Postconventional Moral Thinking

A Neo-kohlbergian Approach

James R. Rest, Darcia Narv ez, Stephen J. Thoma, Muriel J. Bebeau

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 1999
• ISBN:
  9781135705619
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Although Lawrence Kohlberg provided major ideas for psychological research in morality for decades, today some critics regard his work as outmoded, beyond repair, and too faulty for anybody to take seriously. These critics suggest that research would advance more profitably by taking a different approach. Postconventional Moral Thinking acknowledges particular philosophical and psychological problems with Kohlberg's theory and methodology, and proposes a reformulation called "Neo-Kohlbergian." Hundreds of researchers have reported a large body of findings after having employed Kohlberg's theory and methods to the Defining Issues Test (DIT), therefore attesting to the relevance of his ideas. This book provides a coherent theoretical overview for hundreds of studies that have used the DIT. The authors propose reformulations in the underlying psychological and philosophical theories. This book pulls together the analysis of criticisms of a Kohlbergian approach, a rationale for DIT research, and new theoretical ideas and new research.

1
Overview of Our Neo-Kohlbergian Approach

There have been numerous suggestions in the academic literature that Kohlberg’s approach to morality was so fundamentally wrong-headed and flawed that researchers in morality are better off starting anew. We disagree. Our neo-Kohlbergian approach contends that Kohlberg’s theory is still fruitful—although some problems warrant modification. In chapter 1, we present a condensed overview of our neo-Kohlbergian approach without developing the arguments for the points, and without citing evidence. The development of our argument is the burden of this whole book; in this chapter, we only present the gist of our approach.

Several core ideas of Kohlberg’s have guided our research:

• Emphasis on cognition. Kohlberg contended that the developing child was like a moral philosopher (Kohlberg, 1968) in trying to make conceptual sense of social experience, particularly in developing concepts of how it is possible to organize cooperation on a societywide level. In order to understand moral behavior, Kohlberg argued that we have to understand how the person is making sense of the world.
• The individual’s construction of moral epistemology. Kohlberg proposed that the basic categories of morality (such as “justice,” “duty,” “rights,” and “social order”) are self-constructed by the individual. This is to attribute activity in meaning-making to the individual, not viewing the individual as simply passively absorbing the ideology of one’s culture.
• Development. Kohlberg proposed that it is possible to talk about “advance,” whereby one set of concepts was more developed (higher is normatively “better”). All of the differences among people aren’t all equally defensible; some of the differences among people represent more comprehensive, more coherent, more elaborated— more developed—concepts. Furthermore, in broad terms (at least for a large number of people) the course of moral judgment development can be described as evolving from simpler ideas to more complex ideas.
• The shift from conventional to postconventional thinking. Kohlberg proposed that one of the major social cognitive developments in adolescence and young adulthood is the growing awareness of how people interrelate to each other through laws, rules, roles, and institutions—the “system” of a society. Furthermore, there develops a concern with the system’s morality. He described development in terms of conventional moral thinking (the morality of maintaining social norms because they are the way we do things) shifting to postconventional thinking (the morality that rules, roles, laws, and institutions must serve some shareable ideal of cooperation).

It is useful to see Kohlberg’s theory as primarily addressed to the formal structures of society (laws, roles, institutions, general practices) instead of to personal, face-to-face relationships in particular, everyday dealings with people. Just as in the field of economics a distinction is made between macroeconomics and microeconomics, so also it is useful to distinguish levels of phenomena in “macromorality” and “micromorality.” Macromorality concerns the formal structures of society that are involved in making cooperation possible at a society level (in which not just kin, friends, and long-known acquaintances are interrelated, but strangers, competitors, and diverse clans, ethnic groups, and religions are as well). Examples of the special concerns of macromorality include the rights and responsibilities of free speech, due-process rights of the accused, nondiscriminatory work practices, freedom of religion, and equity in economic and educational opportunity.

On the other hand, micromorality concerns developing relationships with particular others, and with an individual’s creating consistent virtues within him- or herself throughout everyday life. Examples of micromorality include displaying courtesy and helpfulness to those with whom one personally interacts; caring in intimate relationships; observing birthdays and other personal events of friends and family; being courteous while driving a car; being punctual for appointments; and generally acting in a decent, responsible, empathic way in one’s daily dealings with others (in contrast to being cantankerous, displaying road rage, being incommunicable, not carrying your share, being unreliable, and acting like a jerk).

