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 the Second World War, following his high school education, he decided to join the merchant marines. During his time as a sailor he helped Jews escaping Europe by smuggling them into Palestine.

After his service in the war he applied to the University of Chicago. He 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.

In 1968, being 40 years old and married with two children, he became a professor of education and social psychology at Harvard University. There he met and 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 started by beginning a new school within a school, called the Cluster School, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Cluster School ran as a "just community" where students and staff 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 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 took a day's leave from the hospital he was being treated at, drove to the coast, and drowned in the Atlantic Ocean. Rumors persist that he committed suicide. He was 59 years old. To this day Kohlberg's work is continued by his peers, friends, colleagues and students.

Work

Theory of moral development

Kohlberg is most well known for his theory of moral reasoning. Fascinated by Jean Piaget's work on moral development in children and adolescents, he developed his own interview technique. In what has become the classic method for studying moral reasoning, he presented a "moral dilemna" to 72 white adolescent boys in Chicago. This dilemna was presented in the form of a story about Heinz.

Heinz and the Drug
In Europe a woman was near death from a special kind of cancer.
There was one drug that 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 to make. He paid $200 for the radium and
charged $2,000 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 desparate and began
to think about breaking into the man's store to steal the drug for
his wife.
Should Heinz steal the drug?

Just community schools

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.

Legacy

Kohlberg's theory, research program, and educational practices expanded our conception of morality. Going beyond moral psychology, Kohlberg addressed the issues of justice, cross-cultural universality of moral judgment, moral education, and the relationship between moral judgment and action.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Garrod, Andrew (ed.). 1993. Approaches to Moral Development: New Research and Emerging Themes. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. ISBN 0807732478
• Schrader, Dawn (ed.). 1990. The Legacy of Lawrence Kohlberg. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Inc. ISBN 155542824X
• Reconstructing Larry: Assessing the Legacy of Lawrence Kohlberg
• PSYography: Lawrence Kohlberg

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