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Moral Development
This entry analyzes moral development as a perennial philosophical view complemented by
modern empirical research programs. The two initial sections summarize what moral
development is and why it is important for ethics and human nature theory. The “Roots” section
notes historical versions of natural development in morality, touching on Confucius, Aristotle,
Rousseau and Rawls. The next four sections assess current empirical research in moral
psychology focusing on the cognitive-developmental approach of Piaget and Kohlberg and its
philosophical theory. In the “Critical Specifics” section, controversies are taken up in stage
theories of moral development focusing major rivalries in moral philosophy, critical and feminist
theory. “Caring’s Different Voice” focuses on conflicts between justice and benevolence ethics.
The “Pedagogical Implications” of moral cognition research are then summarized with a focus
on classroom practices. Finally, “Related Research” is surveyed on the roles of moral perception,
identity, empathy, convention/tradition, altruism and egoism, along with new moral-automaticity
notions in cognitive science.
1. What it is
Human nature is naturally good. At least it leans decidedly toward an awareness of the good, and
a preference for it, over evil and injustice. Despite appearances, human nature is inherently selfrealizing and self-perfecting, if in moral understanding and aspiration more than practice.
Morality grows in human beings spontaneously alongside physical limbs, basic mental and social
capacities. Both individually and in social interaction the human species evolves mature moral
conscience and character despite the many psychological and social impediments that slow or
de-rail the process for a time.
These are the basic tenets of moral development in its most vital, if naive historical form--a
dominant perspective in ancient ethics and traditional religion. By painting human nature in this
ultimately elevated and dignified posture, moral development visions grounded an ultimate hope
in human progress. They forecast the flowering of our species' most humane and admirable
potentials, leaving behind its troubled childhood.
Under critical scrutiny, moral development notions gradually surrendered their identification of
human psychology with virtue. But for German idealism, however, their credibility continued to
wane reaching a low ebb in the mid twentieth century when the "naturalness" of human morality
seemed hardest to square with the stunning inhumanity engulfing much of the world at war.
Scientifically, a continually strengthening fact-value distinction also placed “natural” and
“moral” on opposite sides of the fence causing the history of moral development and
perfectionist notions to seem mired in fallacy.
Only in the latter 19th century did moral development revive as a lively research field in social
science led by the cognitive-developmental approach of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg.
Newfound credibility for this effort was garnered by abandoning the traditional geneticist
position in moral development, which depicted even sophisticated moral reasoning as a
physiologically, age-determined phenomenon. For cognitive-developmentalists, instead, natural
development involves complex combinations of trial-and-error social interaction, guided only
indirectly by certain implastic similarities in human motivation and basic cross-cultural
institutions of social life. While these processes allow great variation in moral and quasi-moral
socialization, their interaction yields remarkably similar patterns of coping. Only certain
cognitive strategies seem capable of navigating basic social interaction successfully. Research
suggests that the cognitive competences fueling them and their ordering in a certain sequence are
practically unavoidable for functioning in human society. And these cognitive competences are
decidedly moral in key and holistic respects.
2. What it is for
In human nature theory (or axiology) moral development notions convey a sense of ourselves as
dynamic and progressive beings. It is normal for us to be ever-evolving and aspiring beyond
ourselves even beyond the maturity of adulthood. Being potentially perfect or self-realizing, we
inherit an august natural legacy to fulfill in our individual characters and through community,
which reveals our hidden but awesome inherent worth. On this view, we owe it to ourselves not
to sit still or languish in anything less than the full completion and perfection of all our potentials
and powers.
Morally speaking, making progress in this supremely elevated cause is less daunting than its
supreme end-point would suggest. We are naturally prone toward it after all. What we are
obliged to do is what comes most natural to us deep down. The physical and psychological laws
that govern our fundamental nature are all pulling for us, offering staunch and unremitting
supporting for our journey toward ideals. For ethical perfectionism, supporting by natural
development, the difficult "why be moral?" was airily brushed aside in the answer, “Because it's
who we are, because it’s self-fulfilling, because it is what we are meant to be.”
But such answers raise powerful questions. If we are so ideal deep down, why are we such
disappointments everywhere else? Why do we fall so characteristically short in our characters
and communities, showing all manner of vice and corruption, and making a cruel and violent
mess of our world?
The typical response to such telling observations comes packaged in "alienation theory." Either
the outside world corrupts us—a world we can not well control. Or the inside world corrupts us.
The human part of our aspiration comes freighted with, and mired in, the lustful, grasping,
animal portion of our heritage, a portion not only difficult to control but bent on running us
morally out of control. Or most ironic, we corrupt ourselves, conspiring unwittingly with these
other corrupting influences due to the imperfect state and function of our all-too-slowly
developing capacities. Our aspiring saint within is dogged not only by demons without and
within, but by the natural imperfection of time needed. For most of its course development
provides us only formative tools for dealing with hostilities that greet us full-formed from the
start, always at the top of their game. Our ongoing inadequacies entrench themselves as habits in
personality and as social institutions guiding socialization, making our already thorny path
thornier still by our own misguided hand.
The alienation gambit loses perfectionist ethics its edge over competitors, sharing their
disadvantages. Perfectionist principles must engage in just as much pleading and haranguing to
have us walk the straight and narrow path against the stiff wind of temptation. Our development
task takes on dual roles in this struggle. Building character requires clearing away the
impediments to self-discipline and social righteousness. We must fight mental distractions,
motivational lusts, prejudices, false ideologies, the myriad lures of false appearance and
materialist obsession. With these temptations somewhat in hand, we must shine brightly forth
from our natural core, "polishing our mirrors" so that unfolding capacities rise to their full level
of flourishing. This pro-active urging of our spontaneous development is natural as well. Faced
with the prospect of such awesome self-realization we can not just sit idly by, watching it take its
natural pace, but instead offer a boost.
3. Roots
In ancient philosophies, moral development was normally conceived "teleologically." This
means defining the inherent reality or essence of a moral phenomenon by the valuable function
or purpose it ultimately serves. Teleology is a strong version of functionalism—x is what x does
(well).
Confucian traditions attributed "four beginnings" to human personality, which naturally unfolded
into defining human virtues. These were reason (which becomes moral understanding) affiliation
or fellow-feeling (which transmutes into compassion), resentment (which yields a sense of
justice) and feelings of guilt and shame (which become moral regret at having done wrong).
Moving from initial inner drives to polished virtues in such a direct way stretches plausibility. It
leaves mysterious how such socially subtle and adept abilities spring forth from such
psychologically isolated and internal roots, despite all the other influences apparently at play.
This contrasts with the Confucian view of how ritual institutions in society guide the careful
crafting of artful behaviors.
Aristotle also focuses on habituation regarding ethical virtues. But strands of natural growth and
moral evolution are embedded throughout his depiction of human flourishing. For him, ethical
happiness or flourishing is the fulfillment of our natural human function. The "Aristotelean
Principle" of cognitive motivation is one such strand, moving us to prefer more complex to less
complex activities. This pulls us toward greater challenges and resulting cognitive growth in
dealing with them over time. The development of the intellectual virtues is largely a process of
natural growth toward natural function. And some of these (logos and sophrosune especially)
play necessary roles in the proper expression of ethical virtues.
Aristotle's approach was more plausible because its natural growth only provided tools and
tendencies for able behavior. No assumption need be made that human nature is distinctly moral.
