Kohlberg's Six Stages

[struggle4progress]

KOHLBERG'S STAGES OF MORAL DEVELOPMENT

Stage 1. Obedience and Punishment Orientation ... The child assumes that powerful authorities hand down a fixed set of rules which he or she must unquestioningly obey ...
Stage 2. Individualism and Exchange ... This is a notion of fair exchange or fair deals ...
Stage 3. Good Interpersonal Relationships ... They believe that people should live up to the expectations of the family and community and behave in "good" ways. Good behavior means having good motives and interpersonal feelings such as love, empathy, trust, and concern for others ...
Stage 4. Maintaining the Social Order ... Now the emphasis is on obeying laws, respecting authority, and performing one's duties so that the social order is maintained ...
Stage 5. Social Contract and Individual Rights ... a good society is best conceived as a social contract into which people freely enter to work toward the benefit of all ...
Stage 6: Universal Principles ... the principles of justice require us to treat the claims of all parties in an impartial manner, respecting the basic dignity, of all people as individuals. The principles of justice are therefore universal; they apply to all ...

http://faculty.plts.edu/gpence/html/kohlberg.htm

It is interesting to set a scheme like this beside (say) a religious-based ethical system. "I'll go to hell if I'm bad" seems to be Stage 1, "I'll go to heaven if I act properly" seems to be Stage 2, "My motives should be good" seems to be Stage 3, "I should follow the rules and respect authority" seems to be Stage 4, and so on

[patrice]

1. Great! to see this here! I really appreciate how Kohlberg's description parallels

Piaget's description of cognitive development. The point being that morality and ethics aren't something that is somehow supernaturally transmitted into our heads, but are one of the products of the ability to reason.

It's been a while since I taught this stuff, but one of the things I liked about Piaget and, hence, Kohlberg is its/their organic ground. Early on this got me to thinking about how something that we call "Good" is actually encoded into the physical world as an intrinsic part of that world and, ergo, human experience.

[zazen]

2. please remember "In a Different Voice" by Carol Gilligan (1982), which questioned these

because most of his work was done on male reasoning. Her work inaugurated a revolution in questioning developmental assumptions. She really questioned these stages and moving toward abstraction as the most "ethical," in that females reasoned in terms of balancing relational needs. .. and that that didn't necessarily make them less morally "mature."

[struggle4progress]

3. Thanks. It seems that Gilligan and Kohlberg take the view that "rule-following"

is not the highest moral level, with Gilligan aiming more at relational issues and Kohlberg aiming more at abstraction. In such a matter, I have no particular preference for Kohlberg: I merely want to ask whether modern notions of "stages of moral development" illuminate in any way various ethical ideas associated with some religions.

Do you have a link you like re: Gilligan?

[rug]

4. These should be required for GDP.

Especially Stage 1.