Topher Hunt

2011-05-05
Culture, mind, and education
Final paper

What does it take to claim a universal stage sequence?

The right to make universal claims in moral development research

The debate between Lawrence Kohlberg and the early critics of his moral development

stage theory boils down to concerns over when, how, and whether it is acceptable to make

universal claims about human development in a quasi-normative domain such as morality

research. In this essay, I ask what qualities make research such as Kohlberg’s moral development

research justified in claiming that a model or stage sequence produced is universal. First I briefly

overview Kohlberg's research method and his main relevant claims. I then identify some cautions

and concerns critics have voiced about making claims to cultural universality of research, and

identify elements of Kohlberg's empirical research which can be used to address those concerns.

Finally I identify some confusions about the nature of Kohlberg's research, which was never

meant as a purely empirical, but instead as a joint psychological-philosophical project. I

conclude with some speculations on this universality-versus-relativity debate as a reflection of

the incomplete separation of structure and content in Kohlberg's moral development model.

Throughout the essay, I leverage the concerns of Elizabeth Simpson, who wrote one of the

earliest prominent critiques of Kohlberg's research, as an entry point to explore the question of

what sort of research, data, and argument it takes to come to universalizing conclusions from

cross-cultural research on such a sensitive (and normative) topic as morality and development.
An overview of Kohlberg’s research method and claims

Kohlberg’s moral development research essentially involved eliciting judgments and

reasoning about moral topics from a wide variety of people, searching for patterns in the content

and structure of their thinking, and identifying a developmental dimension to the structure of

moral judgment when those patterns were laid out longitudinally or cross-sectionally by age

groups. First, Kohlberg presented a moral dilemma to subjects which “requires a choice between

competing values and then stimulates judgment about related rules and institutions” (Kohlberg &

Nisan 1982:867). Subjects' responses were transcribed and later analyzed to extract patterns in

what they said, what they took into consideration, and how they justified their judgments.

Kohlberg tried to consider both the content of people's responses, or the specific things they said

and considered important, as well as the structure of their moral reasoning, or the abstract

patterns in their reasoning and in how they handled answering the dilemma. Cross-sectional data

with subjects of different age groups, or preferably longitudinal data with the same subjects over

time, allowed Kohlberg to identify developmental stages within the responses. Through iterations

of research, Kohlberg gradually refined his definitions and descriptions for each stage, codifying

the whole in his scoring manual which standardized his model and score analysis technique

across many researchers (Snarey 1985:206).

Kohlberg made three claims about his research which are relevant to this essay. First, he

claimed that the moral stages he identified were true stages in the Piagetian sense, “something

more than age trends”: they formed an invariant and irreversible sequence, and could not be

skipped over (Kohlberg 1971:167). Secondly, he claimed normatively that the later stages are
more “moral” (or more morally adequate) modes of moral judgment than the earlier ones

(Kohlberg 1971:214). And third, he claimed that his moral stage sequence, as well as the basic

categories of moral consideration and other aspects of his developmental model, are universal to

all people, regardless of race, color, sex, nationality, or other demographic divisions.

The right to make claims about universality

Diana Baumrind wrote an article aptly titled “From ought to is”, in which she critiques

the philosophical arguments of Kohlberg’s and other universal theories of morality. In this she

offers a general caution against making unwarranted value judgments across cultures:

A pluralist sensibility and regard for cultural diversity urges caution in judging the esthetic

preferences or the conventions of another culture (or individual) as repugnant or

reprehensible, or its epistemology as irrational. Moralization in which activities or

preferences are converted into values without sufficient thought or justification can result

in intolerance. (Baumrind 1998:155)

Kohlberg, according to a number of critics, has crossed this line. He is making evaluative

judgments, not merely empirical observations, about continuities across cultures, and in so doing

he unjustly holds other cultures against an arbitrary and self-serving bar which necessarily places

Europe and America at the top of the scale.

We don’t need to go far to see the sources of this interpretation of his claims: his

philosophical essay “From is to ought” includes a prominent section boldly titled “Our stages

form an order of moral adequacy: The formalist claim” (Kohlberg 1971:214). (Lest we give him

the benefit of the doubt, he is quick to explain to us in this section that he means this claim not as
a comparison of cognitive complexity, philosophical adequacy, or social functionality, but of the

pure “morality” of people’s moral reasoning in the most normative sense possible.) Joan Miller

refers disparagingly to the “parochialism of some of the early theoretical models” of morality,

and points to systematic skew in the alleged moral development levels in different cultures as

indication that Kohlberg’s model favors the values of Western society (Miller 2001:154).