With these general abilities and sensibilities in place, social experience could pick up the
developing story, shaping norm-compliant traits along and behaviors. An apparent psychological
principle toward moderation leaned this process norm-compliance farther toward moral norms
since many distinctly moral virtues arise at the mean between and under- and overflow of nonmoral motivation.
In general, the more indirect and morally non-distinctive the view, the more plausible it depicts
moral development. Developmental views of morality themselves make such an advance on
earlier innatist viewpoints that locate full-blown moral insight and virtue in our souls from birth.
Such views cannot explain the anomaly of moral wisdom amidst the naiveté of all other
childhood beliefs, nor the failure of this wisdom to actually show itself. Likewise, direct moral
development views cannot explain evolution's highly distinctive selection of such a complexly
civilized and culturally mediated form of social reasoning and cooperation. Nor can they explain
why peculiarly institutionalized social experience seems necessary to attain full natural
edification and character.
In general, also, the logic of moral development history tells us more than its authorship,
suggesting strategies for the philosophical progress on the concept. Our "inherent goodness" is
best viewed as akin to genetic instructions for seeking social competence, and competence in a
general sense. The basic instruction is to unpack and upgrade personality potencies as suits
whichever environments will welcome their designs. Some parts of the social environment will
welcome the combined expression of cognitive and social talents that enable cooperation. Some
combination will be practically geared, some geared more to prudent reciprocity and mutual
expectation in kind. Those that are mutually beneficial across these dimensions will progress, in
a general sense of beneficial or valuable. Some will function to produce norms, and
institutionalize them—norms of various sorts.
As social organization and practice moves toward beneficial divisions of labor, some norms will
engender bind with traditions, other generate laws and legal systems, and some foster moral
tenets of mutual fairness and respect, mutual reliance and aid. Again, each norm system endures
primarily because of its respective benefits such as sense of social continuity, belonging,
meaning, or worth. Our cognitive and social capacities will help shape these distinct practices
and tailor their functions to them. Those that take moral shape thereby realize our inherent moral
nature.
To the degree this process is unavoidable in the moral realm, and progresses in an unavoidable
manner, it is natural. Yet its distinctive moral nature arises naturally, for the most part, as the
fruition of its basically non-moral or morally undifferentiated path. On this indirect view, it is not
that uprightness simply works in the world, as our limbs do. It is that general competencies
differentiate and partner, adapting to and helping shape differentiated social environments, some
of which take a moral shape and demand moral functions from them. This explains why moral
tendencies would be attractive to biological selection and evolution—why our "survivalist"
human psycho-biology would turn toward admirable sociality along a progressive, ageappropriate time line.
The perfectionist legacy found in writers as diverse as Augustine and Nietzche carried this
indirect approach forward, more and less. Perfectionist principles urged us to develop a range of
non-moral traits, serving certain individual needs and interpersonal problem-solving functions.
When practiced, polished, and performed artfully together, within an artfully organized social
system, these rise to the level of virtues and find their moral niche.
With the decline of teleological metaphysics and axiology, the "natural development" of morality
assumed a more purely functionalist form. (Development was not pulled by a potential telos or
end-point; rather it foreshadows that end-point by able handling the means to it.) Arguable, this
requires that moral development be reconceived as a distributed property, crossing various
domains. One might be a perfectionist ethic, a second, the functional psychology on which it
rides, and, third, the adaptive needs each serves for the individual and society (Puka 1980). In
such combination, moral development becomes a naturally motivated striving to fulfill those
prescriptions that bid us nurture and express certain virtues. These are the virtues that, in turn,
produce an effective personality and excellent overall character while fostering a thriving,
progressive society.
To avoid circularity, such naturalistic views strained historically to distinguish between
descriptively and normatively "natural" psychological processes—between normal and adaptive,
that is. They strained further to distinguish “adaptive” from “morally apt or desirable.” And their
perfectionist ethical component strained hardest to represent the transitions from minimal moral
ability to high moral excellence as a smooth and homogeneous continuum. This is a stretch
because excellence by its admirable nature seems extraordinary, not “natural;” it requires special
efforts, not mere formative growth, to attain.
Where such straining fails, the logic of moral development falls into various fallacies, seeming to
build moral norms into social and psychological ones by fiat, then trying to pass the attempt off
as descriptive or factual. Efforts to avoid this outcome are worthwhile because of the valuable
function moral development serves in ethics.
Any morality faces so-called strains of commitment. At base, these are strains on motivational
rationality. The ultimate logical question, "Why be moral" has real-world versions: why act as I
am told I should when it conflicts with what I want—with what motivates me? why struggle
toward a life of integrity, when the childhood propensity to duck and weave promises an easier
path to a fun-filled life? This question raises the prospect that being intellectually moral is
motivationally unnatural or irrational, or even pathological. What suits our reason likely doesn't
suit our full range of motivations (some stronger than reason) that reason, to be reasonable,
should take into account. As noted, the most powerful psychological answer is this. “Because
doing right is what is in fact most fulfilling overall: w are spontaneously drawn to it at all levels
of need, desire and interest, the more so as we grow. Moral integrity produces greater self-esteem
and personal satisfaction than material acquisition and social status. Thus morally we need
follow our ever-increasing propensities to do what we should, exerting that little extra to bolster
and stretch those propensities. The extra effort pays tenfold in making us more of what we are at
our best.”
In these respects, moral development is to ethical perfectionism what psychological egoism is to
ethical egoism. It renders excellent character and virtue natural, relatively easy to achieve,
fulfilling, and therefore motivationally rational. Immorality does not seem so naturally desirable
to us here that it must be forbidden. Instead, it presents merely tepid attraction, notable
debilitation, and therefore, an undesirable cast overall. Natural development in morality,
however, can serve any type of ethic, perfectionist or otherwise, providing the needed
psychological resources for fulfilling whatever obligations and pursuits it recommends.
Unfortunately, neither ancient teleological views of moral development nor their functionalist
successors detailed the presumed processes of psycho-moral evolution. Nor did they clarify the
relation of nature to nurture involved. This pointed to the need for copious empirical
investigation.
Recent philosophical history gave a rare nod to moral development through Rawls's (1972) A
Theory of Justice. Like Kant before him, Rawls paid homage to Rousseau’s vision of moral
cooperation. Such cooperation is nature’s way of humanizing and civilizing the human race, not
merely of institutionalizing humanity’s civilizing intent to stabilize and protect it. But we see in
Rawls’s hands the degree to which supporting ethical prescriptions with psychological
proclivities has retreated under threats from the naturalistic fallacy, and other category mistakes.
Rawls recognizes only the logical requirement that just social institutions remain compatible
with the facts of human psychology and its development so that socializing each successive
generation in justice institutions will be a feasible enterprise, assuring compliance. He does not
turn to moral development for moral support, grounding value prescriptions on its facts.
Rawls relied on a pre-scientific account of moral development (Rousseau's Emile), when an
entire field of social science provided an empirically-based alternative. (This field was centered
just a short stroll from Rawls’s Harvard office). We see here philosophy’s reluctance to rest
enduring theory on the current state of empirical research programs. (Quine paid the price of
resting the epistemology of Word and Object too heavily on the Skinnerian psychology of
operant conditioning.) But we also see the skepticism and controversy that marks the research
field of moral development and its guiding light, Lawrence Kohlberg. Philosophy gratefully
accepted the flattering role of guide in the design of Kohlberg’s research design and the
interpretation of data. But Kohlberg’s presumptive preferences for one rival philosophy over all
others smacked of ideological partisanship. It raised philosophical hackles as well when
Kantianism was provided empirical validation, while Utilitarianism, intuitionist virtue theory and
the like were disconfirmed. Had evolution really selected Kant’s categorical imperative as our
racial destiny? The title of Kohlberg’s first ethics monograph did nothing to mollify
philosophical ire: "From Is to Ought: How To Commit the Naturalistic Fallacy in the Study of
Moral Development and Get Away With It."
