Toward Moral Maturity

A group of young inmates in a New England reformatory began meeting regularly last year to talk about a subject that normally receives little attention in prisons: ethics. They were participating in a novel experiment designed by Harvard Psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg to teach moral judgment--not by sermons, but through open discussions.

When the reformatory sessions began, many of the boys agreed with the philosophy of one teen-age felon who insisted that "If I'm not gettin' nothin', I'm not givin' nothin'." But now they share the outlook of another inmate who voices a concept that would have seemed alien to them before they began meeting: that it is important "to respect other people's feelings."

Wide Cross Section. This change in attitude seems to bear out Kohlberg's unique theories, formulated in the course of 15 years of research in the field of moral psychology. He believes that morality "is not a bag of virtues" (honesty, generosity, loyalty and the like) but an idea of justice that is primitive in young children and becomes more sophisticated as a child passes through distinct stages of moral development.

In the first of these six stages, which Kohlberg established after interviewing a cross section of youngsters about imaginary moral problems, "right" behavior is based on fear of punishment. In the second stage, the criterion is selfish need --as in the case of a child who believed a man should steal a lifesaving drug for his wife because if she dies "there'll be no one to cook his food."

At Stage 3, a child is "good" to win approval; by Stage 4, the law is respected and upheld out of a simplistic concern for law and order. Those who progress to Stage 5 believe that the purpose of the law is to preserve human rights and that unjust laws should be changed. In the opinion of those who reach Stage 6, unjust laws may be broken, because morality is grounded not in legality or in specific rules like the Ten Commandments but in abstract principles of justice and respect for the individual. At this level, a 16-year-old told Kohlberg he would steal to save a life because "human life is above financial gain."

Kohlberg's reformatory subjects were operating primarily at Stages 1 and 2 when the experiment began. Although most of them are now moving into Stage 4, their problems are far from over. As Kohlberg himself acknowledges, moral judgment does not ensure moral behavior; it is hard to act justly in an unjust world, especially for those too weak to resist temptation. Prison rules are often unfair, and prison staffers are not necessarily much more moral than inmates. Outside, released prisoners may find a society that may not help reinforce their new-found morality; although U.S. democracy is founded on Stage 5 thinking, Kohlberg estimates that fewer than one out of three Americans have reached that level.

Moral Nihilism. Yet Kohlberg does not despair, either for his delinquents or for society. He recalls that Socrates was put to death for trying to teach morality and observes that although "we now occasionally assassinate such people, it is not government policy to do so." Besides, as recently as a generation ago, "nobody would have raised an issue such as the Son My massacre." Kohlberg is also optimistic about the behavior of college students; he hopes that the moral nihilism displayed by some may actually mark "a developmental step forward." He cites as an example one study in which 20% of the students who left high school with a mixture of Stage 4 and Stage 5 morality regressed in college to Stage 2. But by age 25, they had again attained Stage 5, with a new tolerance for moral outlooks different from their own.

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