Table Of ContentESSAYS ON MORAL DEVELOPMENT
Volume II
The Psychology of
Moral Development —
The Nature and Validity of Moral Stages
AA
LAWRENCE KOHLBERG
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ESSAYS ON MORAL DEVELOPMENT. VOLUME II. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MORAL DEVELOP-
MENT. Copyright © 1984 by Lawrence Kohlberg. All rights reserved. Printed
in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or repro-
duced 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
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Kohlberg, Lawrence, 1927-
‘THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MORAL DEVELOPMENT.
(Fssays on moral development ; v. 2)
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Moral development. 2. Developmental-psychology.
I.Vitle. 1. Series: Kohlberg, Lawrence, 1927-
Fssays on moral development ; v. 2.
BF723.M54K62 vol. 2) 155.2s [155.2] 83-47726
ISBN 0-06-064716-2
84 85 86 87 88 10987654321
Contents
Acknowledgments V1
Preface to Essays on Moral Development xe
Introduction xXU1
Part One. Moral Development Theory
l. Stage and Sequence: The Cognitive-Developmental
Approach to Socialization
2. Moral Stages and Moralization: The Cognitive-
Developmental Approach 170
Part Two. Moral Stages: A Current Statement and
Response to Critics 207
The Current Formulation of the Theory
with Charles Levine and Alexandra Hewer 212
Synopses and Detailed Replies to Critics
with Charles Levine and Alexandra Hewer 320
Part Three. Empirical Methods and Results 387
5. The Meaning and Measurement of Moral Judgment 395
6. Continuities and Discontinuities in Childhood and
Adult Development Revisited—Again
with Ann Higgins 426
The Relationship of Moral Judgment to Moral
Action
with Daniel Candee 498
Cultural Universality of Moral Judgment Stages:
A Longitudinal Study in Turkey
with Mordecai Nisan 582
ra CONTENTS
9. Cultural Universality of Moral Judgment Stages:
A Longitudinal Study in Israel
with John Snarey and Joseph Revmer 594
Appendixes
A. The Six Stages of Justice Judgment 62]
B. The Nine Hypothetical Dilemmas 640
C. From Substages to Moral Types: Heteronomous and
Autonomous Morality, with Ann Higgins,’ Mark
Tappan, and Dawn Schrader 652
References 684
Bibliography of Writings by Lawrence Kohlberg 710
Index 717
Acknowledgments
BECAUSE this book represents a line of work that started with my
dissertation proposal in 1955, I would like to acknowledge my Uni-
versity of Chicago mentors and dissertation committee, Helen
Koch, Anselm Strauss, and William Stephenson. Helen Koch, now
dead, was an extraordinary mentor, and any mentorship | have
been able to offer students has come from her example. Anselm
Strauss, a sociologist, is perhaps the first American scholar to at-
tempt to integrate the structuralist theory of Piaget with the sym-
bolic interactionism of George Herbert Mead, a recurring theme of
this volume. ‘The latest scholar to attempt this task, Jiirgen Haber-
mas, is someone to whom I am also deeply intellectually indebted, as
Part Iwo of this volume indicates. Unusual among writers about
dialogue, now a trendy topic, Jtirgen actually has a capacity to en-
gage deeply in intellectual dialogue, a capacity from which I have
greatly benefited. I have had an opportunity to acknowledge my
indebtedness to Will Stephenson, still brillant and prolific in his
writing in his eighties, in another place (Kohlberg 1970). I would
like to also acknowledge my lifelong friendship with Jack Gewirtz,
who introduced me to the actual doing of child psychology research
and who invented the experimental social learning paradigm as a
young teacher at Chicago in the fifties. While I chose Anselm
Strauss’s paradigm rather than Jack’s, our lifelong dialogue about
the relation of communication across paradigms continues. It 1s dif-
ficult to imagine that this book could have been written by anyone
who did not intellectually grow up at Chicago where, as an under-
graduate with teachers like Henry Sams (Kohlberg, 1973e) and
Alan Gerwith, I learned something of the great moral tradition
from Aristotle to Kant, Mill and Dewey and its expression both in
philosophy and literature. As a psychology graduate student, I had
the good fortune to learn clinical theory and practice from Bruno
Bettelheim, Carl Rogers, Bill Henry, and Sam Beck; philosophy
from Charles Morris; and adult human development from Bernice
Neugarten and Bob Havighurst.
