Moral Stage Theory

The history of science will record the latter decades of the twentieth century as the apotheosis of the cognitive–developmental tradition in developmental psychology. This tradition has its obvious source in Piaget’s genetic epistemology and in his remarkable research program on the ontogenesis of children’s logicomathematical and scientific reasoning. But the extension of the tradition’s influence to matters of socialization, and to domains of social cognitive development, owe as much to the work of Lawrence Kohlberg and his colleagues. Piaget (1932/1965) did, of course, pioneer the study of moral judgement in children, yet it was Kohlberg’s work that galvanized a whole generation of scholars to pursue the developmental features of moral reasoning in its several sociomoral manifestations, and to explore the implications of sociomoral development for educational (e.g., Power, Higgins, & Kohlberg, 1989) and clinical (e.g., Selman, 1980) practice. Indeed, no developmental psychologist trained in the 1970s and 1980s could safely enter the professional guild without close study of two seminal papers, “Stage and Sequence” (Kohlberg, 1969) and “From Is to Ought” (Kohlberg, 1971). These chapters are the twin pillars on which rest the theoretical aspirations of the cognitive–developmental approach to morality and socialization. Here Kohlberg attempted to show not only that the cognitive–developmental approach was a progressive problem shift over rival accounts (maturationism, associationism, psychoanalysis) of socialization, but that the “doctrine of cognitive stages” (Kohlberg, 1969, p. 352) could also provide the resources to resolve fundamental problems in ethical theory, such as the problem of ethical relativism and how to defeat it. The scope of the doctrine—its range of application and sheer audacity— defined the problematic of its time and established the terms of debate over fundamental developmental questions that still resonate today, if only in vestigial forms. And yet to speak of an apotheosis that is now past, and of an era in moral psychology that is post-Kohlberg, is to suggest that something has happened to the status of moral stage