Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [253]
Piaget’s Moral Judgment of the Child, appearing in English in 1932, inspired a rash of studies of moral development in America, but most were little more than tinkering and nitpicking. The next major advance, a landmark in the study of moral development, came three decades later and was the work of Lawrence Kohlberg of Harvard. He conceived a new method of measuring moral development and over a twenty-five-year span revised it, collected and analyzed data, and propounded a six-stage theory of moral development that became the classic in the field and the model that all others, ever since, have either emulated, modified, or reacted against.
Kohlberg would have made a good clergyman had he not found his calling as a moral-development psychologist. Earnest and thoughtful, warm and gently humorous, talkative and impassioned, he was profoundly concerned about ethical questions and the moral life. Indifferent to externals, he was the very archetype of the intellectual professor, his clothes baggy and rumpled, his hair disheveled, his briefcase badly scuffed and overfull, his glasses shoved up on his forehead and forgotten there.
The son of a well-to-do businessman, Kohlberg was born in 1927 in Bronxville, an affluent suburb of New York.96 He attended the Phillips Academy in Andover and graduated as World War II ended. Then, instead of proceeding to college, he was driven by his conscience to become a merchant mariner so as to join a project that was smuggling shiploads of refugee European Jews through a British blockade into Palestine. The experience gave Kohlberg a lifelong interest in the question of when one is morally justified in disobeying the law and legitimate authority. It also gave him a lifelong disease: he was captured and briefly interned in a camp in Cyprus from which he soon escaped, but not before acquiring a parasitic intestinal infection that intermittently ravaged him throughout his life.
Kohlberg took his undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Chicago; psychology and philosophy (particularly ethics) were his twin passions. He read and admired Piaget’s Moral Judgment of the Child, but in the spirit of American psychology felt that a sound theory of moral development should be based on data gathered by objective methods rather than Piaget’s naturalistic observations. For his doctoral dissertation, therefore, he created a rating system (he later made it into a test) that he modified and used for the rest of his life and from which he derived his cognitive-developmental theory of the stages of moral development. The test consists of nine moral dilemmas, which the researcher presents, one at a time, to a subject. Each is followed by an interview comprising a long series of questions about what the subject considers the right and wrong thing to do in the case.
An example (the “Heinz dilemma”): In a European town, a woman is near death from a special kind of cancer; a new drug, discovered by a druggist in the town, might save her, but he is a profiteer and charges ten times what it costs him to make the medicine. Heinz, the woman’s husband, can borrow only half the amount and pleads with the druggist to cut his price, but the druggist refuses. Heinz thinks about breaking in and stealing the drug to save his wife’s life. Should he? Why or why not? Does he have a duty or obligation to steal the drug? Should he steal the drug for his wife if he doesn’t love her? What if the person dying were a stranger—should Heinz steal the drug for him? It is against the law to steal; does that make it morally wrong? And so on, for a total of twenty-one questions.97