4. Empirical Philosophy (Cognitive-Developmentalism)
In contemporary terms, "moral development" is a research specialty of cognitive and
developmental psychology, with associated research in anthropology, cognitive science, social
and political psychology, law and education. A strong research partnership with moral theorists
has marked this field's development from the outset. Researchers trace evolving systems of
competence in interpreting, judging, and reasoning out moral problems. These cognitive systems
incorporate empathic and social role-taking abilities that promote interpersonal negotiation,
relation, and community (Selman vol. 2, Hoffman vol. 5, 7) [(References with volume numbers
in the text refer to the series Moral Development: A Compendium)].
But they do not cover as much of personality, sociality, or character as the original teleological
notions of human nature. Attempts to find anything like natural development in such breadth of
human psychology and personality were empirically unsuccessful.
Empirical research that relies so heavily on leading philosophical conceptions, distinctions and
methods of analysis cannot help but interest philosophers. Its results are highly relevant to
philosophical debates, suggesting important roles for philosophy in scientific practice. The
Piagetian definition of moral development's domain distinguishes fruitfully between morality,
morals, ethics (as in professional codes), cultural ethos, and Ethics (as "worthy living.").
Normative reasoning and reflective meta-cognition is also carefully distinguished within
commonsense cognition itself. Research focuses on phenomena that have enough internal
stability and cohesiveness to be said to develop--to undergo change while retaining identity and
to evolve inherent, of their own accord. (This contrasts with being shaped externally, in ways
that supplant an earlier version with a somewhat similar successor over time.) Great care is taken
as well to demonstrate that the moral quality of observed phenomena are improving, not simply
the functional sophistication of the psychological structure in which it is embedded (Kohlberg
1981).
Normative moral theory helps design the main research tools in moral development (the posing
of research dilemmas and interpretation of findings). Moral-philosophical concepts are used to
define empirical coding (identification) and scoring (rating) categories by issue, judgment,
rationale or principle. The success of these categories suggests that the structural adequacy of
moral theory derives in part from the functionality of its logic in common sense and practice.
This renders those theoretical accounts of ethics that rise from "considered moral judgments"
more than armchair credibility. It suggests, moreover, that difficulties faced in applying moral
principles to socio-moral issues are worth the effort, and should turn out surmountable with
effort. Paths have been chartered from moral judgment to theory that should be traversable in
reverse direction.
Obviously, general moral principles and their logical prescriptivity indicate little in themselves
about the feasibility of an ethic. Thus the philosopher must welcome any empirical account that
renders reasoning a motivating and practically effective force. Moral developmentalists detail a
variety of ways that conceptual competence itself motivates principled choice and action, while
also partnering with moral emotions. Uncovering empirical evidence of a distinct competencemotivation principle is a great boon to theories of practical reason and intention generally, given
how central conceptualization is to human competence and adaptivity. Showing a close
affiliation between reasons and emotions, competence motivation and interest principles (the
pleasure principle, law of effect or reinforcement) further bolsters the case.
But the philosophical bounty from moral development goes farther. A zeal for distinguishing
facts from value judgments had driven modern psychology to explain morality away. Taking
crudely reductionist stands, behaviorists portrayed morality as outward conformity to the
prevailing ethos of one's social environment. Freudians, in turn, depicted morality as a
combination of irrational forces born of biological drives, coupled with ego-defensive coping in
the face of social threats and presses. These portrayals not only create a disjunct between moral
philosophy and the psychology its views must ride on in practice, but between moral theory and
social science generally.
Cognitive developmentalism restored the role of reason and discriminating emotion in moral
choice. It provided a central role for self-determination and distinctly moral autonomy to boot.
Cognitive research traces the detailed psychological processes by which children unconsciously,
yet self-constructively recreate their own systems of thought and self. In so doing they resist the
coercion of inherited and socialized influences enough to gain control over their thinking—to in
fact use these forces as raw materials for structuring their thought. Tracing these processes
provides empirical evidence of the deep, two-level sort of self-determination on which even the
most rationalist and autonomy-focused philosophical ethics of Kantianism can stand.
Psychology's more realistic and blended notion of "cognition" also suggests ways to overcome
philosophy’s own pre-empirical divide between rationalism and emotivism or related
voluntarism and determinism.
Further research on meta-cognition indicates that even common sense reasoning distinguishes
between interested values, moral conventions, and autonomous morality. It depicts the former as
merely interested and conventional, as morally arbitrary and relative, akin to tastes and fads. The
latter, by contrast, it requires to invoke reasoned support and validating evidence (Turiel vol. 2,
4). Commonsense reasoning goes further in attributing distinctly moral responsibility to people
for the self-determined choices and autonomous self-expressions they make (Blasi 2004 ).
While ancient philosophical views placed our psyches in the driver's seat of "natural
development," they also provided the environment a guiding role. On this adaptation model
social environment not only “watered” our inner growth, but provided the channels through
which it unfolded properly. Unless society and nature stayed within the “normal,” “civil,” or
even welcoming range, our personal growth and character would become stunted. With a modern
psychology divided into environmentalists or geneticists on development, a cognitivist revival of
the social-interactionist, moral adaptivity perspective was a crucial innovation.
5. Moral Stages of Reasoning
Jean Piaget (vol. 1) recognized the virtues of trying to reduce development either to nature or
nurture. This is a tried and true theoretical research strategy in science and philosophy, reflecting
the virtues of explanatory parsimony. Piagetians credited the role of socialization in developing
moral ideologies and emotions. They saw the importance of guilt, shame and pride in reinforcing
prevailing norms of right and wrong, also in developing ego-ideals and an aversive consciencesystem to avoid censure from social authorities. But they recognized that even the most
optimistic projections of such behaviorist and Freudian potential falls far short of capturing
sophisticated moral deliberation and problem solving, not to mention interpersonal negotiation
and relationship
Piaget introduced a third factor, the cognitive schema or system, that mediated the interplay of
bio-psychology and socialization. He asked children to describe their intention and behavior,
their goals and aspirations, and how they made sense of them. In this way, Piagetians have
produced decades of evidence that children co-construct their moral reality much as they
construct their physical reality and epistemology—organizing concepts as practical tools for
interacting effectively with the world. The "tool" metaphor had special appeal when observing
the continuity between using our limbs and coordinating our bodily movements in infancy, then
using our conceptual categorizations of reality and coordinating their use through “logical”
operations. Piagetians also demonstrated that continual enhancements to these operating systems
could be depicted structurally, using the laws of propositional logic. This greatly improved the
practical outlook for what seemed abstracted and overly general theory.
While tracing sequences of stages in the development of logical and scientific reasoning,
however, Piaget only uncovered two somewhat cohesive systems of naturally-developing moral
thought. The childhood "heteronomous" phase conditioned right and responsibility on concrete
interests. It focused on conformity to approved social conventions as means of fulfilling them.
