Lawrence Kohlberg

Lawrence Kohlberg (October 25, 1927 - January 19, 1987) was born in Bronxville, New York. He served as a professor at the University of Chicago as well as Harvard University. He is famous for his work in moral education, reasoning, development. Being a close follower of Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development, Kohlberg's work reflects and perhaps even extends his predecessor's work. This work is further extended and modified by such scholars like Carol Gilligan.

Life

Lawrence Kohlberg grew up in a wealthy family and attended Phillips Academy, a private and renowned high school. During World War II following his high school education he enlisted and became an engineer on carrier ship. On that ship he and his shipmates decided to aid Jews escaping Europe to Palestine. They accomplished this by smuggling them in banana crates that were secretly beds, fooling government inspectors that formed the British blockade to the region.

After his service in the war he applied to the University of Chicago in 1948. He tested extremely high on his entrance, and received his bachelor's degree in psychology in just one year. Kohlberg stayed in the University of Chicago for his graduate work, becoming facsinated with children's moral reasoning and the earlier works of Jean Piaget and others. He wrote his doctoral dissertation there in 1958, outlining what is now his stages of moral development.

Kohlberg then taught in 1962 at the University of Chicago in the Committee on Human Development, further extending his time with academia. In 1968, being 40 years old and married with two children, he became a professor of education and social psychology at Harvard University. This is also the year he befriended Carol Gilligan, a colleague and critic of his moral development stage theory.

During a visit to Israel in 1969, Kohlberg journeyed to a kibbutz and was shocked to discover how much more the youths' moral development had progressed compared to those who were not part of kibbutzim. Jarred by what he saw, he decided to rethink his current research and start by beginning a new school called the Cluster School within Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School. The Cluster School ran as a 'just community' where students had a basic and trustworthy relationship with one another, using democracy to make all the school's decisions. Armed with this model he started similar 'just communities' in other schools and even one in a prison.

Kohlberg contracted a tropical disease in 1971 while doing cross-cultural work in Belize. As a result, he struggled with depression and physical pain for the following 16 years. On January 19th he got a day's leave from the hospital he was being treated at, drove to the coast, and committed suicide by drowning himself in the Atlantic Ocean. He was 59 years old. To this day Kohlberg's work is continued by his peers, friends, colleagues and students.

Work

An ethical relationship, in most theories of ethics that employ the term, is a basic and trustworthy relationship that one has to another human being, that cannot necessarily be characterized in terms of any abstraction other than trust and common protection of each other's body. Honesty is very often a major focus.

Usually the most basic of these relationships studied is that between the mother and child, and second most basic is between sexual partners — the focus of feminism and Queer theory respectively, where relationships are central. Family role theory extends this to study paternalistic, maternalistic and sibling roles, and postulates that one's later relationships are formed largely in order to fill the roles one has grown to find comfortable as part of one's family environment - the family of origin thus setting pattern for the family of choice.

As contrasted to theories of ethics that derive from social dispute resolution, or the meta-ethics as defined in Western moral philosophy, ethical traditions emphasizing abstract moral codes expressed in some language with some judgemental hierarchy, ethical relationship theories tend to emphasize human development. Thus they focus on unequal power and such matters as sexual honesty, marital commitment, child-raising, and responsibility to conduct such essential body and care matters as toilet training, weaning, forming attitudes to sexuality and to masturbation. Failures to consider consequences of teachings or examples set in these matters is disastrous, as it leads to failures of the most fundamental relationship any person has: to their own body, shame in it, pride in it, care for it, and etc. Care and concern for other's bodies follows.

No ethical tradition has failed to prescribe at least some rules for the conduct of such relationships.

Carol Gilligan famously championed the role of relationships as central to moral reasoning, and superior as a basis for understanding human choices than any prior linguistic or meta-ethical concept. Lawrence Kohlberg, her colleague famous for work on moral development as a part of human development, had reservations, but eventually joined her in starting a descriptive ethics of relationship conduct in what they called the ethical community or just community: This was in effect a community of practice which, at least in Kohlberg's conception, had a core epistemic community of those trusted to define and resolve the disputes between members, and to facilitate the growth of moral development: not only in children, but prisoners and others. Their democratic educational interventions are still the standard against which all work in ethical relationship psychology is measured. However they did not reconcile the different approaches to moral development they took to the project, rather, they played quite different roles in the interventions.

Donald R. C. Reed, whose Following Kohlberg: Liberalism and the Practice of Democratic Community, 1998, outlined the extension of these principles to that of deliberative democracy, claims that "During the four years following publication of Gilligan's In a Different Voice, (1982), Kohlberg and Gilligan both revised their accounts of moral development so that they converged far more than is commonly recognized." He argues for "extending this convergence to include the understanding developed in the just community projects."

There is also potential for application of these methods to ethical tradition. Kohlberg's student Burton Visotzky, for instance, in The Genesis of Ethics, 1997, applied the relationship approach to Ethics in the Bible. The book focuses on the choices and interactions of major characters in the Book of Genesis. Visotzky exploits much of the Talmudic, midrash and magisterium, demonstrating that these Jewish theological traditions too had often focused on the ethical relationship, not only between Man and God, but between others in one's family, tribe or community.

Mohandas Gandhi, Confucius, Menno Simons and Baruch Spinoza are examples of figures in moral philosophy and political philosophy who focused first and foremost on the ethical choices made in the actual framing and encounter of moral interventions. Greens and New Confucians are two examples of modern movements that are derived in part from relational traditions.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Reconstructing Larry: Assessing the Legacy of Lawrence Kohlberg
• [http://faculty.frostburg.edu/mbradley/psyography/kohlberg.html PSYography: Lawrence Kohlberg

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