Lawrence Kohlberg

Introduction

Lawrence Kohlberg (October 25, 1927 to January 1987) was an American psychologist who turned the study of moral judgment into a field of its own. Working in the tradition of Jean Piaget, he argued that children do not merely absorb the rules handed down by adults but actively construct successively more adequate ways of reasoning about justice, and he set out to describe those ways as an invariant sequence of stages. His six-stage model, his Moral Judgment Interview and the Heinz dilemma became fixtures of developmental psychology textbooks, and in a quantitative ranking of eminence that combined journal citations, textbook coverage and survey nominations, Haggbloom and colleagues placed him thirtieth among twentieth-century psychologists.

Kohlberg was also unusual in the breadth of his ambitions. He treated moral development as an educational and civic project as much as a scientific one, helping to build "just community" schools and prison programmes in which participants governed themselves through democratic deliberation. Both halves of that legacy have been contested. His stage sequence has been criticised as culturally biased, as gender-biased and as a weak guide to how people actually behave, and few claims in developmental science have been argued over as long as his claim to universality.

Early Life and Education

Kohlberg was born in Bronxville, New York, the youngest of four children of Alfred Kohlberg, a German-Jewish textile importer, and Charlotte Albrecht, a Christian German chemist. His parents separated when he was four and divorced when he was fourteen; between 1933 and 1938 the children rotated between the two households for six months at a time.

He attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and at the end of the Second World War, aged eighteen, joined the United States Merchant Marine. He served on a ship run by the Zionist Haganah that carried Jewish refugees from Romania toward Mandatory Palestine through the British blockade, was captured by the British and held in an internment camp in Cyprus, and escaped with members of his crew. He was in Palestine during the fighting of 1948 but refused to take part, lived for a time on a kibbutz and returned to the United States that year. The episode left him with the question that organised his career: under what conditions is it morally right to disobey the law and the authorities who enforce it.

Enrolling at the University of Chicago, where course credit could be earned by examination, he completed a bachelor's degree in about a year and then began doctoral study in psychology, finishing in 1958 with a dissertation on the development of modes of moral thinking and choice in the years from ten to sixteen. As a graduate student he read Piaget's work on children's moral judgment and found in it a way of studying morality as reasoning rather than as internalised training; he also drew on the Chicago traditions associated with George Herbert Mead and John Dewey. His dissertation has often been described as one of the most cited unpublished dissertations in the discipline.

Academic and Professional Career

Kohlberg's first academic post was at Yale University, where he was an assistant professor of psychology in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He then spent a year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, moved to the University of Chicago as assistant and later associate professor of psychology and human development, and held a visiting appointment at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1967 and 1968. In 1968 he joined the Harvard faculty as professor of education and social psychology, where he remained until his death and where he established the Center for Moral Education.

His empirical programme was deliberately long-term. The boys interviewed for his dissertation were reinterviewed at intervals over roughly two decades, and from the 1960s onward he and his colleagues ran parallel studies in Turkey, Mexico, Taiwan, Yucatan, Kenya, Honduras, New Zealand and Israel, including a comparison of kibbutz-reared and city-reared adolescents begun after his 1969 visit. In 1971, while doing cross-cultural work in Belize, he contracted a parasitic infection that produced recurrent abdominal pain, nausea and fatigue for the remaining sixteen years of his life and was accompanied by depression.

In January 1987, after a severe depressive episode, Kohlberg was a patient in the psychiatric unit of Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge. On January 17 he took a day pass, drove to Winthrop, Massachusetts, and left his wallet and jacket in his unlocked car on a dead-end street facing the water. The car was found within days; his body was recovered from Boston Harbor near the end of a Logan Airport runway in April, with the late winter thaw. He was fifty-nine.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The Moral Judgment Interview and the Heinz dilemma

Kohlberg's central method was a semi-structured interview in which participants were read short fictional dilemmas and asked not only what should be done but why. The best known, the Heinz dilemma, asks whether a husband should steal an unaffordable drug to save his dying wife. Scoring attended to the structure of the justification rather than to the choice, on the grounds that the same act can be defended from radically different moral logics. He also codified this into increasingly formal manuals, culminating in the Standard Issue Scoring system prepared with Anne Colby and published in 1987.

