Lawrence Kholberg began popularizing and advancing his theory regarding the stages of moral development in the 1970s. As a developmental psychologist, Kholberg developed the moral development theory and advanced it through research at the Harvard’s Center for Moral Education. Kohlberg believed there were six stages of moral development that children go through while growing up and that the stages could be classified into three categories. He reckoned that the stages of moral development were in conformity with the popular Piaget’s stages of cognitive development. From his studies and tests on children and adults, he strongly believed that humans consecutively advanced from one stage to the other without skipping any stage or going back to a previous one. However, his work received a lot of criticism from other philosophers who not only critiqued the stages but also the theory itself. As such, the paper is aimed at providing a critical discourse of the stages and the theory in general.
The stages are divided into three levels; (1) The Premoral or Preconventional Level that includes punishment and obedience (Might Makes Right) and Instrumental Exchange (The Egoist). These stages are mainly focused on the individual’s self at the ages of between 10 to 13 years. Behavior in these stages is mainly motivated by the anticipation of pain or pleasure. (2) Conventional Morality Level. This includes interpersonal or tribal conformity (Good boy/Good Girl), Law and order or societal conformity (The Good Citizen), and The Cynic. These stages fundamentally focus on the significant others. The age under consideration in these stages is the start of middle school ending up in middle age. Additionally, individuals accept regulations and standards of the groups they belong to. (3) Principled or Postconventional Morality Level. It includes Social Contract and Prior Rights (the Philosopher or King) and Universal Ethical Principles (The Prophet or Messiah). The fundamental focus of these stages includes justice, the common good, and dignity for all forms of life. Also, according to Kohlberg, very few individuals reach these stages since most of them end up in middle age, (Barger, 2000).
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Kohlberg's model only considers process and does not concern itself with the fundamental contents of reasoning. As such this brings about the bias that favors only values of liberal worldviews while ignoring the conservative worldviews. However, studies carried out by James Rest at the University of Minnesota revealed that there is a potential inclusion of both liberal and conservative worldviews in Kohlberg's model. Furthermore, Carol Gilligan also raised a number of concerns regarding the model. She purported that Kholberg’s model stratified and socialized women differently from men. Moreover, the stages in the second level that focused on concern for the significant others prevented women from developing and achieving moral reasoning due to tenets such as nurturing and undertaking roles socially dictated to them.
Research conducted by an array of philosophers has proved futile in finding individuals who have attained the sixth stage of Kohlberg's model. This serves as a weakness in his theory as well as his moral developmental stages. Just as Kholberg earlier described the stages as hard, his sentiments later proved to be true in limiting his model for the fact that, as much as the stages are sequential, they are relatively separate from each other. To this effect, in a bid to remedy the weakness, James Rest in 1979 introduced a mixed stage model where all stages were interrelated within an individual’s repertoire (European Medical Alliance, 2016). Kohlberg's research that led to the development of the model was filled with anomalies owing to the long-term follow-up studies of his subjects. This is exposed as a particular weakness in his moral development model. Similarly, in an effort to remedy this weakness, Elliot Turiel developed the Domain theory which distinguished between the moral development of children and other domains of social knowledge, (European Medical Alliance, 2016).
Conclusion
The development and advancement of the six stages of moral development by Kohlberg was a fundamental thing in modeling the morality of individuals from childhood to maturity. His study and model has provided a fertile platform for further improvements of his theory and model by other philosophers such as Elliot Turiel and his Domain Theory. Credit to Kholberg’s pioneer theory, other critical models such as the Domain theory has been groundbreaking in the modern world especially in schools where moral issues such as cheating in exams are handled separately from conventional matters such as dress codes.
References
Barger, R., N. (2000). A Summary of Lawrence Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Development. The University of Notre Dame. Retrieved from http://www5.csudh.edu/dearhabermas/kohlberg01bk.htm
European Medical Alliance. (2016). Cognitive Therapy: Critiques of Kohlberg’s Stage Theory. European Medical Alliance. Retrieved from http://www.europeanmedical.info/cognitive-therapy/critiques-of-kohlbergs-stage-theory.html
