Mediated Moralities: Sociocultural Approaches to Moral Development

The purpose of this chapter is to present a sociocultural perspective on the study of moral development, and to review theoretical and empirical work on moral development that has been conducted under the rubric of this perspective. This perspective has emerged over the course of the last decade or so, in response to a variety of challenges to prevailing theories of moral development—in particular, challenges to Kohlberg’s (1963, 1969, 1976, 1981, 1984) stage theory of the development of justice reasoning. There is no doubt that researchers and practitioners interested in understanding the vicissitudes of human moral experience owe a singular debt to Kohlberg for bringing the study of moral development into the mainstream of developmental and educational psychology, and his theory is arguably still the best-known theory of moral development. Yet the past 25 years have witnessed a growing awareness of the metatheoretical, theoretical, and methodological limitations of Kohlberg’s cognitive–developmental attempt to formally reconstruct the ontogenesis of competence in moral judgment making, via a sequence of six structurally defined, cross-culturally universal stages of justice reasoning. Among the many and varied critiques of, and challenges to, Kohlberg’s project (see, for example, Coles, 1986; Cortese, 1990; Flanagan, 1991; Packer, 1985, 1992; Shweder, 1982; Sullivan, 1977; Turiel, 1983, 2002), the most significant have come from those who have argued that Kohlberg’s approach does not sufficiently acknowledge the multidimensional and multivocal nature of the moral domain. In this regard Gilligan’s (1977, 1982) critique that classical theories of moral development—Freud’s (1923/1960), Piaget’s (1932/1965), and, most importantly, Kohlberg’s—are flawed because they systematically excluded girls’ and women’s experience from foundational theory-building research studies is most widely known. Gilligan claimed that, for some people, an orientation other than the “justice