Having acknowledged what I have learned from my former
teachers, I also want to acknowledge what I have learned from my
V/201 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
former students. Their work continually appears in this volume, the
work of Jim Rest, Dick Kramer, Mordecai Nisan, Dick Krebs, and
Moshe Blatt at Chicago; Eliot Turiel and Jim Fishkin at Yale; and
Bob Selman, John Broughton, Dwight Boyd, Bob Kegan, Bill Puka,
Peter Scharf, Joe Reimer, Al Erdynast, Betsy Speicher, Sally Pow-
ers, Laura Rogers, Alexandra Hewer, Dan Hart, John Snarey, Rich
Shulik, and Clark Power at Harvard. All have long since ceased to
be students and have become intellectual colleagues and friends
from whom I continue to learn. All have gracefully helped me to
make the stormy transition from mentor to colleague and friend
less stormy and more rewarding than I could have imagined as pos-
sible. Among my current students at Harvard, Mark Tappan, Dawn
Schrader, Cheryl Armon, and Bob Ryncarz have contributed to the
book and to the ongoing life of the Center of Moral Education.
Among working colleagues, Anne Colby, Ann Higgins, Dan Can-
dee, John Gibbs, Marc Liberman, and Chuck Levine have been
central to this book and to Harvard’s Center for Moral Education.
Anne Colby (Colby et al., 1983, 1984) is lead author of the technical
book and monograph on the longitudinal measurement of moral
stages to which these theoretical essays are parallel. Without Anne’s
leadership and work on the ten-year project, it could not have been
successfully completed. Her deep friendship continues to mean
much to me. Her career in developmental psychology has continued
to progress as Director of the Henry Murray Center for the Study
of Lives at Radcliffe College. Her current work reminds me of my
intellectual indebtedness to Henry Murray, the grandfather of all
our work in personality development.
Dan Candee has been a friend who has kept alive the study of the
relation of moral stages to moral action of which the chapter in this
book is just one report. John Gibbs appears in these pages as a
friendly critic, but was a second backbone to the longitudinal pro-
ject as well as the creator of a valuable measure of his own.
The devotion of a chapter in the book to a comparison of my
work with that of Jane Loevinger indicates the respect and col-
leagueship I feel toward her. While differing on many issues, I feel
with her (Loevinger, 1979) that there is an “invisible college’ of
developmentalists facing new assessment problems together, a ‘‘col-
lege’’ that includes not only Jane and myself but many of the people
already mentioned. Carol Gilligan is another psychologist whose ap-
proach is perhaps more divergent than Jane Loevinger’s from my
own, but whois also a member of this “‘invisible college,’ joining in
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix
discussion and debate about the frontiers of thinking about moral
development.
Ann Higgins has been central to the book both as chapter con-
tributor and overall editor of the book. More importantly, her com-
pany and support have been central to my life in the years this book
was written, as it will be in the years to come. In Volume I, I ac-
knowledged my mother’s encouragement of my writing since ado-
lescence. In this volume, I want to reaffirm this acknowledgment
even though she thinks my best writing 1s “Beds for Bananas,”
which I wrote at age nineteen (Kohlberg, 1949).
The theoretical work in these essays was largely made possible by
released time from teaching provided first by an N.I.M.H. career
scientist award from 1969 to 1974, and then by a Danforth Founda-
tion award from 1974 to 1980. I am deeply grateful to Gerri Bagby,
vice-president of the Danforth Foundation, for her advice, support,
and friendly role as “official needler”’ to get things in writing during
this period. I myself view writing as having a largely dialogic func-
tion. This book like its predecessor was written for my students, my
colleagues, and my friends, the people with whom one can carry on
a dialogue about an ongoing research program.
