Kohlberg's Theory of Moral Reasoning

Encyclopedia of Childhood and Adolescence, Apr 06, 2001 by Dianne K. Daeg de Mott

Kohlberg's emphasis on abstract reasoning also creates confusing results in which habitual juvenile delinquents can score at a higher stage of moral development than well-behaved children. Because behaviors are not considered and reasoning is determined through hypothetical situations, 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. Early criticisms of Kohlberg's lack of attention to behaviors led Kohlberg to add an emphasis on moral action to his Just Community educational program. For those who are looking for concrete help in developing moral values in children, however, Kohlberg's theory is still of little practical use.

Another strong criticism of Kohlberg's theory is that it devalues the morality of care and community. Carol Gilligan was the first to attack this aspect of Kohlberg's theory, relating it to gender differences between men and women (all of Kohlberg's original subjects were male, as was Kohlberg himself). Although Gilligan's critique has weaknesses of its own, her assessment of Kohlberg's theory as incomplete has many supporters, though others relate the absence of communitarian morality to class rather than gender differences.

Kohlberg, as a member of the educated, elite, white, male, Western culture, viewed individual autonomy and justice as the premier moral values. He even went so far as to equate morality with justice (ignoring other moral values such as courage, self-control, empathy, etc.). Members of the working and rural classes, however, tend to have a more communitarian approach to life, viewing the common good as the highest value, promoting care and harmonious relationships over individual justice. (Women, having been relegated to "lower class" status for centuries, may have developed a more communitarian approach to life for that reason, rather than simply because they are female.) Non-Western and tribal societies also frequently see the community as more important than the individual.

According to Kohlberg's upper-class Western view of moral reasoning, communitarian morality is doomed to rest forever at a lower stage of development (Stages 3 and 4). This view disregards the possibility that communitarian morality may be as advanced as individualistic morality, if not more so. It also places Western culture at the top of the scale, with little room for cross-cultural inclusion. Although Kohlberg insisted that his theory was culturally inclusive, he found little empirical evidence to back this up. In all of his interviews, only a few people showed Stage 5 reasoning, and nearly all were well-educated Westerners. Stage 6 reasoning was never substantiated in interviews; Kohlberg created it as an "ideal" and pointed to examples such as Gandhi to support its existence. After a tremendous amount of criticism over the fact that Stage 6 was purely hypothetical, Kohlberg removed it from the empirical stages but retained it as a "theoretical construct in the realm of philosophical speculation." Despite equally heavy criticism, Kohlberg refused to remove Stage 5 from his system.