself, classifying each response into one of the six stages. Where Piaget had studied moral development mainly in children, Kohlberg followed it much further into adulthood and argued that its central concern was justice, a claim that opened a continuing debate over the theory's philosophical implications. The theory has been challenged on several grounds: that it privileges justice over other moral values such as care, that the boundaries between its stages overlap enough that they function more like domains than a strict sequence, and that the reasons people give for their moral choices are often after-the-fact rationalizations of decisions already made intuitively. Despite these critiques the theory founded a new field of study within psychology, and Kohlberg himself ranked among the most frequently cited psychologists of the twentieth century. In education the stages are used to describe how a student's moral reasoning can be expected to develop over time and to interpret how a student justifies a decision, rather than to grade how moral a particular behavior is.