The adult “autonomous phase” showed greater concern with doing the right thing per se within
the framework of mutual purposes. This phase arose as children became critical and self-critical
about their conventional moral beliefs and the social institutions supporting them, also as they
began comparing different possible moral policies and practices with each other, intuiting the
sorts of social purposes they needed to serve. The ability to intuit these purposes, even in the face
of sparse and misleading information, is one of our great naturally-developing achievements. It
provides intriguing support for those moral-political theorists who believe that the social contract
model of ethics and just government is anything but the intellectual fiction that classical authors
considered it. Still, with Piaget, it is unclear that the ancient philosophy of moral development
and its inclusion within natural development of human personality had been reclaimed.
Lawrence Kohlberg determined to investigate whether there was much more detail and
sophistication to the natural development of moral reasoning. And he doggedly pursued this
singular investigation until his death, some thirty-five years later. In drawing hundreds of
colleagues into his empirical and educational mission, across the globe, he virtually established
moral development as a field. Kohlberg's approach centers the field to this day, with no
comparable rival but skepticism. However, much research is performed using a simpler device
(DIT) developed by Rest and colleagues (2000) that also yields findings on more components of
moral judgment than Kohlberg’s MJI. The continuing program of Kohlbergians and neoKohlbergians is best known for a moral judgment interview technique that led to a particular sixstage theory of moral judgment,also for educational programs designed to edify at-risk urban
students and prison inmates, and notably, for "being controversial." Philosophers have
participated actively in the moral development debate, making Kohlberg’s work both wellknown and infamous in ethics. Perhaps it should be best known for being poorly understood and
critiqued.
The range of philosophical critiques that some believe discredit Kohlberg suffer from two basic
flaws. They do not consider the likelihood that Kohlberg's key interpretive models and claims are
dispensable in his developmental theory. Nor do they try out the alternative position they favor
(the position Kohlberg’s view is allegedly biased against) to see if this makes an appreciable
difference for the findings involved. This violates normal philosophical policy on apt analysis.
These shortfalls suggest a dismissive prejudgment of Kohlberg theory, based perhaps on
prevailing intellectual ideologies. Contemporary thinking is averse to the apparent pigeon-holing
of complex systems or inflexible (hierarchically) ordering of complex processes. Kohlberg’s
frustratingly casual use of philosophical methods and overblown use of philosophical notions
support such pre-judgment.
Even cursory observation suggests that Kohlberg's philosophical self-depictions are dispensable
indeed, leaving the empirically-based core of his theory in tact, and that his assessment of
findings can be performed using a range of explanatory and meta-ethical standards (Puka vol. 4,
Colby, Kohlberg. et. al. 1987). Kohlberg need not claim that observed development occurs in
unified stages that are hierarchically integrated and arise in invariant sequence, that they
culminate in a highest stage of a particular sort, or that stage development and the morality it
captures is "natural" or “universal” in any cross-cultural sense. The leading theories of cognitive,
ego, and social development do not make claims of this extreme sort, and yet are held adequate
and valuable without them. Philosophers should be able to distinguish a developmental theory
derived from data from further claims, derived theoretically, regarding the ethical significance of
certain findings.
Kohlberg's strongest and most criticized philosophical claim--that justice and rights are the
central concepts of morality--is the most obviously dispensable. Kohlberg’s perennial stage
descriptions center on different moral concept or theme in every stage such as prudence,
benevolence, or advancing social welfare. They are even titled in this way. It was not until the
fifteenth year of advancing the well-known stage theory that Kohlberg even seriously tried to
find "justice operations" working in each of the stages (Colby and Kohlberg 1987).
Kohlberg's even more fundamental claim that moral development can only be chartered where
morality is non-relative seems dispensable. Moral judgment can become relatively developed, as
aesthetic and culinary judgment does. There are clearly more and less developed palates and
tastes, which would hold for morality were it mainly a matter of taste. Perhaps the most valuable
service performed by Rest and colleagues (2000) in summarizing their twenty-years of neoKohlbergian research is to present the data without Kohlberg’s bold claims, showing that the
stage sequence remains.
6. Philosophical Research Method
Drawing from the literature of moral philosophy, Kohlberg hypothesized that justice-as-fairness
was the central moral concept, also that conflict resolution and fostering mutual cooperation
were its chief aims and marks of adequacy. Kohlberg thus presented experimental subjects with
moral conflicts and cooperation scenarios, recording their strategies for resolving the dilemmas
involved. ( In the original longitudinal study, 52 subjects from a private Chicago boy's school
were interviewed every 3-4 years for 35 years (Colby and Kohlberg 1987)). Interview probe
questions also challenged these strategies to uncover the subject’s highest level of ability versus
present performance. Additional interview questions asked subjects to address issues of fairness,
right, rights, responsibility, equality, guilt, law versus morality, values and ideals, promisekeeping and loyalty, benevolence and love in family relations and friendships (Kohlberg 1984).
These dilemmas and questions provided respondents the opportunity to couch their responses at
different social perspectives and within different social units, from primary and intimate relations
to social-institutional and international perspectives.
After coding recorded interview responses (in logical, social, moral categories) Kohlberg and
colleagues looked for patterns. They were particularly interested in whether the template of
Piagetian stages could be put over the logical, social-perspectival, and moral aspects of
responding. The results showed a six-stage sequence of such stages ranging from (a) a preconventional level in which children think egoistically or instrumentally, using each other to get
what they want, through (b) a conventional level in which conformity to the institutional
practices of one's peer group and society are key toward maintaining group solidarity and
stability, to (c) a post-conventional level at which morality is seen as a mutually created
institution serving certain shared and elevated purposes—some achieved, some still being
pursued. The post-conventional level shows commonsense rationales resembling those of
reciprocal respect-for-persons, rule- utilitarianism, and libertarian rights.
Kohlberg's non-empirical theorizing offended philosophical sensibilities by claiming that these
findings on post-conventional morality especially support the adequacy of leading moral
theories. To philosophers it seemed unlikely enough that natural selection equipped us to
reproduce Kant, Mill and Locke when trying to deal with each other. Alternatively, it seemed
unlikely that only these three individuals discovered and portrayed our universal moral
inheritance. Claiming that the naturalistic fallacy had been overcome in this way--through a few
dozens clinical interviews with Chicago school kids--also seemed a bit bold. Overlooked here is
the obvious. Outside the internal debates of moral philosophers, the advisability of building
general explanatory theories in a practical field like ethics is not clear. Neither is it clear that
such theories can provide useful guides for choice and action. Thus hard evidence that theories
further refine and elaborate thinking that works effectively on real-world moral problems should
be welcome news.
Less known to philosophers are Kohlbergian observations on developmental process and its
uncanny resemblance to intellectual theory building. These same observations may offer mutual
support for the common sense and intellectual search for "unified theories" or understandings.
The developmental process, left out of traditional accounts, starts with trial and error inquiry
and experimental observation, then the differentiation of elements and observed relations among
them in one's observational field. Next these elements and relations are integrated via
overarching rationales or principles designed to unify them and achieve a close correspondence
between cognitive and environmental structure. The correspondence achieved is gauged
functionally, by testing cognition’s predictive validity in practice. Such testing is part of general
processing or assimilation of information to the stage structure achieved. This expresses ongoing
competence levels until discrepant information is noticed (differentiated). Such information is
then assimilated reductionistically to the structure until the discrepancies become too great and
numerous. Then the structure is partially loosened or disassembled (disequilibrated) so that
existing rationales can work in more ad hoc fashion, piecing together novel responses where
needed. Additional ad hoc operating principles are added as well until a new more unified and
coherent operating structure can be formed. When it does, we have completed stage-transition.
