A stage theory, borrowed and then lengthened

Kohlberg's account of moral development, the paper says, began when Lawrence Kohlberg, still a graduate student, extended the psychological theory of the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget and applied it to morality. Piaget had already argued that moral thinking and morality develop in stages. Kohlberg took that staged idea and set it out as six stages of moral thought. The author calls it one of the more persuasive theories of moral development in modern society.

The method is as important as the ladder. Kohlberg held that you can measure moral development by watching how a person reacts when placed in a moral dilemma, and how that person then justifies the action. He developed dilemmas such as the Heinz dilemma, presented them to people, and measured the level of moral development through an interview. The stages themselves are said to rest on cognitive processes. Movement through them is unidirectional. The higher the level, the more complex thinking about justice becomes, and the wider the moral point of view. Kohlberg saw moral thinking as developing across a whole life, not only in childhood.

Obedience, self-interest, and the long climb after that

The six stages are organized as three levels, two stages in each. Stage 1 is obedience; stage 2 is self-interest; stage 3 is conformity to social norms; stage 4 is law and order; stage 5 is human rights; stage 6 is universal human ethics. The paper does not need a dramatized retelling of Heinz's story in order to use the name; the extract gives the name of the dilemma and the interview, not a scene-by-scene plot, and this page follows that.

At the preconventional level, the standard for ethical action is described as whatever comes back to the person — a punishment or a reward — and it is mainly young children, the author writes, who show this level. The stages, in this telling, are a way of watching how a person thinks about justice, not a score for how kind they appear.

A second name on the cover, and a page that does not invent it

The report announces, more than once, that it will set out both Kohlberg's theory and Erikson's psychosocial theory of development. That promise sits on the cover and in the introduction. The extract we have does not clearly carry the Erikson account, and a borrowed list of eight psychosocial stages would be someone else's paper. This page therefore stops with the six moral stages, the Heinz interview, and the claim that thinking about justice grows more complex as a person climbs. If you are writing your own comparison, you can still use this report for Kohlberg, and you will need another source for Erikson.

Sources

1. A campus paper that introduces Kohlberg's six stages of moral development, as an extension of Piaget, measured through dilemmas such as the Heinz dilemma and an interview. Erikson's psychosocial theory is announced in the introduction but is not clearly present in the extract.

Last updated: 14 November 2026