Elizabeth Simpson spends the entirety of her bluntly titled article “Moral development research:

A case study of scientific cultural bias”, driving home the point that Kohlberg’s whole model is

shot through with “ethnocentric and culturally-biased”, empirically ungrounded normative

statements (Simpson 1974:81).

The empirical and the normative make up two elements of Kohlberg’s claims. When

concerning statements of how people develop and whether development happens in the same

stage sequence, empirical data can make or break the claim. When normative statements are

made, such as that some stages are “more moral” than others, research data will not suffice; some

other non-empirical source of justification is needed. Just as I will later point out that Kohlberg’s

research straddles the line between psychology and philosophy, the critiques of his model fall on

both sides: sometimes calling it normative, and sometimes calling it simply wrong. However, the

central and primary question of whether his findings were universally applicable, is one that we

can latch onto as a more purely empirical question.

A decade after the controversy over these claims to universality began, John Snarey wrote

a review which clarified a central methodological requirement for the justification of broad

claims like Kohlberg’s. In stating that a certain trait or pattern is universal, one assumes that
“moral development research has been conducted in a sufficiently wide range of sociocultural

settings to jeopardize adequately the claim” - in other words, that if the claim in question were

false, we would reasonably expect empirical evidence to the contrary to have shown up by now

(Snarey 1985:202; italics mine). By 1985 the cross-cultural research drawing on Kohlberg’s

model has swollen to 45 studies in over 25 countries. Following Simpson’s tour of this data, we

will next identify what sorts of results are needed to make certain kinds of claims, i.e. ward of

the corresponding critiques.

Backing up claims of universality in cross-cultural research

One obvious concern in cross-cultural research relates to the different cultures, languages,

and environments in which the study must be conducted. Snarey comments that in most of the

studies using Kohlberg’s model in different cultures, the researchers have “adapted the interview

by translating it into the native language... the majority of the studies also attempted to adapt the

dilemmas so that the content was culturally relevant” (Snarey 1985:213). Given such translation,

or especially adaptations of the meaning of the stories, how can we be confident that the

interview method will still have the same effect on eliciting moral reasoning that Kohlberg

trusted his method to have with Harvard college boys? One study in the Bahamas took a

particularly drastic adaptation of the issue and administered the test with it, on the same people

as also had taken the standard interview in English and with no adaptation (White et al 1978).

They, and other similar attempts, found no differences in people’s responses to the original

versus adapted version of the interview - leading Snarey to conclude that while “Kohlberg’s

interview cannot be culture free, it does appear to be reasonably culture fair” (Snarey 1985:215).
Here, a control study, finding no significant differences, supported the assumption that the act of

adapting the interview does not distort cross-cultural research.

A central critique by Simpson towards the moral stage theory is that research has been

conducted (as of 1974) only in around ten different cultures. Simpson asserts that this is too

narrow of a sample to justify generalizations about “all” cultures. How many cultures do you

need to do research in, in order to make a claim to universality? Simpson’s concern here is purely

a matter of quantity of research. Citing his rule of jeopardy, Snarey argues that the larger number

of countries where Kohlberg’s model has been applied as of 1985, is sufficient breadth to make a

claim of universality acceptable (Snarey 1985:207).

The stage-ness of Kohlberg’s moral stages can also be verified empirically, by confirming

their status as an invariant and irreversible sequence with no stage-skipping allowed. Simpson

calls the moral stage theory’s status as an internal developmental progression into doubt: might

subjects simply be taking on influences of different reference groups as they age and move into

different social roles? “Learning to examine one's own life analytically and to function as an

autonomous moral agent may also be the result of group values and training”; it is possible that

what Kohlberg calls a developmental sequence is instead “an indication of increased

socialization into the norms of a particular group” (Simpson 1974: 84-85). To find a way to

empirically disentangle these two interpretations, of change as internally driven cognitive

development and of change as shift in social roles and influences, we should look at what

specifically Kohlberg means by his concept of stage development. If changes in moral reasoning

form a true stage progression, they will display three traits required of true stages: invariance,
irreversibility, and a lack of stage-skipping. And indeed, these three traits have shown up reliably

in research with his model. On the other hand, if changes in morality were the mere aftermath of

changing values or adopting the norms of a new “reference group” as Simpson suggests, we

would expect to see stage-skipping and stage-regressions in some cases, and would expect the

sequentiality to generally be less definitively fixed than it seems to be (Snarey 1985:216).