Then the process of differentiation, accommodation, integration, and assimilative equilibrium
begins once more.
While all these processes are self-constructional, they all occur quite unconsciously. This says
something remarkable about our pre-intellectual capacities and routines, making the trained
philosophical intellect appear less effete.
7. Philosophical Interpretation of Findings
Armed with these observations on developmental stages and processes, Kohlberg derived a range
of overarching. They regarded their invariant moral and psychological progression, their
spontaneous (untutored) and self-constructive quality, and their universality. In addition to
launching a program of cross-cultural research, Kohlberg again consulted the philosophical
literature for standards of logical, normative and meta-ethical adequacy. Gauging century-old
debates, Kohlberg concluded that formal Kantian criteria as less problematic than alternatives.
And he installed them as measures of moral progress in development, sketching how each stage
more closely fulfilled them (Kohlberg 1981).
A host of commentators later charged Kohlberg's methodology with formalist, Kantian, and
liberal-egalitarian bias. Such charges have a point. Kohlberg, after all, had not experimented with
using other meta-criteria for gauging moral progress. He did not show the caution of other social
scientists who imported preferred theories from other disciplines, utilizing them more
hypothetically and tentatively. Still, such criticism ignores the more powerful and generalizable
assessment Kohlberg offered: the stage-by-stage-comparisons in which increasing completeness
and inclusivity marked moral adequacy. Here each new stage of reasoning, each operating
system, was shown to add a major type of principled operation that performed a vital problemsolving function. At the same time, each retained the least problematic structures and operations
of all previous stages. A largely bottom-up assessment is involved here, gauging progress away
from basic inadequacy and incompleteness in both psychological and moral processing.
Examples would include not considering the social or interpersonal dimension of a problem, not
considering the role of key values, virtues, or responsibilities that any conceptual analysis would
consider relevant.
Applied to later-stage reasoning, such assessments invoke very basic and shared adequacy
criteria among competing ethical outlooks. As such they match Piaget's approach to measuring
mature logical reasoning. Such "formal-operational" thought shows the competence to consider
all relevant causal possibilities, from the most relevant perspectives required, to address a wide
range of scientific problems.
It is worth noting that Kohlberg's stage sequence likely measures up on rival meta-ethical
measures, e.g., on rule-utilitarian criteria of a quasi-teleological, quasi-intuitionist form. This is
true, at least, so long as the weighted utilities or rules involved stress justice and rights, as in
Mill, or in Bentham’s "each is to count for one" proviso. There is good reason for preferring such
a utilitarian lean as well; the perennial list of criticisms lodged against utilitarianism call for it.
Utilitarianism is unable to assure minimal fairness and equality, to view such considerations and
others as morally inherent and untradable, to create moral disjuncts that set upper limits on
obligation and lower limits on decency, to accord proper place and protection for individual
autonomy, and the like. While Kohlberg never attempted such an analysis, those criticizing the
lack of one never even suggested why it would be difficult to perform.
While Kohlberg originally claimed a sixth and highest stage of moral development that put
Kantian respect and individual rights first. But his research program eventually recanted this
finding. Ongoing worldwide research, combined with the statistical reanalyzes of existing data,
de-legitimated the significance of many Stage 6 observations, leaving too little reliable data for
Stage 6 claims. This locates the highest empirical stage in Kohlberg's theory in the same place
that mainstream moral philosophy finds itself after two centuries of debate—with two main
competing sets of principles, one fostering the advancement of social welfare and benevolent
virtues, the other a mutual respect for individual liberty. These are accompanied by several
intuitive rationales concerning goods of community, interpersonal responsibility and loyalty,
equal economic opportunity and toleration, and various virtues of friendship. This state of ethical
affairs approaches quasi-intuitionist rule-utilitarian criteria at least as well as it approaches
Kantian, deontological ones.
The presence of interpersonal and virtue rationales in later moral development is often
overlooked. Indeed, Kohlberg's own stage descriptions downplay them by focusing on what is
new and distinctive in each later stage of development, not on what is inclusively preserved from
earlier stages. General ethical principles are the innovation in later stages because they reflect a
broadened social perspective. This misleading emphasis in stage depictions was deemed
necessary by the history of stage scoring system in research, Scorers constantly confounded
similar moral rationales, expressed in adjacent stage terms. Thus distinctive stage-qualities had to
be emphasized at each stage. Philosophical critics who do not immerse themselves within the
empirical research project and its requirements miss matters of this sort completely, failing to
credit ways in which an empirically-based theory can not be altered simply to serve conceptual
goals such as neutrality or elegance.
8. Critical Specifics
Critics rightly fault the over-interpreted nature of Kohlberg's initial research as well as the
inflated nature of his claims relative to reliable data. Qualitative research generally offers poor
safeguards against an author’s peculiar interpretive preferences, helping to shape the very
content of observational "data." Recognizing this, Kohlberg invited heretics and critics of his
view into his central research group over time. His conceptual interpretations were radically
reanalyzed in the 1980s seeking consensus among a dozen ideologically conflicting coders and
scorers, working contentiously together.
Initially, Kohlberg was not careful to control either his qualitative research method or his theorybuilding process for biases. Ideological (liberal) and gender (male) biases proved hardest to
tame. The Kohlberg program cannot legitimately be faulted simply for having a particular focus:
it need not address the full diversity of relevant topics in moral psychology. But it has clearly
fallen short in considering phenomena that strongly interact with those investigated, changing
their nature. Certain moral emotions should have been researched that help set cognitive
orientation, gather crucial information (Blum 1980), or facilitate moral self-expression and
relation (Gilligan vol. 6). Empathy and compassion should have been investigated alongside
cognitive role-taking and perspective-taking since, as moral competences, they are unlikely to
function separately (Hoffman vol. 7). The same can be said for the relation of moral cognitive
and meta-cognition at higher levels of development (Gibbs vol.4, 5). Kohlberg followed Piaget
in conceiving moral development personally and psychologically, not seriously researching the
phenomenon as an interpersonal or relational process above all, or one pertaining primarily to
small communities. Such apparent shortfalls top a virtual catalogue of charged deficiencies,
some holding particular philosophical interest.
Methodological: (1) Empirical researchers should seek their subjects' own opinions on what
morality encompasses and when it progresses or sinks low. Moral relevance and adequacy
should not be pre-defined by "expert" theorists on theoretical grounds exclusively, intellectually
limiting the scope and determining the emphasis of research. (2) At least one survey (Gilligan
and Murphy vol. 4) indicates that subjects spontaneously conceive morality as setting value
priorities or aspiring toward ideals when conceiving morality, as well as defining the kind of
person one is. Testing subjects’ abilities to resolve conflicts of interest doesn’t get at these
(teleological) moral sensibilities. (3) The use of an all-male sample in Kohlberg’s original,
central, and ongoing study of moral development is not only unacceptable by present-day
research standards. Instead, given the accumulated data on gender differences, the results should
be radically reinterpreted as tracing male moral development primarily, not natural or human
development. (4) The stage-system model of moral development does violence to data that
shows a majority of subjects scoring at two and sometimes even three adjacent “stages” (out of
five). This suggests that people remain distributed across the range of their development for most
of their lives in a loose confederation of rationales and beliefs. (5) Asking research subjects to
first resolve a moral dilemma then give reasons for their choice does not focus on moral
reasoning or problem-solving competence, but on the ability to explain or justify judgments.