In micromoral issues, what is praiseworthy is characterized in terms of unswerving loyalty, dedication, and partisan caring to special others. On the other hand, in macromorality, the praiseworthy response is characterized in terms of impartiality and acting on principle, instead of partisanship, favoritism, or tribalism. Both macro- and micromorality concern ways of constructing and enriching the web of relationships—one through the structures of society, and the other through personal, face-to-face relationships. To be sure, there is a tension between macromorality and micromorality, and there are many interconnections between the two. Our view is that Kohlberg’s theory is more illuminating of macroissues than of microissues.

Consider the context of the 1960s, when Kohlberg’s work became popular. At that time many young people were challenging the moral basis of American society, finding it too repressive at home and too imperialistic abroad. In addition, American society was purportedly materialistic, sexist, and racist. Many young people experimented with alternative lifestyles, including new work roles, alternative schools, self-supporting communes, and disdain for material goods. Hippies dramatized the question “Is society moral?” by answering it in the negative and advocating that people “drop out.” They said that American society was too corrupt to be worth joining.

Recall, too, that in the 1960s the issues that dominated the front pages of newspapers were macromoral ones: the Civil Rights movement, the student protests for free speech, the antiwar protests, and later, the Black Power and the women’s movements. Additionally, the United States had just gone through a period of ferocious anti-Communist McCarthyism in the 1950s. All these events made it important to understand what the ideal of social justice entailed, and thus made the focus of Kohlberg’s work relevant.

For instance, in the 1960s a highly controversial figure, Martin Luther King, Jr., was deliberately disobeying the law by marching in illegal places, sitting in illegal places, and eating in illegal places. George Wallace, then governor of Alabama, gained national attention by calling King a lawbreaker, just like other lawbreakers. Wallace argued that if the United States was a country of law and order, then King should be treated like others who break the law, such as bank robbers or purse snatchers. Entering the debate of King and Wallace, Kohlberg proposed that development in moral judgment was sequenced into three main levels: preconventional, conventional, and postconventional. Kohlberg said that King was to be distinguished from common criminals because he represented Postconventional morality, whereas George Wallace’s thinking was conventional (i.e., “law and order”). To many people, both in academic psychology and in the society at large, such a way of looking at the issues of social justice made sense. This book describes research with the Defining Issues Test (hereafter referred to as the DIT) that directly bears on Kohlberg’s theory. The viability of Kohlberg’s position depends on there being such a thing as a law-and-order orientation (in which conventionality defines what is moral), and evidence that there is a developmental progression from Conventionality to Postconventionality.

The DIT began life humbly in the 1970s as a “quick and dirty” multiple-choice alternative to Kohlberg’s time-consuming and complicated interview procedure. Since the 1970s, over 400 studies have been published (cited in chaps. 3 and 4). As findings accumulated, we began to reconsider some of Kohlberg’s theoretical points. Among the first to be modified was Kohlberg’s notion of “Piagetian hard stages” based on the staircase metaphor as the model of development. Instead, we argue for a model of development that represents upward movement in terms of gradually shifting distributions of the use and preference for more developed thinking. For us, development is not change one step at a time, but instead is the gradual increase of higher over lower forms of thinking.

Second, over the years many moral philosophers (e.g., Beauchamp & Childress, 1994; Walzer, 1983—the list could go on and on) have cast doubt on defining the developmental endpoint of morality in terms of the individual’s mental operations (and therefore have also cast doubt on Kohlberg’s definition of Stage 6 as “moral musical chairs”). Philosophical critics object to the view that the most advanced form of moral thinking was the individual’s cognitions, reflecting on his or her own mind, apart from the other people who may also be involved in the moral decision. Consider, for instance, the development of medical ethical guidelines for the discontinuance of life support systems in the case of Karen Quinlan. (Recall that Karen Quinlan was a young woman who had been in a tragic accident, was brain dead for years, and had been artificially kept alive in a hospital on life-support systems, without ever regaining consciousness.) Here, the peculiarities of institutional and societal circumstance—and the formation of consensus by medical, philosophical, legal, and political authorities—determine the “ethics” of such cases.

There has been a move within moral philosophy toward viewing morality as an inherently social phenomenon, embedded in the particular experiences and deliberations of a community. (The notion of an evolving “common morality” of a community entails this social character.) This view has implications for Kohlberg’s structure-content distinction, for the definition of postconventionality (and Stage 6 and Principled Morality), for the claim of cross-cultural universality, and for the place of debate and deliberation in a moral society. The social construction of morality is more consistent with Kohlberg’s discussions of the “just community” approach to moral education than with his discussions of the six-stage model of moral judgment development.