Miller (2001:158) suggests that Kohlberg-esque moral theory eschews concrete details

and defies clear criteria of evidential support or refutation, instead staying at a “purely abstract

analytical level of highly general and somewhat vacuous commonalities”. The act of finding

empirical support for Kohlberg’s claim to stages, above, counters Miller’s accusation and implies

the need to draw a clear distinction between “abstract” and “vacuous”. While I have no desire to

attempt a defense of the structuralist tradition’s love of ‘deep structure’ and abstract levels of

analysis, I will observe that to call a model “vacuous” is to deny that its predictions can be

operationalized and falsified along clear and relevant criteria. To me the widespread replication

of Kohlberg’s research, and the decent clarity of results that these studies present as an aggregate,

indicate that his model and scoring system are far from vague. His structuralist stage sequence

may be abstract, but it is not disconnected from research evidence, as Miller has suggested.

Clarifying the purpose and nature of Kohlberg’s research

Simpson voices concerns that Kohlberg “blurs” the distinction between normative

philosophy and empirical psychology: “in his prolific writing he does not make clear the

empirical sources of his claims to universality in the empirical realm … Normative thinking

especially governs the description of what he calls empirically derived categories of 'post-
conventional' or principled reasoning” (Simpson 1974:83). Simpson seems to suggest, though

never explicitly states, that one cannot do philosophy and psychology together; that the act of

making normative statements corrupts the acceptability of any empirical statements within

hearing distance.

The marriage of psychology and philosophy, however, is a central pillar of Kohlberg’s

method of inquiry. In “From is to ought”, he finds it obvious that psychology must lean on

philosophy, or suffer the eventual consequences of epistemic anemia: “The fact that the cognitive

categories of the philosopher are central for understanding the behavior development of the child

is so apparent, once pointed out, that one recognizes that it is only the peculiar epistemology of

the positivistic behaviorist which could have obscured it” (Kohlberg 1971:152). Meaningful

psychology research cannot happen without philosophical (and thus non-empirical) footing. This

is true particularly when researching on morality, which “is itself a philosophical (ethical) rather

than a behavioral concept” (152). In a 1985 “Synopses” of his work, Kohlberg recaps Richard

Shweder’s criticisms of his normative and evaluative statements (largely the same as Simpson’s

concerns above) and replies that Shweder both misrepresents his work, and misunderstands his

project: “Shweder does not present my fundamental standpoint as a moral psychologist, which is

to create a theory that is a rational reconstruction of ontogenesis, drawing jointly on philosophy

and psychological data” (Kohlberg 1984:326).

Kohlberg’s research project transcends the empirical, and thus cannot be held accountable

for providing purely empirical supports as Simpson calls for. He sees his claims as straddling the

two disciplines of philosophy and psychology; as such, supporting data from both domains need
to be woven together to validate his work. Thus, central to understanding, interpreting, or

critiquing Kohlberg’s arguments is understanding the interplay of empirics and philosophy in his

(cross-cultural) research design. It is my sense that, for some critics, a rejection of the normative

element of Kohlberg’s project (and perhaps a failure to understand the project altogether) has

equated with a rejection of his universal claims, these perhaps being seen as inherently normative

and empirically corrupt to someone with a cultural-relativist bent.

Conclusion

In this essay I have reviewed some of the ways in which Kohlberg’s claim that his model

and stage sequence of moral development were universal, can be evaluated on empirical

grounds. I have then explained that his work was cross-disciplinary from the start, and thus we

should not expect it to be founded on exclusively empirical supports (although prominent critics

have made such an expectation). I have not discussed the numerous philosophical critiques of his

work, by figures from Baumrind to Alston to Habermas. I have also not discussed any of the

numerous critiques of his research on empirical grounds.

It is worth mentioning critiques of his claim that justice is the most fundamental moral

principle. Researchers using other techniques have found patterns that suggest a second or even

third ‘moral attractor’ principle (Miller & Bersoff 1992; Vasudev & Hummel 1987), leading to

discussions where researchers affirm the abstract model proposed by Kohlberg but challenge the

specific content of his post-conventional stages (Vasudev & Hummel 1987). Kohlberg has

responded to these doubts by accommodating his model in response to Gilligan’s proposal of a

second ‘caring and concern’ voice; Miller comments that this is the only point of critique which
has led Kohlberg to make changes to his model (Miller 2001:155) - although this is an

exaggeration if you consider the influence that Habermas’ philosophical and meta-

methodological critiques had on Kohlberg’s work (Habermas 1992:171-187).

Miller’s (2001) characterization of Kohlberg’s moral development model, which I found

dismissive and somewhat misleading, hint that the controversy over Kohlberg’s universality

claims are more than just an interesting debate from the past, to be enjoyed from a distance.

Analyzing various aspects of the debate has revealed disagreements about what constitutes valid

support for empirical claims, as well as simply what counts as an empirical claim and whether

these are allowed to consort with non-empirical normative claims. My reading has led me to

believe that the moral development research community has not come to a solid consensus on

these meta-methodological questions, or on what sort of evidence will validate universalist

claims in cross-cultural research on such a charged topic as morality and moral development.
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