Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Development

Lawrence Kohlberg was a moral philosopher and student of child development who died in 1987. He was at one time, director of Harvard's Center for Moral Education. His special area of interest was the moral development of children how they develop a sense of right, wrong, and justice. Kohlberg observed that growing children advance through definite stages of moral development in a manner similar to their progression through Piaget's well-known stages of cognitive development. His observations and testing of children and adults, led him to theorize that human beings progress consecutively from one stage to the next in an invariant sequence, not skipping any stage or going back to any previous stage. These are stages of thought processing, implying qualitatively different modes of thinking and of problem solving at each stage.