Imre Lakatos (1978), the historian and philosopher of science,
has had the sense to see that a scientific theory is not an axiomatic
hypothetical-deductive system but an evolving research program.
Critics like Phillips and Nicolayev (1978) have argued that my the-
ory 1s a “‘regressive’’ program, adding epicycles to epicycles like
Ptolmaic astronomy. Lapley and Serlin (1983) and Puka (1979) have
answered Philips and Nicolayev, claiming that my theory is a pro-
gressive program. The reader may judge, but at least can judge
based on the presentation of the evolution of the theory. When I
started the work reported in this volume, Piagetian structualism was
66out”’ in American psychology. When the earlier essays of this vol-
ume were written, structuralism was “‘in’’; now it is “‘out’’ again.
Research programs, however, do not, or should not, follow the fads
of American psychology, though serious critics deserve the courtesy
of a response, which I have tried to provide in this volume.
In this volume, I have not responded to much important and
informed criticism like that of Richard Peters, since criticism related
to moral education will be dealt with in the next volume. The next
volume will find a more eclectic ‘‘Kohlberg’s theory,’’ since as we
claim in the Preface moral education must not make the “‘psycholo-
gists’ fallacy’ of trying to derive educational practice from some
Xx ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
one psychological theory. It will also acknowledge another group of
important teachers, students, and colleagues whom I have not men-
tioned in this note.
In addition, I want to acknowledge the help of Carole Lee, who
not only was responsible for the typing of this book but has been the
mainstay of the Center for Moral Education in the years in which
most of this book was written.
Finally, | wish to express my appreciation to the men whose de-
velopment this book records, men who have cooperated every three
years for twenty-one years in another go at the Heinz dilemma.
Over the years they have become friends, not just research subjects.
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: The Nature
and Validity of Moral Stages
Volume III. Education and Moral Development: Moral Stages
and Practice
Each volume is intende-J to stand independently of the others, but
the flow of ideas and arguments logically suggests reading the vol-
umes 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, phi-
losophy (theology), 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 phi-
losophical theory of justice with (2) a psychological theory of the
process of moral development to produce (3) an educational the-
ory prescribing a reasonable practice of moral education in the
schools.
In thinking of the more general audience, I have viewed moral
education as of interest to more than a few specialists and graduate
students. The major required readings for my graduate course
(which these volumes supplement) are Plato’s Republic, Emile Durk-
heim’s Moral Education, Jean Piaget’s Moral Judgment of the Child,
and John Dewey’s Democracy and Education. These books on moral
education were not written for professional researchers or graduate
students but for literate people interested in the great questions of
x11 PREFACE
society. Although my writings enter into the realm of technical re-
search 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, | 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 psychologi-
cal, 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 psychologi-
cal stages of moral development goes back to my 1958 doctoral
dissertation. It took, however, twenty years of longitudinal study
to validate empirically the conception of the stages. This twenty-
year period was not simply a matter of collecting dilemma inter-
views 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 process just completed in the year of the first
volume’s publication. In addition to the longitudinal data them-
selves, Volume II reflects revisions of ideas in response to the dis-
cussions with my psychologist colleagues.
Volume III, on practice, represents the next set of ideas |
worked on. When I started my dissertation in moral psychology, |
was aware of a tradition of thought about moral education origi-
nating 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 writing in the early 1960s, I speculated on some
implications of moral stage development for education. In 1969, I
was galvanized into deeper reflection when to my surprise a gradu-
ate student, Moshe Blatt, engaged intermediate and high school
students in a semester of Socratic classroom dilemma discussions
and found that a third of the students, moved up a stage, in contrast
to control students, who remained unchanged (Volume III, Chapter
13). My first response to this evidence of stage change as a result of
Socratic teaching was a lecture (published as Chapter 2 in Volume I,
