MORAL DEVELOPMENT

Kohlberg developed his three major levels of morality and six specific stages of moral development on the basis of moral dilemmas. The heart of any moral dilemma is that it forces the individual to make a decision or choose a course of action that will have implications for other people. For this reason, some authors have argued that we cannot really call Kohlberg’s stages 1 and 2 moral stages, because children at those stages are still too self-centred to consider other people at all.

Many other criticisms have also been made of Kohlberg’s model. Some critics argue that to speak of moral development, one must have suitable criteria for measuring such development. But to the extent that Kohlberg’s criteria for judging the morality of any given line of reasoning are products of their time, they entail certain philosophical presuppositions. For example, someone living in Ancient Greece could scarcely have judged the morality of actions according to universal principles of human rights (Kohlberg’s stage 6), because in those times not all humans were regarded as having the same rights (for instance, women and slaves had no right to vote). Similarly, some time later, in places where Christianity became the predominant religion, social customs could still easily have conflicted with the norms decreed by God and the Church. Such conflicts would not have made moral judgments easy for people at Kohlberg’s stage 4!

Another criticism of Kohlberg is made by certain psychologists who believe that the positive and negative reinforcements that children receive at home have more influence on their moral development than any natural progression through moral stages such as Kohlberg proposes.

The methodology of Kohlberg’s studies has also been questioned in various respects. For example, just because someone says how he would act if faced with a particular moral dilemma does not necessarily mean that he would actually act that way. In other words, our actions are influenced by many other factors besides our moral judgment—factors such as social pressures, dependencies, and fears.

Yet another issue: there is some uncertainty as to whether any given child would be assessed as being at the same stage when interviewed by two different researchers on two different days.

And what about the differences between men and women? It is known that in resolving moral dilemmas, women tend to accord greater importance to interpersonal relations. But this tendency leads interviewers to assess women as being at earlier moral stages than men who base their judgments more explicitly on abstract concepts such as justice and fairness, which prevail at stage 5 or 6. Carol Gilligan was the first to point out that because Kohlberg derived his stages solely from interviews of males, these stages were highly likely to be biased in their favour. By listening to numerous women, Gilligan realized that in women, a “morality of care” quite often took the place of the morality of laws and justice that predominates among men and that Kohlberg embraced.

In fact, Gilligan found that in men as much as in women, moral judgments always seem to embody two imperatives: the imperative to treat others fairly (which is based on justice), and the imperative to help other people who are in need (which is based on caring). Gilligan’s work has had a considerable impact, by showing that paying attention to other people constitutes a fundamental component of our moral reasoning.

Other studies, conducted by Elliot Turiel and his colleagues, established a distinction between children’s development in the moral domain, on the one hand, and in the domains of social skills (such as adherence to social conventions) on the other. According to these researchers, children make this distinction naturally as they discover various forms of social experiences associated with these two kinds of social events. Social events with moral content are those that have a direct effect on other people’s well-being, such as hitting them or stealing from them. In contrast, events that depend on social conventions—for instance, whether a university student addresses a teacher as “Professor” or uses her first name instead—generally do not have any intrinsic effect on that person. Nevertheless, the fact that in a given social context, one of these forms of address is considered better than the other still shows that conventions play an important role in facilitating social relationships.

Turiel’s contribution to our understanding of moral development was to show that morality and social conventions follow two parallel pathways of development, rather than a single path, as Kohlberg had supposed. But because even the most trivial social event takes place within a broader social setting, every act of moral reasoning falls not only within the framework of certain conventions, but also within the broader framework of a particular cultural and historical context (see the first sidebar at the top of this page).