MORAL DEVELOPMENT AND DECISION MAKING. KOHLBERG'S MODEL.
Joaquín Díaz Atienza
Lawrence Kohlberg He was born in Bronxville on October 25, 1927 and died in the outskirts of Boston (USA) on January 17, 1987, possibly by suicide and as a consequence of a possible mood disorder that he had suffered from for some time.
After finishing high school, he enlisted in the navy and, once back in civilian life, he finished the Bachelor of Arts and PhD in Philosophy at the University of Chicago. His thesis was on moral development. He began his teaching career in Chicago, then at Yale, and finally returned to Chicago. He later founded the [program/program/etc.] at Harvard. Center for Development and Moral Education.
INTRODUCTION
He followed Piaget, though placing greater emphasis on cultural and environmental influences. However, as will be discussed later, much of the criticism leveled against him stems from his limited attention to social learning psychology. While Piaget's great merit, as we saw in the previous post, was demonstrating a series of universal and regular stages based on formal cognitive reasoning, Kohlberg took on the challenge of developing the different types of moral development through, like his mentor, a clinical methodology. To this end, he created a series of stories with different moral dilemmas. He established 10 moral duties and formulated 25 characteristics of moral judgment, which he ultimately reduced to seven fundamental aspects of moral judgment: rules, rights and authority, choice, sanctions and motives, value, and positive and punitive justice.
In moral development, it gives significant modulating, even predictive, importance to the child's mental age or IQ in the process of moral maturation.
THE LEVELS AND STAGES OF MORAL DEVELOPMENT
Kohlberg describes three levels: the preconventional, the conventional and postconventional or principledEach of these levels will present different stages with their corresponding characteristics.
To make it more didactic, we represent the characteristics of each of the levels in several tables.
| Table 1. LEVEL A: PRE-CONVENTIONAL LEVEL |
| Stage 1: Stage of punishment and obedience: | Content: Literal obedience to the rules and authority, avoiding punishment and not causing physical harm. Social perspective: Egocentrism. Confuses the figure of authority with his own. |
| Stage 2: Stage of design and individual instrumental exchange | Content: The right thing to do is to attend to one's own needs or those of others and to make impartial deals in terms of concrete exchange. Social perspective: A specific individualistic perspective is adopted. One separates one's own interests and viewpoints from those of the authorities and from those of others. |
| Table 2. LEVEL B: CONVENTIONAL LEVEL |
| Stage 3: Stage of interpersonal mutual expectations, relationships, and conformity. | Content: The right thing to do is to adopt a friendly attitude, showing interest in others and their feelings, maintaining loyalty and trust with colleagues, and being willing to follow the rules and expectations. Social perspective: Adopt the perspective of the individual in relation to other individuals: fulfill the "concrete golden rule" by putting yourself in other people's shoes. |
| Stage 4: Stage of maintenance of the social system and coexistence. | Content: The right thing to do is to fulfill one's duty in society, maintaining social order and supporting the well-being of society and the group. Social perspective: This stage differentiates the societal viewpoint from interpersonal agreements or motives. It adopts the system's point of view. |
| Table 3. LEVEL B/C: TRANSITIONAL LEVEL |
| This stadium is considered post-transitional, although still not of principle. Content: The choice is personal and subjective. It is based on emotions, and coexistence is considered arbitrary and relative. Social perspective: The perspective is that of an individual who stands outside of his own society and considers himself a subject who makes his decisions without a general commitment or social contract. |
| Table 4. LEVEL C: CONVENTIONAL AND PRINCIPLES LEVEL |
| Stage 5: Stage of priority rights and social contract or utility | Content: The right thing to do is to uphold the basic legal rights, values, and contracts of a society, even when they conflict with the specific rules and laws of the group. Social perspective: Priority to society |
| Stage 6: Stage of universal ethical principles | Content: It assumes being guided by universal ethical principles that all of humanity can follow. Social perspective: It adopts the perspective of the moral point of view from which social orderings derive, or on which they are based. |
Kohlberg views each stage as a structured whole that serves as a platform for the next. Therefore, individuals can only understand the morality of their own stage and those of the preceding stages. Moral development, he argues, is the result of logical development and the progressive assimilation of social roles.
EVOLUTION OF KOHLBERG'S THEORY
In 1973, anticipating methodological criticisms from his own colleagues, he set himself the task of achieving a more comprehensive reconciliation between the different stages of cognitive development described by Piaget and his theories on moral development. He also wished to deepen his understanding of the foundations that produced what was termed "regression" from the fourth stage to the second stage produced during the last stage of adolescence.
Table 5. Correspondence between cognitive development (Piaget) and moral development (Kohlberg)
| J. PIAGET | L. KOHLBERG |
|
Premoral stage Stage of moral realism Autonomous stage |
Preconventional Conventional Post-conventional |
Kohlberg ultimately subdivides Stage 5 into two substages with their own distinct characteristics. He maintains that there is no linear correspondence between cognitive development and moral development, an assertion that has subsequently been supported by some research. For example, it is known that the so-called "resistance to temptation," as well as post-transgression behavior, is related less to moral development than to the maturation of moral judgments. When there is inconsistency between moral theory and practice, it is due, according to Kohlberg, to factors that distort an appropriate correspondence. These factors include age, type of social relationships, type of beliefs, mental status, and different professions.
Kohlberg is criticized for giving excessive weight to cognitive-structural aspects at the expense of sociocultural and individual factors.
Due to input from some of his critics, he eventually changed his previously mentioned concept of "regression." He argued in favor of this evolutionary phenomenon, claiming it was a consequence of the adolescent's "internal inconsistency." He continued to view it as a period that fostered individualism, leading to relativism and moral agnosticism, with the individual abandoning their view of ethical objectivism. He asserted that the post-conventional level could only be reached around the age of 23 or 24.
Kohlberg's model has been shown to be non-universal, a fact that has ultimately been acknowledged. Much of this critical analysis comes from Carol Gilligan. This researcher highlighted the non-universality between men and women. According to her, women follow a different model with some particular characteristics. For example, women value responsibility more than legal norms; female morality is more of an ethic of responsibility, while in men, an ethic of conviction predominates. Finally, women are more inclined toward care and responsibility than men. For Gilligan, these differences are primarily due to social learning.
In short, it seems that an intellectual consensus has been reached insofar as it is accepted that Kohlberg would represent the structure necessary for moral judgment (judgments of duty), while Gilligan would represent the moral content (judgments of will).
OTHER CRITICISMS OF KOHLBERG'S THEORY
The most relevant criticism refers to those that question the veracity of its hierarchical model.
Kohlberg presented his model as an antidote, as a vaccine against indoctrination, both because of its defined structural cognitive development, and because of its Kantian vision of (universal) moral principles.
However, some argue that stages 5 (contractualist) and 6 (deontologist) do not correspond to cognitive structure but rather represent legal-moral behaviors. Gilligan, on the other hand, considers the "regressive" phenomenon to be simply another necessary stage for the subject's transition to ethical pluralism. Furthermore, some critics have accused him of "moving toward totality," viewing his model as an absolutization of a specific morality.
Finally, Habermas describes four gaps in Kohlberg's thinking:
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- Their description of stage 6 is incomplete.
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- The conceptual definition it makes about the logic of development is excessively decisive (overrated).
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- It takes very little into account environmental and interpersonal factors.
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- It does not delve into the psychodynamic aspects involved in moral judgment. (Which we will see in the next post).