Such an approach can not even distinguish justification from self-deceptive rationalization.
Conceptual: (1) Due to the many cultural and epochal influences on cognition, conceptual
safeguards should have been in place to assure that American research on moral development did
not unduly reflect western ideology. This includes the "social contract" or “natural rights”
heritage of Anglo-American ideology (Sullivan vol. 4). (2) Defining adequate moral judgments
as the decisive resolution of conflicting interests or duties fails to inquire into non-decisive, noncontending moral competences and their adequacy. These might include trying to avoid or skirt
moral dilemmas due to harm done some parties by resolving them, or trying to pre-empt moral
dilemmas through dialogue and negotiation aimed at altering the prior interests of involved
parties (Gilligan and Murphy vol. 6). (3) Interpreting moral responses in exclusively structural or
systemic terms, organized by general principles, ignores intuitionist and pluralist ethical
considerations. It also ignores emotional sensibilities and intelligences, thus grossly distorting
the moral-development profile. (4) Focusing moral development research on reasoning, not on
traits producing expressive behavior, misses what is adequacy about moral development. The
observed judgment-action gap allows a highest stage reasoner to be a high-level hypocrite, selfdeceiver, and cad (Straughan vol. 4). (5) A great intermixing of moral and political perspectives,
as well as similar moral and political concepts seems to occur in later developmental stages, as in
some philosophical theories. Do we interpret this as a natural developing competence or
incompetence? It fails in cognitive differentiation, yet seemingly shares a tendency found in
expert ethical theories.
Kohlbergians have often tested and accommodated the panoply of criticisms leveled at them.
Thus they have come to see the dialectic of debate as the central natural developmental course of
their research program. Their absorption of many critics into their research team adds credibility
to this portrayal. Some critiques have not yet been addressed however, and should be. As
philosophers seem unaware, however, later phases of the Kohlberg research program arguably
have evolved the most psychometrically sophisticated coding and scoring system known to
qualitative research (Colby and Kohlberg 1987). This system offers the most sophisticated
integration available of conceptual and empirical assessments for interpreting data and drawing
conclusions from it, and arguably has generated the most impressive results in of any research
program in cognitive development or moral psychology by far--winning over major opponents
(Kurtines and Grief vol. 4).
In addition, Kohlberg's original thirty-year study, begun with the least sophisticated methodology
and fewest bias controls recently received a thorough empirical reanalysis by Edelstein and
Keller (vol. 5) which surprisingly confirmed most original Kohlberg findings. As noted, twentyyears of parallel studies using a completely different research measure than Kohlberg’s also
confirmed main findings (Rest, Narvaez et al 2000). Proponents of this neo-Kohlbrgian approach
have detailed the role of moral structure in perceiving and interpreting moral issues, also the
function of intermediate sized moral concepts and rationales that bring stage logic closer to reallife cases than universal principles do (Rest, Narvaez, Bebeau and Thoma 2000). Each year
several large-scale cross-cultural studies are reported testing both Kohlbergian claims and the
bias charges against them. The basic moral development sequence is verified in each (see New
Research in Moral Development).
In light of such findings, philosophical critics must address a question too long delayed. If
Kohlbergian stage theory is misguided and misconceived on major points, how do we explain the
massive data accumulated over a half-decade that continuingly and surprisingly confirm its
claims? After decades of methodological and conceptual criticism, why hasn't the depiction of
moral development come close to being disconfirmed?
Critical theory can be tapped for an answer, viewing Kohlberg research as parroting the
socialized ideologies of western (individualistic, male-dominated, industrialized-capitalist)
societies, found in his socially brain-washed subjects. But this speaks to conceptual possibility.
No competing account is offered. More, it suffers from far more of the empirical shortfalls and
conceptual leaps attributed to Kohlberg by critics, condemning it by its own standards. Still,
Kohlberg often warned followers not to take "those stages" too seriously. As a scientist he
assumed that future research would change current findings. The depiction of moral development
would be altered further when each domain of natural cognitive development was eventually
integrated into a general theory of cognitive ego-development.
9. Caring's "Different Voice"
Of the more specific critiques coming from critical and cultural theory, one feminist-friendly
version garnered most notice, especially outside research psychology. More noteworthy is the
rare and rich alternative perspective on moral development that accompanied it: caring versus
justice. Indeed, the caring theme offers an especially promising portrait of what benevolence
ethics looks like on the practical level, in everyday life. As such it poses a far superior champion
for the benevolence tradition than outsized views such as utilitarianism, or dated, intuitionist
virtue theories. Feminism looks to virtue theory at its peril since, among other things, traditional
trait theory has garnered very poor empirical backing. And the conceptualization of traditional
virtues pre-dates both research psychology and the careful introspective or depth psychology that
preceded it. The caring theme is researched as a set of interpretive skills and sensibilities,
proclivities and habits, easily observed and verified. Further, caring is not only more realistic
than its main virtue alternative, agape, but shows up such unconditional love as a kind of
kindness-machismo.
Carol Gilligan (1982) argued that Kohlberg research, like Piagetian and Freudian research,
reflected a male outlook on development. While occurring at the theoretical level, it also greatly
infected Kohlbergian research methodology, making qualitative observations the fulfillment of
prior ideological prophecy. The view of moral thinking and development that resulted—the
"justice-and-rights orientation"--is over-abstracted, overly general and essentialistic. It focuses
on foundational moral concepts only and on universal laws, not on a morality of social practice
and interaction that its research claims to measure.. The moral orientation portrayed in
Kohlbergian stages is rigid, formulaic or calculative, and legalistic. In personal life it is cold,
aloof, and impersonal, if not manipulative and punitive. Its individualism urges contentiousness
with vague threat of violence. These untoward qualities show in personal judgmentalism and
blaming, in both social censure and legal punishment. But they also show in the demand-quality
of rights-in-conflict, and in our restive resistance toward burdensome duties. Here, obligations
are straightforwardly posed as moral burdens to be born, just as rights are cast as demands and
“claims against” comrades. Responsibility is seen as diminishing free self expression when in
care it is an opportunity for artful relation and fulfilling mutuality.
These observations on the coercive aspects of justice must strike a chord for ethicists, especially
with Kantians who hold high the liberation of self-imposed moral laws. Vigilance against
moralism within morality's midst is a constant for non-partisan ethics. Critical-feminist ethicists
can only welcome the picture of rights and duties as clubs and shields in a battle of conflicting
interests. What better fits the military model of human relations glimpsed in the masculinist
"state of nature" and social contract myth underlying western ideology? Need ethics be designed
for remote cooperation against mutually mistrustful and threatening strangers? Must it form an
artificial bridge of relation where natural relational bonds are weak, and relational know how
deficient? Or can it equally serve the needs of enhancing primary relations and spreading their
scope as the expression of a natural “will-to-care?” (Noddings 1985).
