Table Of ContentESSAYS ON MORAL DEVELOPMENT
Volume I
The Philosophy of
Moral Development
Moral Stages and the Idea of Justice
MAR
LAWRENCE KOHLBERG
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181 7
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ESSAYS ON MORAL DEVELOPMENT. VOLUME I: THE PHILOSOPHY OF MORAL DEVELOPMENT.
Copyright © 1981 by Lawrence Kohlberg. All rights reserved. Printed in the United
States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied
in critical articles and reviews. For information address Harper & Row, Publishers,
Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022. Published simultaneously in Canada
by Fitzhenry & Whiteside, Limited, Toronto.
FIRST EDITION
Designed by fim Mennick
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publica tion Data
Kohlberg, Lawrence, 1927-
THE PHILOSOPHY OF MORAL DEVELOPMENT.
(Essays on moral development; v. |)
Includes bibliographies.
1. Moral development. 2. Justice (Philosophy) I. Title. II. Series: Kohlberg, Law-
rence, 1927- Essays on moral development; v. |.
BF723.M54K62 vol. 155.2’34s [155.2’34] 80-8902
ISBN 0-06-064760-4 AACR2
81 82 83 84 85 10 9 8 7 65 43 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vu
Preface to Essays on Moral Development
Introduction XXUIL
Part One. Moral Stages and the Aims of Education
1. Indoctrination Versus Relativity in Value Education
2. Education for Justice: A Modern Statement of the
Socratic View 29
Development as the Aim of Education: The Dewey View
with Rochelle Mayer 49
Part Two. Moral Stages and the Idea of Justice 97
From /s to Ought: How to Commit the Naturalistic
Fallacy and Get Away with It in the Study of Moral
Development 107
Justice as Reversibility: The Claim to Moral
Adequacy of a Highest Stage of Moral Judgment 190
Part Three. Moral Stages and Legal and Political Issues 227
The Future of Liberalism as the Dominant Ideology
of the Western World 231
Capital Punishment, Moral Development, and the
Constitution with Donald Elfenbein 243
Moral and Religious Education and the Public
Schools: A Developmental View 294
Part Four. Moral Stages and Problems Beyond Justice 307
Moral Development, Religious Thinking, and the
Question of a Seventh Stage with Clark Power 377
10. Moral Development and the Theory of Tragedy 373
Epilogue. Education for Justice: The Vocation of
Janusz Korczak 40]
Appendix. The Six Stages of Moral Judgment 409
References 413
Bibliography of Writings by Lawrence Kohlberg 423
Index 429
Acknowledgments
THESE EsSAys are the result of continuing dialogue in a very real intel-
lectual and moral community, Harvard’s Center for Moral Education.
I am very much in debt to each of its members. Ann Higgins and
Clark Power, members of the Center, edited this volume. Clark has
contributed not only through his insight into religious development but
through his presence as a fine and gentle spirit. Ann has contributed
not only through the clarity of her thought but through her sustaining
and cherished company during the years in which this volume has
evolved. Lastly, I would like to acknowledge the support of my moth-
er, who has encouraged my writing since adolescence and finally has a
book to see.
Some of these essays were written during the period 1970-1974,
when I was freed from some of my academic duties by a National
Institute of Mental Health Research Scientist award. The remainder
were written in the period 1974-1980, when the Danforth Foundation
supported my writing by releasing me from a portion of my teaching
load. I wish to express my appreciation to these agencies, and particu-
larly to Geraldine Bagby, Vice-President of the Danforth Foundation,
for their support.
Preface to Essays on Moral
Development
You ARE reading one of three volumes on moral development, as
follows:
Volume I. The Philosophy of Moral Development: Moral Stages
and the Idea of Justice
Volume II. The Psychology of Moral Development: Moral Stages
and the Life Cycle
Volume III. Education and Moral Development: Moral Stages and
Practice
Each volume is intended to stand independently of the others, but
the flow of ideas and arguments logically suggests reading the volumes
in the order listed.
Audience and Purpose of the Three Volumes
The three volumes are aimed at the same general audience and have
the same general purpose. In writing, I have partly had in mind a
special audience, the graduate students in psychology, philosophy (the-
ology), and education whom I teach and who attend a course called
“Moral Development and Moral Education.” I have also had in mind
a more general audience, all those potentially interested in a theory of
moral education that combines (1) a philosophical theory of justice
with (2) a psychological theory of the process of moral development to
produce (3) an educational theory prescribing a reasonable practice of
moral education in the schools.
In thinking of the more general audience, I have viewed moral edu-
cation as of interest to more than a few specialists and graduate stu-
dents. The major required readings for my graduate course (which
these volumes supplement) are Plato’s Republic, Emile Durkheim’s
Moral Education, Jean Piaget’s Moral Judgment of the Child, and
John Dewey’s Democracy and Education. These books on moral edu-
x ESSAYS ON MORAL DEVELOPMENT
cation were not written for professional researchers or graduate stu-
dents but for literate people interested in the great questions of society.
Although my writings enter into the realm of technical research more
than do these great books, and lack their grandeur of thought or style,
I have tried to write them in a way that would be understandable to
any literate person who might read these other books.
In writing and organizing these essays, I have also tried to keep in
mind the awareness these great writers had that moral education 1s
“interdisciplinary” and that it requires an integration of psychological,
philosophical, and sociological (or political) perspectives.
