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Lawrence Kohlberg, who was born in 1927, grew up in Bronxville, New York, and attended the Andover Academy in Massachusetts, a private high school for bright and usually wealthy students. He did not go immediately to college, but instead went to help the Israeli cause, in which he was made the Second Engineer on an old freighter carrying refugees from parts of Europe to Israel. After this, in 1948, he enrolled at the University of Chicago, where he scored so high on admission tests that he had to take only a few courses to earn his bachelor's degree. This he did in one year. He stayed on at Chicago for graduate work in psychology, at first thinking he would become a clinical psychologist. However, he soon became interested in Piaget and began interviewing children and adolescents on moral issues in 1958. The result was his doctoral study, the first rendition of his new stage theory. Kohlberg's core sample was comprised of 72 boys, from both middle- and lower-class families in Chicago. They were ages 10, 13, and 16. Kohlberg analyzed the answers to the following question: In Europe, a woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the 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 him 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 desperate and broke into the man's store to steal the drug-for his wife. Should the husband have done that? (Kohlberg, 1963, p. 19) Kohlberg was not really interested in whether the subject said "yes" or "no" to this dilemma but in the reasoning behind the answer. The interviewer wanted to know why the subject thought Heinz should or should not have stolen the drug. The interview schedule then asked new questions which help one understand the child's reasoning. For example, children were asked if Heinz had a right to steal the drug, if he was violating the druggist's rights, and what sentence the judge should give him once he was caught. Once again, the main concern was with the reasoning behind the answers. The interview then proceeded on to give more dilemmas in order to get a good sampling of a subject's moral thinking. The interviews with different individual boys helped Kohlberg develop his theory which consisted of six stages. At stage 1, children think of what is right as that which authority says is right. Doing the right thing is obeying authority and avoiding punishment. At stage 2, children are no longer so impressed by any single authority; they see that there are different sides to any issue. Since everything is relative, one is free to pursue one's own interests, although it is often useful to make deals and exchange favors with others. At stages 3 and 4, young people think as members of the conventional society with its values, norms, and expectations. At stage 3, they emphasize being a good person, which basically means having helpful motives toward people close to one At stage 4, the concern shifts toward obeying laws to maintain society as a whole. At stages 5 and 6 people are less concerned with maintaining society for it own sake, and more concerned with the principles and values that make for a good society. At stage 5 they emphasize basic rights and the democratic processes that give everyone a say, and at stage 6 they define the principles by which agreement will be most just. Once Kohlberg had classified the various responses into stages, he wanted to know whether his classification was reliable. In particular, he wanted to know if others would score the protocols in the same way. Other judges independently scored a sample of responses, and he calculated the degree to which all raters agreed. Kohlberg found these agreements to be high, as he has in his subsequent work. Kohlberg maintained that his stages were not the product of maturation. That is, the stage structures and sequences did not simply unfold according to a genetic blueprint. His stages were also not the product of socialization. That is, socializing agents (e.g., parents and teachers) did not directly teach new forms of thinking. Indeed, it was difficult to imagine them systematically teaching each new stage structure in its particular place in the sequence. “The stages emerge, instead, from our own thinking about moral problems. Social experiences do promote development, but they do so by stimulating our mental processes. As we get into discussions and debates with others, we find our views questioned and challenged and are therefore motivated to come up with new, more comprehensive positions. New stages reflect these broader viewpoints” (Kohlberg et al., 1975). We might imagine, for example, a young man and woman discussing a new law. The man says that everyone should obey it, like it or not, because laws are vital to social organization (stage 4). The woman notes, however, that some well-organized societies, such as Nazi Germany, were not particularly moral. The man therefore sees that some evidence contradicts his view. He experiences some cognitive conflict and is motivated to think about the matter more fully, perhaps moving a bit toward stage 5. Kohlberg also sometimes spoke of change occurring through role-taking opportunities, opportunities to consider others' viewpoints (e.g., 1976). As children interact with others, they learn how viewpoints differ and how to coordinate them in cooperative activities. As they discuss their problems and work out their differences, they develop their conceptions of what is fair and just. Whatever the interactions are specifically like, they work best, Kohlberg says, when they are open and democratic. Fewer children feel pressured simply to conform to authority, the freer they are to settle their own differences and formulate their own ideas. Kohlberg's scale has to do with moral thinking, not moral action. As everyone knows, people who can talk at a high moral level may not behave accordingly. Consequently, we would not expect perfect correlations between moral judgment and moral action. Still, Kohlberg thought that there should be some relationship. As a general hypothesis, he proposed that moral behavior was more consistent, predictable, and responsible at the higher stages (Kohlberg et al., 1975), because the stages themselves increasingly employed more stable and general standards. After Kohlberg established his theory of moral reasoning, he started to teach in 1962 at the University of Chicago in the Committee on Human Development, further extending his time with academia. In 1968, being 40 years old and married with two children, he became a professor of education and social psychology at Harvard University. 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 start by beginning a new school called the Cluster School within Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School. The Cluster School ran as a 'just community' where students 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 one 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 19, 1987, he got a day's leave from the Massachusetts hospital where he was being treated, drove to the coast, and committed suicide by drowning himself in the Atlantic Ocean. He was 59 years old. Kohlberg, a follower of Piaget, has offered a new, more detailed stage sequence for moral thinking. Whereas Piaget basically found two stages of moral thinking, the second of which emerges in early adolescence, Kohlberg uncovered additional stages which develop well into adolescence and adulthood. He suggested that some people even reach a post conventional level of moral thinking where they no longer accept their own society as given but think reflectively and autonomously about what a good society should be. Kohlberg's accomplishment is great. He has studied the development of moral reasoning as it might work its way toward the thinking of the great moral philosophers. Kohlberg suggests that if children engage in enough independent thinking, they will eventually begin to formulate conceptions of rights, values, and principles by which they evaluate existing social arrangements. Perhaps some will even advance to the kinds of thinking that characterize some of the great moral leaders and philosophers who have at times advocated civil disobedience in the name of universal ethical principles. So, although few people may ever begin to think about moral issues, Kohlberg has nonetheless provided us with a challenging vision of what development might be.