Role of Reasoning

Kohlberg expanded Piaget’s theory by investigating how people reasoned
the rightness or wrongness of an act and not how people actually behaved.
For example, Kohlberg proposed the following moral dilemma. A man named Heinz had a wife who was dying from a disease that could be cured
with a drug manufactured by a local pharmacist. The drug was expensive to
make, but the druggist was charging ten times the amount it cost. Heinz
could not afford the drug and pleaded with the man to discount the drug or
let him pay a little at a time. The druggist refused, so Heinz broke into the
pharmacy and stole the drug for his wife. Should Heinz have stolen the
drug?
By listening to people’s reasoning concerning Heinz’s actions, Kohlberg
proposed that there are three levels (of two stages each) of moral reasoning.
The first level is called the preconventional level; in this stage, a person’s
feelings of right and wrong are based on an external set of rules that have
been handed down by an authority figure such as a parent, teacher, or religious
figure. These rules are obeyed in order to avoid punishment or to gain
rewards. In other words, people at this stage of moral reasoning would not
steal the drug—not because they believed that stealing was wrong but rather
because they had been told not to and would fear being caught and punished
for their action.
The second level of moral reasoning is the conventional level, at which
judgments of right and wrong are based on other people’s expectations. For
example, at this level there are two substages. One is known as the “good
boy/nice girl” orientation, in which morality is based on winning approval
and avoiding disapproval by one’s immediate group. In other words, people
may or may not steal the drug based on what they believe their peers would
think of them. The second substage is called the “law and order” orientation,
under which moral behavior is thought of in terms of obedience to the
authority figure and the established social order. Social order refers to the
way in which a society or culture functions, based on the rules, regulation,
and standards that are held and taught by each member of the society. The
“laws” are usually obeyed without question, regardless of the circumstances,
and are seen as the mechanism for the maintenance of social order. A person
operating from this stage would say that Heinz should not steal the drug
because it was against the law—and if he did steal the drug, he should go to
jail for his crime.
The third level of moral reasoning is called the postconventional orientation.
At this stage, the person is more concerned with a personal commitment
to higher principles than with behavior dictated by society’s rules. Disobeying
the law would be in some instances far less immoral than obeying a
law that is believed to be wrong, and being punished for the legal disobedience
would be easier than the guilt and self-condemnation of disobeying
the personal ethical principles held by that person. For example, many civil
rights workers and VietnamWar conscientious objectors were jailed, beaten,
and outcast from mainstream society, but those consequences were far less
damaging to them than transgressing their own convictions would have
been.
According to Kohlberg, the preconventional stage is characteristic of young children, while the conventional stage is more indicative of the general
population. It has been estimated that only about 20 percent of the
adult population reach the postconventional stage. Thus, the course of
moral development is not the same for everyone. Even some adults operate
at the preconventional level of moral reasoning. Education, parental affection,
observation and imitation, and explanations of the consequences of
behavior are factors in determining the course of moral development in a
child.