Third, we began to specify the limitations of a Kohlbergian theory—which aspects of morality it did not address. The distinction between macro- and micromorality has already been mentioned, with our neoKohlbergian theory applying more to macro- than to micromorality. Critics of Kohlberg claim that his stage sequence favors abstract, impartial principles over loyalty, friendship, and close relationships. Critics can cite the fact that Kohlberg’s Stage 3, defined in terms of seeking interpersonal concordance, is portrayed as developmentally primitive in contrast to Stage 6, which is defined in terms of abstract, impartial principles. Contrasts between Stage 3 and Stage 6 have been interpreted as implying that Kohlberg advocates loyalty to abstractions over loyalty to persons, noncommitment to personal relationship, and “being a rat” whenever pressured (e.g., Gates, 1998).

However, we interpret this as a consequence of the particular emphasis of his theory on macromorality issues. This is our interpretation: The conditions for establishing a societywide system of cooperation (cooperation among strangers, not only among friends) require impartiality and acting on shared ideals, not acting on behalf of our friends and kin. For instance, judges must act impartially, not giving favorable verdicts to kin and friends; an educational system that is supported by public money ought to benefit all the children (not only one’s favorites); in the health care system, decisions about who receives an organ donation must be governed by fairness principles, not favoritism. When seeking solutions to macromorality problems, Stage 3 interpersonal concordance is primitive. Favoritism to kin or friends, tribalism, and ethnic particularism are enemies of a state system of cooperation. The devastating ethnic/tribal warfare of Africa, Bosnia, and Ireland are examples of the insufficiency of Stage 3 concepts to solve problems of macromorality. Thus, we affirm that Stage 3 thinking is a primitive way of solving problems in macromorality; at the same time, we admit that Kohlbergian theory does not adequately cover micromorality issues.

Another limitation of Kohlberg’s six-stage theory is that it is cast at a very broad-gauge level of abstraction. For instance, the many issues that are the focus of discussions of professional ethics (e.g., confidentiality, due process, paternalism, informed consent, patient automony, surrogate decision making) are more concrete and specific than are Kohlbergian stages. And these concepts and issues are intermediate to the even more concrete codes of ethics that prescribe specific acts for professionals. Therefore, one must recognize that there are different levels of abstraction in moral reasoning, that Kohlberg’s characterizations deal with the broad level of society and institutions within it, and that a full representation of moral decision making must include more than Kohlbergian stages.

Furthermore, one must recognize that there is much more to the psychology of morality than moral judgment or Kohlbergian moral reasoning. For example, we refer to moral sensitivity, judgment, motivation, and character as four components in producing moral behavior. Different components are the starting points for different approaches to morality (psychoanalytic, social learning, various social psychology approaches; Rest, 1983). Although most researchers would agree that there is much diversity of constructs, processes, phenomena, and starting points for the psychology of morality, the greater challenge is to formulate how all these different parts fit together.

Fourth, we have found that schema theory—as used in contemporary social cognition research—offers many advantages over Kohlberg’s version of Piagetian stage theory. The moral judgment interview method has been assumed to provide a clear window into the moral mind. Contrary to assuming the face validity of interviews, researchers in cognitive science and social cognition contend that self-reported explanations of one’s own cognitive process have severe limitations. There is now a greater regard for the importance of implicit processes and tacit knowledge on human decision making that is outside the awareness of the cognizer and beyond the subject’s ability to verbally articulate. Schema theory is helpful in understanding how the DIT works. Because the DIT has produced reliable empirical findings, we can ask why it does work.

This is our current view: The DIT is a device for activating moral schemas (to the extent that a person has developed them) and for assessing them in terms of importance judgments. The DIT has dilemmas and standard items; the subject’s task is to rate and rank the items in terms of their moral importance. As the subject encounters an item that both makes sense and taps into his or her preferred schema, that item is rated and ranked as highly important. Alternatively, when the subject encounters an item that either doesn’t make sense or seems simplistic and unconvincing, the item receives a low rating and is passed over for the next item. The items of the DIT balance “bottom-up” processing (stating just enough of a line of argument to activate a schema) with “top-down” processing (stating not too much of a line of argument such that the subject has to fill in the meaning from schema already in the subject’s head). In the DIT, we are interested in knowing which schemas the subject brings to the task (are already in his or her head). Presumably, those are the schemas that structure and guide the subject’s thinking in decision making beyond the test situation.