Six stages in three levels

Kohlberg grouped moral reasoning into three levels of two stages each. At the preconventional level, Stage 1 orients to obedience and the avoidance of punishment, and Stage 2 to self-interest and instrumental exchange. At the conventional level, Stage 3 orients to interpersonal accord and being a "good boy" or "good girl", and Stage 4 to maintaining authority and the social order. At the postconventional level, Stage 5 reasons from social contract and individual rights, and Stage 6 from universal ethical principles arrived at by reversible, prescriptive reasoning. He claimed the sequence was invariant, that stages could not be skipped, and that movement was driven by cognitive disequilibrium when existing reasoning proved inadequate.

Universality claims

Kohlberg held that the sequence, though not the content, was universal, and that later stages were philosophically more adequate because they resolved a wider range of moral conflicts. This claim, elaborated in his "From Is to Ought" essay, deliberately bridged descriptive psychology and normative philosophy and drew on Kant and Rawls as well as Plato.

Moral education and the just community

Kohlberg rejected what he called the "bag of virtues" approach to character education, on the grounds that no two authorities agreed on what belonged in the bag. In its place he proposed moral discussion of real dilemmas and, more ambitiously, the just community school, in which students and staff shared democratic governance. Evaluations of just community programmes, published by Clark Power and Ann Higgins with Kohlberg in 1989, reported gains in moral atmosphere and reductions in misbehaviour.

Major Publications

  • Kohlberg, L. (1958). The Development of Modes of Moral Thinking and Choice in the Years 10 to 16 (doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago).
  • Kohlberg, L. (1969). Stage and sequence: The cognitive-developmental approach to socialization. In D. Goslin (Ed.), Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research.
  • Kohlberg, L. (1976). Moral stages and moralization: The cognitive-developmental approach. In T. Lickona (Ed.), Moral Development and Behavior: Theory, Research, and Social Issues.
  • Kohlberg, L. (1981). Essays on Moral Development, Volume 1: The Philosophy of Moral Development.
  • Kohlberg, L. (1984). Essays on Moral Development, Volume 2: The Psychology of Moral Development.
  • Kohlberg, L., Levine, C., & Hewer, A. (1983). Moral Stages: A Current Formulation and a Response to Critics.
  • Colby, A., & Kohlberg, L. (1987). The Measurement of Moral Judgment (Volumes 1 and 2).
  • Power, F. C., Higgins, A., & Kohlberg, L. (1989). Lawrence Kohlberg's Approach to Moral Education.

Impact and Legacy

Kohlberg's framework made moral reasoning a legitimate empirical object at a time when behaviourism and psychoanalysis mostly explained morality as internalisation, and it generated several research programmes that outlived him: James Rest's Defining Issues Test, Elliot Turiel's social domain theory and Larry Nucci's work on the moral, conventional and personal domains all grew out of engagement with his questions. Just community ideas persist in moral and civic education, and the stage language remains common in professional ethics training.

The criticisms are equally substantial, and Kohlberg and his successors answered them at length.

Gender. Carol Gilligan, his Harvard colleague, argued in In a Different Voice (1982) that a theory built on an all-male sample encoded a justice-and-rights orientation as the developmental endpoint and coded care and relational responsibility as less mature; Kohlberg's own published remarks did place women, more often than men, at Stage 3. Gilligan's own account of that debate is more conciliatory than her reputation suggests: she resisted being cast as a critic and argued that her work enlarged the domain rather than refuted it, and Kohlberg, by several scholarly reconstructions, treated care as a complement to justice rather than a rival. On the empirical question, later meta-analytic work, including that of Jaffee and Hyde in 2000, found no reliable sex differences when men and women were scored with Kohlberg's criteria, and critics such as Christina Hoff Sommers charged that Gilligan's own data were thin. The sampling criticism, however, stands on its own: seventy-two boys from a single American city, aged ten to sixteen, were the empirical base of the original model.

