Criticisms of Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Development
Kohlberg’s stage theory reshaped how psychologists think about morality, but critics argue that it is culturally narrow, gendered, overly rational and not always predictive of real world behaviour. Here is why those limits matter for how we study and teach morality.
Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of moral development is one of the most influential frameworks in moral psychology. Building on Piaget, Kohlberg proposed that people progress through a series of increasingly sophisticated stages of moral reasoning, moving from obedience and self interest to concern with social order and finally to abstract principles of justice. For decades, his interviews using moral dilemmas, such as the famous Heinz dilemma, dominated research on moral judgement and inspired educational programs that aimed to foster higher levels of reasoning.
However, the theory has attracted sustained criticism from philosophers, feminist theorists, cultural psychologists and empirical researchers. Critics argue that Kohlberg overestimated the universality of his stages, privileged a particular Western, liberal view of morality, underplayed the role of emotion and care and relied on methods that are vulnerable to bias.
This essay examines the major criticisms of Kohlberg’s theory with the aim of offering a balanced, rigorous and accessible overview. While the model advanced our understanding of moral reasoning, its limitations highlight the challenges of capturing the richness of moral life in a single developmental sequence.
Stage Universality and Invariance Under Scrutiny
A core claim of Kohlberg’s theory is that moral development proceeds through invariant, universal stages. According to Kohlberg, individuals move from preconventional to conventional to postconventional levels in a fixed order, without skipping stages, and this sequence holds across cultures.
Cross cultural research has challenged this assumption. Studies in non Western and small scale societies often find that people reach conventional levels of reasoning, such as valuing social rules and interpersonal expectations, but fewer individuals show the kind of abstract, rights based reasoning that Kohlberg associates with the postconventional level. Critics argue that this pattern may reflect cultural values rather than developmental delay. In some societies, moral maturity may be expressed through deep commitment to communal roles or religious obligations, not through questioning social contracts or appealing to universal rights.
Even within Western societies, longitudinal research suggests that people do not always move neatly from one stage to the next. Some individuals show different stages of reasoning in different contexts, or appear to regress under certain conditions. This variability undermines the idea of a single, invariant sequence that applies to everyone.
These findings have led critics to argue that Kohlberg’s stages describe a particular style of moral reflection rather than a universal developmental path. Moral reasoning may be more context dependent, plural and flexible than the model allows.
Cultural Bias and Western Liberal Assumptions
Kohlberg’s highest stages emphasise individual rights, abstract justice and personal principles. Critics argue that this framework reflects the values of Western, liberal, educated societies, where individual autonomy and equality are core moral ideals. In other cultural contexts, moral reasoning may prioritise harmony, tradition, spiritual obligations or respect for authority in ways that Kohlberg’s scoring system treats as less advanced.
For example, a person who grounds moral decisions in religious law, communal duties or filial piety might be scored at a conventional level, even if their reasoning is sophisticated within their cultural worldview. This creates a risk of ranking cultures according to their resemblance to Western liberalism, rather than evaluating moral development on culturally neutral grounds.
Some scholars also note that Kohlberg’s early samples were heavily biased toward boys and men from Western, educated, middle class backgrounds. These sampling biases raise questions about whether his stage definitions inadvertently encode the norms of a narrow group, then project them as universal standards of moral maturity.
Taken together, these criticisms point to a cultural bias in the theory. Rather than capturing a culturally independent trajectory, Kohlberg’s highest stages may reflect a particular moral tradition.
Gender Bias and the Ethic of Care
One of the most influential critiques of Kohlberg came from Carol Gilligan, who argued that the theory is gender biased. Kohlberg’s research suggested that males tended to score higher than females on his moral reasoning scale, because they were more likely to use abstract, justice based arguments.
Gilligan proposed that this difference did not reflect lower moral maturity among women, but rather a different moral orientation. She argued that many women approach moral problems with an ethic of care, focusing on relationships, responsibility and responsiveness to others’ needs, rather than on rights and rules. Because Kohlberg’s scoring system privileges justice based reasoning, it systematically undervalues care based reasoning.
Subsequent research has produced mixed findings. Some studies support modest gender differences in the emphasis on care and justice, while others find more overlap than Gilligan originally proposed. Nonetheless, her critique remains important for highlighting that there may be multiple legitimate moral voices. Kohlberg’s theory, in focusing on justice, may capture only one strand of moral thinking and treat others as deficient.
This critique also raises larger questions about whose moral perspective is treated as the standard in psychological theories, and how professional and cultural power shape our definitions of moral maturity.
Methodological Concerns: Hypothetical Dilemmas and Scoring
Kohlberg’s stage theory is based largely on interviews about hypothetical moral dilemmas. Participants are asked to reason about situations such as whether Heinz should steal a drug to save his wife. Their responses are then transcribed and scored according to complex manuals that link certain patterns of reasoning to specific stages.
Critics have raised several methodological concerns. First, hypothetical dilemmas may not capture how people actually reason when they face real moral decisions with emotional and practical consequences. A person might articulate high level principles in an interview, yet act in ways that contradict those principles in everyday life. This gap between reasoning and behaviour challenges the ecological validity of the method.
Second, the scoring process can be highly interpretive. Coders must judge which aspects of a response matter, how to weigh conflicting considerations and which stage best fits the reasoning. This opens the door to subjectivity and bias, especially if coders share Kohlberg’s own assumptions about what counts as mature reasoning.
Third, the reliance on verbally articulated rationales disadvantages individuals who are less comfortable with abstract verbal argument, including young children, people with limited formal education or those whose cultural norms discourage direct expression of personal moral views. Their moral understanding may be deeper than their interview performance suggests.
These methodological issues raise doubts about whether Kohlberg’s stages reflect genuine developmental structures, or partly reflect the way he chose to measure and interpret moral thinking.