Order in the Writing of the Three Volumes
Volume II, on psychology, represents both my earliest thinking and
writing and my latest. The basic conception of six psychological stages
of moral development goes back to my 1958 doctoral dissertation. It
took, however, twenty years of longitudinal study to validate empiri-
cally the conception of the stages. This twenty-year period was not
simply a matter of collecting dilemma interviews from my original
subjects every three years. Rather, it was a period of revising and
refining the stage definitions and the method of assessing them, a pro-
cess just completed in the year of the first volume’s publication. In
addition to the longitudinal data themselves, Volume II reflects revi-
sions of ideas in response to the discussions with my psychologist
colleagues.
Volume III, on practice, represents the next set of ideas I worked
on. When I started my dissertation in moral psychology, I was aware
of a tradition of thought about moral education originating with Plato.
In the contemporary world, however, it seemed as if only optimistic
Sunday school educators and Boy Scout leaders thought or wrote
about moral education. In 1958, that stereotype was not far from the
mark. It was not until 1971 that an academically serious journal on
the topic was started, The Journal of Moral Education. In writings in
the early 1960s, I speculated on some implications of moral stage de-
velopment for education. In 1969, I was galvanized into deeper reflec-
tion when to my surprise a graduate student, Moshe Blatt, engaged
intermediate and high school students in a semester of Socratic class-
room dilemma discussions and found that a third of the students
moved up a Stage, in contrast to control students, who remained un-
PREFACE x1
changed (Volume III, Chapter 13). My first response to this evidence
of stage change as a result of Socratic teaching was a lecture (pub-
lished as Chapter 2 in Volume I, on philosophy) reasserting the ideas
of Socrates about teaching about the knowledge of the good. My sec-
ond response was to write a systematic treatise called “Moral Stages
as the Basis for Moral Education” (1971).
These early educational writings were done before I personally at-
tempted to engage in moral education, first in the Niantic prison in
Niantic, Connecticut, starting in 1971, and then in the Cluster School,
the alternative public high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
beginning in 1974. Both the preface to Volume III and the chapters
themselves make clear how my ideas about moral education changed
through my experience of educational practice.
Volume I, on philosophy presents essays written after my initial
psychological and educational writing. The prod to writing was pri-
marily educational. If an aim of education is stage growth, as I be-
lieve, then one must give a philosophic rationale for why a higher
stage is a better stage. “Later” does not automatically mean “better,”
or senescence and death would be best of all. My answer focused on
the idea of justice; later I became aware of moral philosophic issues
not answered by the idea of rational justice but dealt with profoundly
by literature and theology.
In summary, the volumes span a ten-year period of continual elabo-
ration and revision of ideas. I have not attempted to present a single
final statement, because my thinking and that of my colleagues are
changing and growing.
Order in the Reading of the Three Volumes
Although my writings started first as psychology, psychology should
not be our first concern as writers or readers about moral develop-
ment. The key chapter in Volume I, Chapter 4, “From /s to Ought,”
clearly indicates why some hard philosophic reflection on moral devel-
opment is required before beginning empirical psychological research
on the topic.
For this reason, I have placed Volume I, on moral, political, and
educational philosophy, before the volume on moral psychology and its
applications to education. The reader is likely to start with Meno’s
psychological question to Socrates (in Plato’s Meno): “Can you tell
xu ESSAYS ON MORAL DEVELOPMENT
me, Socrates, is virtue something that can be taught? Or does it come
by practice? Or is it neither teaching or practice but natural aptitude
or instinct?” For the psychologist, it is wiser not instantly to respond
with a favored theory of conditioning, instinct, or cognitive develop-
ment but to recognize the prior philosophic question and to reply, like
Socrates, “You must think I am singularly fortunate to know whether
virtue can be taught or how it is acquired. The fact is that far from
knowing whether it can be taught, I have no idea what virtue itself
is.”
Once the psychologist recognizes that the psychology of moral devel-
opment and learning cannot be discussed without addressing the
philosophic questions “What is virtue?” and “What is justice?” the
only path to be taken is that taken by Plato and Dewey, which ends
with the writing of a treatise describing moral development in a school
and society that to the philosopher seems just.
Although I initially approached moral development and education
as a research psychologist, I have attempted to avoid “the psycholo-
gist’s fallacy”: that what makes a theory good for assembling and or-
ganizing psychological research data is what makes it good for
defining the aims and methods of education. An example of this falla-
cy, in my opinion, is the belief that, because Skinner’s theory of oper-
ant conditioning—behavior modification—is good for accumulating
and ordering psychological data on animal and sometimes human
learning, it must therefore be a good theory for prescribing to teachers
the methods and aims of classroom learning.
Skinner’s theory commits the psychologist’s fallacy in so far as it
claims that because a psychologist can go “beyond freedom and digni-
ty” in the ideas ordering and interpreting research data on children’s
learning, the ideas of freedom and dignity are therefore not necessary
ideas for teachers and citizens engaged in moral education. This claim
of Skinner’s is examined in Chapter 3 of Volume I, “Development as
the Aim of Education.” In contrast, Rochelle Meyer and I claim that
concepts of justice, or of the right of each child or adult to liberty and
human dignity, are the starting point of psychological research and
educational practice rather than psychological hypotheses emerging
from quantitative research data.
In moral philosophy, the “psychologist’s fallacy” is called the “‘nat-
uralistic fallacy.” It is the fallacy that the philosophic question “Why
is some action really right or good?” can be directly answered by so-