Stage Six has since been defended by being reinterpreted. Michele Moody-Adams used the 2024 Kohlberg Memorial Lecture, delivered at the fiftieth conference of the Association for Moral Education and published in the Journal of Moral Education (2025, 54(2): 133–147), to argue that the most familiar criticism misreads the theory's endpoint: on her reading Stage Six is not the application of Kantian principle at all but “humane regard” — respect for human agency combined with concern for the human capacity to suffer — which makes the charge that Kohlberg ranked justice above care a misreading rather than a refutation. Her verdict on the rest of the theory is harsher. She argues that Kohlberg never showed the study of moral theory to be a prerequisite of moral maturity, that he failed to appreciate what sympathetic imagination does in deepening moral understanding, strengthening moral affect and engaging the will, and that he produced no compelling evidence that the path to maturity is linear, invariant or hierarchically ordered. The line the lecture draws — the endpoint is defensible, the staircase is not — is a fair summary of where the debate now sits.

Culture. John Snarey's 1985 review of forty-five studies conducted in twenty-seven cultures supported the claim that progression through the early stages is widespread and that stage skipping and regression are rare, and Snarey concluded that the evidence base for cross-cultural testing was more extensive than for any other developmental theory. But he also found that Stage 5 was extremely rare and largely confined to urban, industrialised, Western-influenced samples, that no tribal or folk society in his sample showed postconventional reasoning, and that the higher-stage descriptions rested on Kant, Rawls and Western liberal philosophy. Richard Shweder and his colleagues, working in India, reported that Hindu children and adults did not draw the moral or conventional distinction Kohlberg's theory requires and rated some purity violations as more serious than harms; Jonathan Haidt, Silvia Koller and Maria da Graça Dias reported comparable findings in Brazil. Shweder's charge was that the model is not culturally neutral but a ranking device that places individualist, Enlightenment moralities at the top. Kohlberg's standing reply was that his stages describe underlying modes of reasoning, not beliefs, and that cultures inculcate different content at different rates; neo-Kohlbergians such as Turiel and Nucci responded with evidence that even young children distinguish moral from conventional transgressions across cultures.

Method. Critics have questioned whether hypothetical dilemmas have any ecological validity, whether moral reasoning predicts moral behaviour, and whether the Moral Judgment Interview has adequate reliability and standardisation, an early and influential version of this critique coming from Kurtines and Greif in 1974. Jonathan Haidt's social intuitionism pushed further, arguing that moral judgments are typically intuitive and that the reasons people give are post hoc rationalisations, so that the reasoning Kohlberg measured may be a poor guide to moral action. A related worry concerns stage regression: follow-up data at the twelve-year point showed some participants moving from Stage 4 to Stage 2, and Kohlberg and his colleagues responded by revising the scoring manual so that each stage was defined as higher than its predecessor, a move critics read as protecting the theory from falsification. Kohlberg himself had already scaled back claims about Stage 6, which clear empirical examples never supported and which the later scoring system effectively set aside. Defenders point to the longitudinal work of Anne Colby and colleagues, which tracked invariant sequence within the original sample over twenty years.

The death. A persistent story has grown around Kohlberg's final months. Because nearly three months separated his disappearance from the recovery of his body, and because Winthrop police had declared no official cause of death while colleagues told reporters they suspected suicide, sources differ on the date, given variously as January 17 and January 19, 1987, and on the manner. Many textbooks and websites assert suicide as established fact, and a smaller literature reframes the ending as accidental or as a direct result of the Belize infection. What is documented is the disappearance, the abandoned car and the recovery of the body. The popular habit of turning that ending into a moral fable about his own theory adds nothing supported by the record.

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References

  • Kohlberg, L. (1981). Essays on Moral Development: Vol. 1. The Philosophy of Moral Development. Harper & Row.

Last updated: 2026-10-20

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