Of what importance to our world today is research in moral judgment? It is no longer the 1960s, and Hippies have passed from the current scene. To give a short answer to an involved question, ruminate on this example: Some writers consider the greatest ideological clash since the cessation of the Cold War to be the polarization between fundamentalism and secular modernism. Marty and Appleby (1993) emphasized the international side of this ideological clash, stating that ideological disputes lead “to sectarian strife and violent ethnic particularisms, to skirmishes spilling over into border disputes, civil wars, and battles of secession” (p. 1). James D.

Hunter, in his book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (1991), described the ideological divide within the United States. Hunter used the terms orthodoxy and progressivism to define differences in ideologies that have very different conceptions of moral authority in society. Our research combines DIT scores with measures of political identification and religious attitudes to produce a measure of orthodoxy/progressivism. This combined score accounts for about two thirds of the variance of positions on divisive public policy issues (e.g., abortion, religion in public schools, rights of homosexuals, women’s roles, and free speech). We argue that understanding the development of moral judgment is crucial to understanding the great ideological divide between orthodoxy and progressivism.

In conclusion, this book summarizes a great body of empirical research (chaps. 3 and 4 cite over 400 published reports using the DIT), but is not simply a compilation of a huge and sprawling literature. Our aim goes beyond summarizing existing research studies. First, we take stock of the problems in Kohlberg’s own approach (noting them, analyzing them, and developing solutions to the problems). Then, in the course of working out solutions to these problems, we consider new theoretical reformulations (ranging from the stage concept itself and the definition of development to methodological issues) and propose modifications to the theory and methods. Third, we keep this theoretical work consistent with the vast number of research findings from DIT research collected by many people over 25 years. Doing all of these things simultaneously is the purpose of this book. The ensuing pages attempt to clarify the issues, present supporting arguments for our positions, integrate our perspective with existing psychological and philosophical views, and cite and summarize empirical findings.

Lest the reader get the wrong impression about our “reifying” the DIT, our intention is not to advocate the DIT as the ultimate solution to morality research. The constant references to DIT research are made in the service of having a consistent reference point and comparable database for a full cycle of research. Completing a full cycle has taken us much longer than anticipated (in the 1970s, we thought it would take a few years). However, having now completed a full cycle of research, we have better ideas for next steps. Now, various new areas are being studied (e.g., “intermediate concepts,” moral sensitivity, and comprehension of moral texts). A new DIT is now being piloted (DIT2): The new instrument updates the dilemmas and items (Heinz is retired from active duty; the Vietnam War is no longer referred to as a current event; long hair in high school is not an issue; and Asian-Americans are not referred to as “Orientals”). The instructions are streamlined and the new test is shorter than the original DIT. The new test is less stringent in purging unreliable subjects, allowing more subjects to survive the subject-reliability checks, and thus permitting experimenters to retain larger samples. The new test also uses our new method of indexing, the N2 index. Most important, however, DIT2 appears to be more valid, producing better trends than did the original DIT. There is much to be done with DIT2 (in part, checking out DIT2 in studies similar to those conducted with the original DIT), but the research with new instruments attests to our expectation of an ongoing and changing research program, not fixed on any one instrument.

2
Psychological and Philosophical Challenges to Kohlberg’s Approach

Kohlberg has had many critics, and he did try to reconcile his theory with many of its criticisms. Over his lifetime he made gigantic changes in his approach (see, especially, Kohlberg, 1984; 1986a; Kohlberg, Boyd, & Levine, 1990). Notably, he reformulated the stage definitions and his method of scoring; shifted his approach to moral education from a focus on individual cognitive growth through dilemma discussion to the focus on the formation of “just communities”; and narrowed the parameters of his six-stage theory, from all of moral reasoning to “the rational reconstruction of the ontogenesis of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• 1: Overview of Our Neo-Kohlbergian Approach
• 2: Psychological and Philosophical Challenges to Kohlberg’s Approach
• 3: A Neo-Kohlbergian Approach Based on the DIT
• 4: Validity and Reliability Studies of the DIT
• 5: New Issues, New Theory, New Findings
• 6: Stages or Schemas?
• 7: Integrating With the Domain Approach
• 8: Integrating With the Cultural Psychology Approach
• 9: Summary
• Appendix A
• Appendix B: Services and Materials Available From the Minnesota Center
• References
• About the Authors