In this video I describe Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of moral development and its 3 main stages: preconventional, conventional, and postconventional. I also provide a description of the Heinz dilemma and how different responses might be categorized into the levels of Kohlberg’s theory. Next I consider criticisms of Kohlberg’s approach as well as more recent ideas related to moral reasoning such as moral intuitions and the role of personal involvement in moral decision-making.
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Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is a Psych Exam Review. In this video we’re going to think about how we develop our systems of morals and our moral reasoning. This brings us to research by Lawrence Kohlberg conducted in the 1950s which posed ethical dilemmas to children and then asked them to give their justifications for why they made a particular choice. Based on his analysis of these different rationales to these ethical dilemmas Kohlberg proposed a stage based theory of moral development.
And this consisted of three main stages; preconventional, conventional, and postconventional morality. Each of these stages has two levels for a total of six levels. One of the dilemmas that Kohlberg posed to these young children is referred to as the “Heinz Dilemma“. so we’ll look at the Heinz dilemma here;
A woman was near death from a special kind of cancer there was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to produce. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman’s husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money but he could only get together about $1,000 which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later, but the druggist said no “I discovered the drug and I’m going to make money from it”. So Heinz got desperate and broke into the man’s laboratory to steal the drug for his wife. Should Heinz have broken into the laboratory to steal the drug for his wife, why or why not?
Now the important point here is that Kohlberg wasn’t so interested in whether the children said “yes he should steal the drug” or “no he shouldn’t”, he was interested in how they justified their answers. How did they back up their decision. He thought this could be used to place them into these different stages of moral development.
This first stage, called the preconventional stage, was focused on the consequences of Heinz’s actions. So at level one Kohlberg thought children mostly focused on punishment. They thought Heinz maybe shouldn’t steal the drug because he might get caught. He’ll go to jail, he’ll be punished, and so he shouldn’t do it. Or they could say he should do it because maybe he won’t be punished. He’ll get away with it. At level two we thought they were more focused on rewards. In other words, maybe Heinz should steal the drug because it will save his wife’s life and they’ll be happy together and so that will be great. And so he’s justified in stealing the drug; that would be an emphasis on the rewards.
Now at the next stage, the conventional stage, the focus was on societal approval. So at level 3, Kohlberg proposed this was mostly about conformity to group norms and social approval for one’s behavior. So at level 3 someone might say Heinz should steal the drug because that would make him a good husband, right? That’s how a husband should behave; he should do anything for his wife and so if her life is at risk he should do whatever it takes, right? That’s the expectation for Heinz, his behavior, and so that’s why he would be justified in stealing the drug.
Or at level 4 they might focus on rigid codes for a controlling behavior. You might say, well Heinz is not justified in stealing the drug because we need to have law and order, right? You can’t just run around doing whatever you want, even if it helps, you know, your family because if everybody does that then society will fall apart. And so law and order is important, and therefore Heinz is not justified. Or similarly we can have codes of conduct for behavior to focus on strict etiquette; that there are certain things that you just have to do in order to be a, you know, member of this society. And so maybe that’s going to cause Heinz to be justified in stealing the drug because he has to do anything for his wife because that’s what etiquette says, or maybe there’s rules saying he shouldn’t do it because you should not violate the law and that if you violate the law you’re a bad person. And therefore that means he should not steal a drug. So again the important point is not whether they think he should steal the drug or not, but how they explain that. Do they focus on things like law and order or strict etiquette or group norms or societal approval? And Kohlberg thought that most people fall into this conventional stage; that when challenged, people mostly fall back to what people should or shouldn’t do based on expectations or based on the order in society.
But he thought some people move beyond that to the postconventional stage. At this stage they’re focused on overall ethical principles. So at level 5 they might focus on things like a social contract or a public good. So you might say, well the laws only exist to protect people, and so if if he can protect somebody better by breaking the law then he’s justified in doing so. You know, that he’s going to save a life versus committing a small crime and therefore the public good is greater served by him violating the law rather than following it. That would be something at the level 5, where it recognizes maybe the flexibility in how laws are enforced. At level 6, Kohlberg thought people had a personal system that involved abstract ethical principles. So an explanation that this level 6 might be something like, you know, Heinz is not justified in stealing the drug because he shouldn’t get to decide who lives or dies. It’s not up to him, so he’s not stealing the drug from the druggist, he’s stealing the drug from somebody else who needs the medicine just as bad as his wife does. And so just because he loves his wife doesn’t mean he gets to essentially steal that drug from another potential patient. And so that might be a level 6 sort of system of ethical principles that need to be followed and would in this case say that Heinz shouldn’t steal the drug. Now again, the point is that these levels are not about being more or less moral, right? Because it doesn’t matter which answer somebody gives. It’s about how they think about the problem. It’s about the reasoning and the development in their reasoning.
Now criticisms of Kohlberg have suggested that his stage-based theory doesn’t take into account considerations for things like culture; that different societal expectations or different expectations for relationships will occur in different cultures and therefore people might give different types of explanations and maybe it’s not correct to place those into these conventional or postconventional stages. Similarly, Carol Gilligan proposed that his theory was androcentric; it was too focused on the way that men think about ethical problems and didn’t take into account that women might think differently about these types of problems. So Gilligan proposed that men are more oriented towards thinking about justice, whereas women might be more focused on relationships and empathy and that we need to take that into consideration. And that perhaps Kohlberg’s theory would unfairly prevent women from being placed in the postconventional category because they’re more focused on relationships and those might be considered to be conventional morality according to Kohlberg.
Now some more recent ways of thinking about morals and how we make moral decisions includes the idea of moral intuitions. This is something that’s been written about by Jonathan Haidt, and this is the idea that people don’t actually reason through when they make moral decisions. They actually go with their instincts; they go with their gut feelings for things. They have these moral intuitions, these emotional responses, and they have these feelings and then he thinks they use reasoning to justify those. So we have a reaction to something like, oh, he should or shouldn’t do this, and then we ask why then we use reasoning to try to justify.
Another way of thinking about this is the idea of system 1 and system 2 dual-processing theory and the idea that we have emotional reactions to things and then we have sort of rational, logical, slow ways of thinking about things. Research by Joshua Greene and colleagues has looked at how people respond to ethical dilemmas, whether they’re personal or abstract. What Greene and colleagues have found is that when people are asked ethical dilemmas that they’re personally involved in they tend to rely on emotional judgments; they go with their feelings. But when those same ethical dilemmas are posed in ways where the people are not personally involved, then they’re more likely to use logic and sort of rational thinking to try to come up with the explanations for behavior.
Ok, so those are a few ways of thinking about morality and moral development. I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!