Gilligan (and Noddings) argued for an unrecognized sub-theme in male moral development and
a preferred and comparably valid theme among women, left out of Kohlberg's original research
sample. This "care" theme focuses morality on skills of relationship—on supporting, nurturing,
and being helpful, not on demanding, defending, requiring and compelling. Mature caring shows
great competence in attending to others, in listening and responding sensitively to others through
dialogue aimed at consensus. The inherent powers of relationship are rallied to address moral
difficulties, not powers of individual ingenuity in problem solving or deliberative argumentation.
As a goodness ethic, caring also emphasizes the sharing of aspirations, joys, accomplishments,
and each other.
Relative to the unique longevity of the Kohlbergian program, care research remains in its
infancy, as does its research methodology (Lyons, Brown, Argyris et. al. vol. 6). But even as a
conceptual posit (a different voice hypothesis) care has proven extremely influential in hosts of
fields spanning literature, domestic violence, leadership counseling and legal theory. It has
garnered an array of serious critics in research psychology and theory (Walker, Maccoby &
Greeno, Luria, Braebeck & Nunner-Winkler, Nichols, Tronto, Puka vol. 6), along with loyal
devotees and defenders (Baumrind, Brown, Lyons Attanucci vol. 6). Care's very relevance to
moral development remains unclear since almost no significant longitudinal research underwrote the view originally, nor has much been added since. The three developmental levels
depicted exactly parallel what Gilligan herself portrays as coping strategies—particular strategic
responses to particular kinds of personal crises (Gilligan 1982, ch 4). Such phenomena differ
great from general competence systems evolved for, and able at handling moral issues generally.
Gilligan also depicts care levels in the format of Perryan meta-cognition, bearing more
similarities to ethical and interpersonal meta-cognition than Piagetian first-order moral judgment.
(Research does not show natural meta-cognitive development, apparently, in any domain, e.g.,
epistemological, ontological, scientific judgment, social, self-concept.). Gilligan also refers to
care levels as cognitive orientations, not competence systems, which research also shows to be
quite different cognitive phenomena (Perry 1968).
Indeed, care "levels" have been defended as wholly different phenomena from Kohlbergian
levels or stages, despite being depicted for two decades as constituting a comparable and parallel
developmental path (Brown and Tappan vol. 6). Gilligan seemingly favors the “different
realities” portrayal from the outset, noting that care orientations are likely some undetermined
mixture of biology, socialization, experience, reflection and cognitive construction. Indeed, they
are an admitted function of masculinist, sexist socialization in part (Gilligan 1982, Intro, chs. 1
and 3). After their initial depiction, moreover, the developmental levels of caring have rarely
received mention in the care literature.
To philosophers, however, placing the depictions of caring cognition alongside Kohlbergian
stages points to a progressive sequence that such a benevolence ethic might take, naturally
developing or not. As such, it suggests an educational curriculum that would foster current
communitarian interest and cross-disciplinary feminism. The care ethic is of exceptional utility
in the classroom, proving much more applicable for addressing real-world moral issues than any
so-called applied ethic derived from moral philosophy or stage structure. Certainly mature care
can be applied to moral issues more easily than Kohlberg's depiction of post-conventional moral
reasoning. Students are struck by care’s preference for suspending judgment or making tentative
and shaded judgments on moral difficulties that call out for interpersonal struggle and
negotiation over time. For many, ethics seems too murky, and ethical problems too sparse on
information to allow decisive, disjunctive solutions of a right-wrong, just-unjust variety.
10. Pedagogical Implications
Any developmental approach to education starts with this recognition: teachers are presenting
ways to think to students who already have their own very competent ways to think. And
students will use these ways of thinking to process the teacher's input. Moreover, many of the
views being presented are intellectually refined versions of viewpoints the student has developed
herself in more rudimentary forms. Thus classroom presentations must partner with a students’
current cognitive competence system. Their design must appeal to student views even when
attempting to enhance and challenge those views, not aiming fill up empty space or reorganize
badly filled space with something new or better.
Teachers who serve up material that is not geared to each student's acquired level of competence
are "banging their head against a wall" to some extent. Worse, their lessons are “bouncing off”—
being rejected as either incomprehensible or radically discordant with good sense. Or they are
being distorted and misconceived to fit the student’s operating system. Enhancing the student’s
ability to understand must work the opposite effect, urging the student’s terms of understanding
to accommodate to the material’s structure, broadening its categories, adding distinct categories
and interrelating them. For cognitive-moral developmentalists, this means presenting material
that will unsettle current terms of understanding, urging students to construct new ones. Here the
teacher can only get students to teach themselves and develop their own skills, as both
psychology and ethics prescribe.
The stage or unified-system notion shows its power and utility most in this context. When
philosophers present the range of post-conventional ethical or political theories in class, many
students are processing them at a conventional level, thus systematically distorting them. They
are not misunderstanding these views in a "factual" sense, but understanding them in different
terms. This distortion is even greater when a less educated portion of the American public
encounters teachings such as democratic toleration, equality before the law, separation of church
and state and other constitutional principles.
Because stage structures are tightly integrated and encompassing--representing the basic
meaning system of each student--class discussion also will have many students talking past each
other in the same systematic sense. Arguments won by one party, or consensus achieved by two,
may not at all be what it seems. Mutual miscommunication may be the rule here, not shared
understanding. The same applies to citizens or voters in public discussion. Those parts of a
discussion that end in greatest confusion, disagreement, and mutual dissatisfaction may be most
educationally productive. And this is not simply because they provide food for reflective
thought. Rather, at a deeper level, they may help initiate or exacerbate existing cognitive
disequilibrium. And this will move a student toward the "accommodative reintegration" of her
ideas in a higher level of understanding.
Likewise, a student whose paper is "a mess" of near-contradictory lines of thought, ad hoc
rationales, and the like, may be showing a much greater degree of learning than one who presents
a smooth and consistent rendering of ideas. The former student will confess, anxiously, that s/he
got her or himself all mixed up, tied in knots, going this way and that. “I'm to the point where I
understood the material far better when I first started.” Most likely, s/he is quite wrong. If
teachers are not somehow urging and testing for such confusion and anxiety—for disequilibrated
rather than equilibrated writing—they are likely falling short in enhancing fundamental student
understanding. The same is true if they are not demanding the reconstruction of each student’s
original and ongoing ideas in the face of challenges to them.
Many instructors likely will recognize the above phenomena in their teaching, finding this
picture of them part-illuminating, part-affirming. Most ethics instructors are struck by their
ability to uncover commonsense Aristotles, John Stuart Mills, Kants, Humes and Lockes in their
classroom, merely by posing moral questions. Moral development findings provide a deep and
systematic partial explanation of this phenomenon. Many instructors recognize that some
students who "get views correct" don't have a very reflective grasp of them. Other who seem to
get things wrong often are actually grappling at a much deeper level with the views. And most
instructors can tell when some lectures or class discussions have no hope of getting anywhere.
“The students’ minds just don’t seem open to this way of thinking.” Yes, this is precisely what
developmental theory and stage unity would predict.
William Perry (1968) offers a quasi-developmental account of meta-cognitive thinking in the
college years, including ethical reflection. Faculty find it useful for understanding special
problems that students face when confronted with opposing conceptions of fact and value across
the curriculum. For the philosopher, such confrontations occur frequently within each course.
Perry's approach explicates the particular intellectual strategies students use when coping with
conflicting fundamental theories. But it also indicates major shifts in student epistemic
perspectives ranging from initial absolutism through a kind of relativistic functionalism. Because
the account is as clinical as it is empirical in a research sense, it offers a insightful speculations
on the emotions, motivations, and anxieties students experience in doing commonsense
philosophy and ethics on their educational experience.
