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Kohlberg's stages of moral development

Lawrence Kohlberg asked children and teenagers what a man should do when he cannot afford the drug that would save his wife. He cared very little about yes or no. He wanted the reason behind it.

Published November 3, 2026. 6 sources at the foot of the page.

What it says

Kohlberg's claim is that moral reasoning grows in a fixed order. A child starts by reading right and wrong off rules and consequences. Later the expectations of other people carry the weight. Later still, some people reason from principles they hold whatever the rule says.

There are three levels with two stages each. A person works up through them in order, one at a time, and most people stop part way. What moves is the kind of reason a person gives, not the answer they land on. Two people can both say the man should steal the drug and reason three stages apart.

The six stages

Each stage is a kind of reason, with the sort of thing a person at that stage says about the dilemma.

  1. Obedience and punishment

    Right means not getting caught. He should not steal it, because he would go to prison.

  2. What is in it for me

    Right means what pays, and favors are traded. He should steal it, because he wants his wife around.

  3. Fitting in

    Right means what the people close to you would approve of. A good husband would steal it.

  4. Law and order

    Right means keeping the system working for everyone. Stealing is wrong even for a good reason, because the rule holds for all of us.

  5. Social contract

    Rules are agreements we make, and a rule that costs a life can be changed. Life weighs more than property.

  6. Universal principles

    Right rests on principles like justice and the worth of a person, which hold even against the law.

Where it came from

The stages come out of Kohlberg's 1958 doctoral work at the University of Chicago. He interviewed 72 boys aged 10 to 16 in Chicago, gave each of them a set of moral dilemmas, and sorted the reasons rather than the choices. The best known dilemma is the one about Heinz and the drug.

He built the scheme on Jean Piaget's earlier work on how children think about rules. Where Piaget stopped in childhood, Kohlberg kept going. He and his colleagues followed part of the first group for twenty years and published that long study in 1983.

What holds up, and what does not

The order held up in the long study. Over twenty years people moved up a stage at a time, in sequence, and almost nobody slid back (Colby and colleagues, 1983). Stages 1 to 4 turn up in many countries. Stage 6 turned up so rarely that the standard scoring manual stopped scoring it at all.

Two criticisms stuck. Carol Gilligan argued in 1982 that the scheme was built from a sample of boys and scores reasoning about care and relationships below reasoning about justice. Later reviews found very small sex differences in stage scores (Walker, 1984). That weakened her reading of the data and left her point about what the measure values. The second criticism is simpler: how a person reasons about a dilemma predicts what they do only loosely (Blasi, 1980).

What it does not mean

A stage is not a grade for a person. The same person reasons at different stages on different problems, and reaching a late stage is no promise of decent behavior. Kohlberg measured the shape of an argument, not the worth of the one making it.

Check yourself

Three questions on what is above. Each answer says why.

  1. Pick the statement that describes what Kohlberg's stages measure.

    1. The choice a person makes in a moral dilemma
    2. The reasoning a person gives for a moral choice
    3. How often a person breaks a rule
    Show the answer

    Answer: B. The stages sort reasons. Two people who make the same choice can sit three stages apart, because the stage is read off the argument behind it.

  2. A reader says stealing the drug is wrong because the law has to hold for everyone, not only for people with a good reason. Which stage is that?

    1. Law and order
    2. Social contract
    3. What is in it for me
    Show the answer

    Answer: A. Stage 4 reasons from keeping the system working for all. Stage 5 would answer that a rule costing a life can be changed.

  3. Which of these is the criticism Gilligan made in 1982?

    1. The stages are not in a fixed order
    2. The scheme was built from a sample of boys and ranks care below justice
    3. People move down the stages as often as up
    Show the answer

    Answer: B. Gilligan's argument was about what the measure values and who it was built from. The long study found the order itself was stable.

Sources

  1. Kohlberg, L. (1958). The development of modes of moral thinking and choice in the years ten to sixteen. Doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago.
  2. Kohlberg, L. (1981). Essays on Moral Development, Volume 1: The Philosophy of Moral Development. Harper and Row.
  3. Colby, A., Kohlberg, L., Gibbs, J., and Lieberman, M. (1983). A longitudinal study of moral judgment. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 48(1 to 2).
  4. Gilligan, C. (1982). In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. Harvard University Press.
  5. Walker, L. J. (1984). Sex differences in the development of moral reasoning: A critical review. Child Development, 55(3).
  6. Blasi, A. (1980). Bridging moral cognition and moral action: A critical review of the literature. Psychological Bulletin, 88(1).

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