Psychologists / developmental
Lawrence Kohlberg
United States 1927-10-25 ~ 1987-01-17
American psychologist (1927-1987) who extended Piaget to moral judgment, proposing six stages from preconventional to postconventional. Known for the Heinz dilemma and Just Community Schools, critiqued by Carol Gilligan.
What You Can Learn
Kohlberg's stages remain the hidden basis of business-ethics, legal and medical training. Compliance from fear sits at stage one; obeying the letter of the law is stage four; whistleblowing reasoning is stage five or six. The map guides ethics program design. For investors, asking which level your judgment runs at — fear of penalty, in-group consensus, or universal principle — is a defense against fads. Caveat: Haidt's work shows moral judgment is intuition first, reasoning later.
Words That Resonate
Moral development continues throughout the life span, even spawning dialogue of philosophical implications of such research.
The Heinz dilemma exposes not the choice a person makes, but the structure of reasoning that justifies the choice.
Right action tends to be defined in terms of general individual rights and standards which have been critically examined and agreed upon by the whole society.
The aim of education should be development.
Only by settling our differences with other members of the group can we actually understand the shortcomings of our own beliefs.
Life & Legacy
Lawrence Kohlberg was born on 25 October 1927 in Bronxville, New York. His parents separated when he was four and divorced when he was fourteen. After Phillips Academy he served in the Merchant Marine at the end of World War II, shipping with the Haganah on a vessel smuggling Jewish refugees from Romania to Palestine. Captured on Cyprus, he escaped, and was in Palestine during the 1948 fighting but refused to take up arms.
In 1948 he entered the University of Chicago, earned his BA in a single year by examination, and took a PhD there in 1958. His dissertation followed boys aged 10-16 in their developing moral reasoning — an unusual topic that took five years to publish. He absorbed Piaget's The Moral Judgment of the Child (1932). He taught at Yale, returned to Chicago, and from 1968 was Professor of Education and Social Psychology at Harvard.
His method was the Moral Judgment Interview built around the Heinz dilemma — should a man steal an expensive drug to save his dying wife? He scored not the choice but the structure of reasoning, classifying it into six stages across three levels: preconventional (punishment, instrumental), conventional (interpersonal, law-and-order), postconventional (social contract, universal principles). A twelve-year longitudinal study of 72 Chicago boys, later extended to Mexico, Turkey and Taiwan, was the empirical core. James Rest's Defining Issues Test (1979) operationalized it into a multiple-choice instrument.
He proposed moral exemplars (Socrates, King, Lincoln), dilemma discussions, and the Just Community School, a democratic program piloted from 1974 where students and teachers each had one vote. The sharpest critique came from Carol Gilligan in In a Different Voice (1982): his male sample masked a different, care-based moral development among women. He conceded care and justice are distinct but disputed the gender gap. After a tropical infection in Belize in 1971 he suffered for sixteen years, dying on 17 January 1987.
Expert Perspective
Kohlberg bridged Piaget's cognitive psychology to ethics and founded the cognitive-developmental tradition of late 20th-century moral psychology. Alongside Erikson and Vygotsky he is a major developmentalist, with deepest impact in education. The work of Rest, Turiel and Haidt all responds to him.