Nel Noddings (1995) poses mature caring as a model for reorganizing public schools. Students
can be taught to care across the board—from the growing of plants in the classroom, through a
kind of dialogue and coming to consensus with mathematical concepts, to the nurturing of
friendships in class. But more, students can learn these lessons by being truly cared for by school
personnel, not just respected or graded fairly. As a hospital aims to be a care-taking institution,
so a school can conceive its overall mission that way, not simply transmitting education or
developing student skills and the like, but supporting, nurturing, and partnering with students in
every aspect of school life. That many school personnel mistakenly believe they are already
doing this indicates how crucial it is to conceive care at higher developmental levels, with many
differentiations and integrations, shadings and textures of adult caring given prominence.
Conventional and post-conventional caring are quite different matters. Imagine what caring of
this overall sort would look like in the usually anonymous setting of a college ethics course.
11. Related Research
The Kohlbergian approach to moral development has yielded hosts of cross-cultural studies
bringing in the more developed cultural research methods of social anthropologists and creating
some controversies regarding the issue of cultural relativism and universality (Sweder vol. 4, 7,
Colby and Kohlberg 1987). Research on moral education, using Kohlberg research and theory,
has taken several forms. Some measures the effects of discussing pointed moral dilemmas with
students in the classroom, some measures the effect of creating "just communities" in which
students can restructure their environment, making it more welcoming to morally sensitive
reasoning.
The Kohlbergian approach also has spun of heretical research programs focused on the apparent
development of moral conventions and traditions, independent of post-conventional reasoning
development (Turiel vol. 2, 5), moral reflectivity, that occurs within seeming first-order moral
judgment, not moving to the meta-cognitive level (Gibbs vol. 2), moral and political ideology,
that often mires and masks moral reasoning within attitude schemes that bias its workings (Emler
1983), faith development that surprisingly mirrors moral cognition in its conceptualization of
divinity and religious devotion (Fowler 1981, Oser 1980), and moral perception, one of several
skills that enable the onset of moral deliberation, negotiation and reasoning (Rest, Narvaez,
Bebeau & Thoma, 2000).
The Rest group offers a "four-component" model of ethical judgment that investigates many key
components in true moral reasoning or problem solving, not clearly distinguished or investigated
in Kohlbergian moral judgment. Narvaez has carried the moral perception component of this
research to the classroom, assessing strategies for making students more sensitive to when
morally-charged issues arise in daily life. She also has led attempts to integrate moraldevelopment research with related cognitive science research on problem solving. Important new
emphasis is being placed on non-deliberative aspects of moral judgment and “reasoning,” that
show an immediate or automatic “rush to judgment.” These processes mark the typical, habitual
way we handle routine moral decisions in daily life (Narvaez and Lapsley 2004 ).
Much research attention has been paid to the age-old problem of akrasia or weakness of will,
termed the judgment-action gap by cognitive psychologists. The most progress in this area has
been made by ego-developmentalists (Blasi 2004, Youniss & Damon vols. 2, 5). They suspect
that our self-definitions—whether we view our sense of responsibility and character as central to
who we are—most determine whether we practice what we moral preach. But many other factors
seem involved, likely centered in moral emotions and attitudes, and the automaticity phenomena
just noted. The important areas of moral motivation and emotion have proven the most difficult
to get at empirically.
While not part of developmental research or theory, other specialties in psychology and
philosophy frame moral-developmental concerns. Care research and feminist analysis can be
seen in this way, as can Perry's meta-cognitive research above. Psychoanalysts have performed
many interesting clinical studies on moral emotions and their motivational effects, focusing on
superego functions (guilt, fear, shame, regret) and the ego-ideal (pride, emulation, aspiration,
internalization). Enright (vol. 7) has conducted a remarkably enduring and progressive research
program on forgiveness and its effects. Hoffman, as noted, has researched empathy most
extensively.
For decades, social psychologists such as Adorno and Sherif have looked at issues of cooperation
and competition, authoritarianism and democracy in various types of organizations and groups.
They have developed an entire area of research, Pro-Social Development, which takes a basically
amoral or non-moral look at all forms of socially conforming and contributing behavior. A
formative, but largely abandoned research movement in this area investigated the conditions
under which onlookers will help or fail to help strangers, accepting different costs or levels of
risks for doing so (Bickman vol. 7). An industrial branch of social psychology looks at fairness
issues in the workplace and the effects of greater and lesser employee control there. Damon has
conducted myriad studies of fairness judgments in early childhood that point to many factors not
taken covered by cognitive competence systems of their development. Related areas of
personality psychology look into the motivations behind forms of moral altruism especially,
trying to understand the concept of self-sacrifice and doing good for its own sake (Staub vol. 7).
A very interesting program of altruism research rises directly from philosophical accounts of
egoism, both psychological and ethical (Batson vol. 7).
Some of the most inspiring research in moral development charts the development and reflective
motivations of everyday moral exemplars and heroes. Lawrence Blum (1988) offered important
distinctions among types of extraordinarily moral individuals, which were incorporated into
interview research and theory by Colby and Damon in Some Do Care. Lawrence Walker has
begun a long-term research program in this area as well, which likely will help tie cognitivemoral development in education to the prominent character-education and moral-literacy
movement. Character education focuses intently on the nurturing of admirable traits, attitudes,
outlooks and value commitments. Without more extensive psychological research to support its
traditionalist emphases on core American values, traditional virtues, and the upholding of codes
and creeds, this approach flirts with the discredited approaches of early Anglo-American public
school education, rife with moralistic strictures and nationalistic indoctrination.
12. References and Further Reading
The empirical research references above can be found in the seven volume series:

Moral Development: A Compendium. (1995). B. Puka (ed), Garland Press.
o Classic research by Piaget and Kohlberg is contained in vols. 1 & 2 Defining
Perspectives in Moral Development and Classic Research in Moral Development.
Cross-cultural and updated longitudinal research is contained in vol. 5: New
Research in Moral Development. Kohlberg criticism is highlighted in vol. 4: The
Great Justice Debate. Care research by Gilligan and colleagues is highlighted in
vol. 6: Caring Voices and Women's Moral Frames. Research on altruism,
bystander intervention, egoism, and pro-social development is focused in vol. 7:
Reaching Out.
Additional References:
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Blasi, A (2004). "Moral functioning: Moral understanding and personality" In D. K.
Lapsley and D. Narvaez (Eds.), Morality, Self, and Identity Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Blum, L. (1988) "Moral exemplars: Reflections on Schindler, the Trocmes and others".
Midwestern studies in philosophy. XII.
Blum, L. (1980 ) Friendship, Altruism and Morality. Boston: Routledge Kegan-Paul.
Colby, A., Kohlberg, L., Speicher-Dubin, B, Hewer, A., Candee, D., Gibbs, & Power, C.
(1987) The Measurement of Moral Judgment.
Colby,A. & Damon, W. (1993) Some Do Care. NY: Free Press.
Confucius. (1979). The Analects. New York: Penguin Classics.
Emler, N., Resnick, S. & Malone, B. (1982). "The relationship between moral rasoning
and political orientation". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45 1073-1080.
Fowler, J. (1981). Stages of Faith. San Francisco: Harper and Row.
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Author Information
William Puka
Email: [email protected]
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
U. S. A.