Reasoning Versus Behaviour: The Moral Action Gap
Kohlberg’s theory focuses on moral reasoning, not moral behaviour. He acknowledged that knowing what is right does not guarantee that someone will act accordingly, but he believed that higher stage reasoning is more likely to support consistent moral action.
Research has often found only modest correlations between stage of reasoning and actual behaviour. People who reason at higher stages do not always behave more altruistically or resist wrongdoing more reliably than those at lower stages. Situational factors, social pressures and emotions can strongly influence behaviour, sometimes overriding principled reasoning.
This gap between thinking and doing has led critics to argue that Kohlberg overemphasised the role of conscious, deliberative reasoning in moral life. Moral psychology has increasingly turned toward models that highlight the importance of emotion, intuition, habit and social norms. In these views, reasoning may often follow behaviour as a way of justifying choices, rather than guiding them from the outset.
If moral action depends heavily on factors beyond reasoning, then a theory centred on the developmental progression of reasoning offers only a partial picture of moral development.
Limited Attention to Emotion, Intuition and Moral Intuitionism
Kohlberg’s stage model portrays moral development as a progression in logical, principled reasoning. Critics argue that this approach underplays the role of emotion and intuition in moral judgement.
Contemporary research in moral psychology suggests that many moral reactions are fast, affectively charged and intuitive. People often have an immediate sense that something is wrong, such as harm or betrayal, and only later construct reasons to justify their feelings. In this view, moral reasoning can be more like a lawyer defending a position than a judge impartially weighing evidence.
Kohlberg’s framework does not systematically address these intuitive and emotional processes. It assumes that the most mature moral agents consciously reason about principles and justice. Critics argue that this rationalist emphasis neglects how empathy, guilt, anger, disgust and moral elevation shape our responsiveness to others’ suffering and our motivation to act.
By giving limited attention to emotion and intuition, the theory risks presenting an overly intellectualised picture of morality, one that is better suited to classroom discussions of moral dilemmas than to the messy realities of moral life.
Overlooking the Diversity of Moral Domains
Another line of criticism comes from domain theory, which argues that morality is not a single, unified domain, but consists of several distinct kinds of rules and concerns. Elliot Turiel and others distinguish between moral rules, such as those about harm and fairness, and social conventions, such as table manners or dress codes, as well as personal choices.
Kohlberg’s dilemmas often involve conflicts between obedience to authority or law and concerns about harm, justice or rights. Critics argue that this emphasis may blur important distinctions between domains. For example, disobeying a teacher’s instruction is not necessarily a moral failure if the instruction is unfair or trivial.
Domain theorists also suggest that children show sophisticated moral understanding earlier than Kohlberg believed, particularly in their judgements about harm and fairness. They may treat some issues as moral, regardless of authority, while viewing others as conventional or personal. This nuance is difficult to capture within a single hierarchical stage model.
The Diversity of Moral Voices and Contexts
Taken together, these criticisms suggest that moral development may be more pluralistic than Kohlberg’s theory implies. People draw on multiple moral voices, including justice, care, community, loyalty and spiritual or cultural values. They also adjust their reasoning to fit different contexts, relationships and roles.
A single ladder of stages, with abstract justice at the top, struggles to accommodate this diversity. Critics argue that moral maturity may involve the capacity to navigate and integrate multiple moral perspectives, rather than simply ascending to a single, postconventional viewpoint.
Ideological and Political Assumptions
Finally, some scholars argue that Kohlberg’s theory is not ideologically neutral. By treating individual rights, social contracts and principled justice as the pinnacle of moral development, it implicitly affirms a liberal democratic worldview. This aligns moral maturity with support for certain political and legal structures, such as constitutional rights and rule of law.
While many psychologists share these values, critics caution that presenting them as the endpoint of universal moral development risks turning a moral and political ideology into a developmental standard. Alternative ethical traditions, such as communitarian, religious or virtue based frameworks, may articulate different ideals of moral excellence.
Recognising these ideological underpinnings does not invalidate Kohlberg’s contributions, but it reminds us that theories of morality are themselves moral and political projects, shaped by the historical and cultural contexts in which they arise.
Simply Put
Kohlberg’s theory of moral development transformed how psychologists study moral reasoning. It highlighted that children are not simply rule takers, but active thinkers whose understanding of morality becomes more complex over time. The model has influenced education, psychotherapy and research for decades.
Yet critics have revealed important limits. The theory appears culturally and gender biased, its stages are not as universal or invariant as originally claimed, and its reliance on hypothetical dilemmas and verbal justification raises methodological concerns. It focuses heavily on rational, justice based reasoning, giving less attention to emotion, intuition, care and the diversity of moral domains.
These criticisms do not render Kohlberg’s work obsolete. Instead, they invite a more nuanced and pluralistic approach to moral development, one that recognises multiple moral voices, values cultural and gender diversity and integrates reasoning with emotion, context and action. Thoughtful engagement with Kohlberg’s legacy can still enrich our understanding of moral life, provided that we appreciate both its insights and its boundaries.
FAQs
1. What is the main criticism of Kohlberg’s theory?
The strongest criticism is that it reflects Western, male-oriented values that prioritise justice over care, emotion and relationships.
2. Does evidence support Kohlberg’s stages?
Research suggests that people do not consistently use one stage of reasoning, and moral reasoning varies across situations, which challenges the sequential stage model.
3. Are Kohlberg’s dilemmas realistic?
Not fully. They are hypothetical, abstract scenarios, which limits their ability to predict how people behave in real moral situations.
References
Rest, J. (1986). Moral Development: Advances in Research and Theory. Praeger.
Walker, L. J. (1989). A longitudinal study of moral reasoning. Child Development, 60(1), 157–166.
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