DOES ETHICAL THEORY HAVE A PLACE IN POST-KOHLBERGIAN MORAL PSYCHOLOGY?

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DOES ETHICAL THEORY HAVE A PLACE IN POST-KOHLBERGIANMORAL PSYCHOLOGY?

Bruce MaxwellDepartment of Educational Sciences

Universite du Quebec a Trois-Rivieres

Abstract. Philosophers tend to assume that theoretical frameworks in psychology suffer fromconceptual confusion and that any influence that philosophy might have on psychology should bepositive. Going against this grain, Dan Lapsley and Darcia Narvaez attribute the Kohlbergian paradigm’scurrent state of marginalization within psychology to Lawrence Kohlberg’s use of ethical theory in hismodel of cognitive moral development. Post-Kohlbergian conceptions of moral psychology, they advance,should be wary of theoretical constructs derived from folk morality, refuse philosophical starting points,and seek integration with literatures in psychology, not philosophy. In this essay, Bruce Maxwellconsiders and rejects Lapsley and Narvaez’s diagnosis. The Kohlbergian paradigm’s restricted conceptionof the moral domain is the result of a selective reading of one tendency in ethical theorizing (Kantianism).The idea that moral psychology may find shelter from normative criticism by avoiding ethics-derivedmodels overlooks the deeper continuity between ‘‘ethical theory’’ and ‘‘psychological theory.’’

The confusion and barrenness of psychology is not to be explained by calling it a ‘‘youngscience’’; its state is not comparable with that of physics, for instance, in its beginnings.(Rather with that of certain branches of mathematics. Set theory.) For in psychology there areexperimental methods and conceptual confusion. (As in the other case conceptual confusionand methods of proof.)

The existence of the experimental method makes us think we have the means of solvingthe problems which trouble us; though problem and method pass one another by.1

Introduction

With these famous remarks, Ludwig Wittgenstein became the flag bearer of areceived idea in philosophy. Stated bluntly, psychological science is a conceptualdog’s breakfast and psychologists could do worse than judiciously apply to itthe refined analytic instruments of contemporary philosophy. The psychologistsDaniel Lapsley and Darcia Narvaez’s recent reflections on the theory of moralpsychology and education and the future of Kohlbergianism insult this smug con-sensus. In their view, the Kohlbergian paradigm in moral psychology is in a stateof terminal decline, and they waste no time attributing its demise to Kohlberg’spredilection for allowing moral philosophy to inform his theoretical model.2 Itis well known that Kohlberg borrowed liberally from Kantian ethics. He openlyacknowledged his conceptual affinities with John Dewey, G.H. Mead, and Plato.He was a firm believer that the correct way to proceed in moral psychology is

1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York:Prentice Hall, 1973), IIxiv (§232e).

2. The term ‘‘moral psychology’’ is used in this text to designate the branch of psychology thatinvestigates moral functioning, development, and education empirically. It especially denotes theresearch programs in contemporary psychology that extend Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of cognitivemoral development or that have emerged as a direct response to its perceived limitations.

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to begin by ‘‘getting one’s philosophy straight’’ before moving on to conductingfieldwork on moral development.3 Kohlberg may never have managed to get hisphilosophy straight — not, at any rate, to the satisfaction of the many ethicists andphilosophers of science with whom he engaged in dialogue — but few, I suspect,deny that he was right to have tried. Lapsley and Narvaez beg emphatically todiffer. Kohlberg’s attempt to integrate ethical theory into the psychological studyof morality, they claim, ultimately led his critics to conflate the question of itsphilosophical adequacy with that of its psychological adequacy. Most urgently, theadoption of certain philosophical starting points led Kohlberg to arbitrarily restrictthe moral domain to conscious, reason-governed activity of the moral agent, andmoral education to the socialization of children to achieve maximally differen-tiated styles of moral reflection. In this way, cognitive moral developmentalismalienated itself from most educators’ and parents’ expectations that moral educa-tion should also aim to help children develop morally praiseworthy personal traits.By the same token, when promising theoretical frameworks finally emerged incognitive psychology to address the habitual side of moral functioning, the contin-ued adherence to restrictive philosophical assumptions about moral functioningblocked the exploration of integrative possibilities. Lapsley and Narvaez see oneway out of this quagmire. New directions in moral psychology need to break withthe Kohlbergian precedent and assert theoretical autonomy from ethical theory.4

In this essay I consider and reject Lapsley and Narvaez’s claim that the influ-ence of ‘‘ethical theory’’ is responsible for moral psychology’s present state ofmarginalization. After laying out a set of legitimate worries about Kohlbergianismas a research paradigm in decline, I present Lapsley and Narvaez’s case that thesefeatures of Kohlbergianism (especially its adherence to a narrow conception ofmoral functioning that excludes character as a moral phenomenon) are a legacy ofits assumption of the putatively philosophy-derived principles of phenomenalismand formalism. I then turn to the critical assessment of this diagnosis. First, I arguethat it is wrong to think that the adoption of phenomenalism is an inevitable resultof permitting ethical theory to influence moral psychology. For phenomenalism, Iclaim, is at best an import from Kantian ethics, and it is easy to imagine how the

3. See Lawrence Kohlberg, The Philosophy of Moral Development: Moral Stages and the Idea of Justice,vol. 1 of Essays on Moral Development (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981).

4. The most complete presentations of this analysis appear in the following two essays: Daniel Lapsleyand Darcia Narvaez, ‘‘Moral Psychology at a Crossroads,’’ in Character Psychology and CharacterEducation, ed. Daniel Lapsley and F. Clark Power (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press,2005), 18–35; and Daniel Lapsley and Darcia Narvaez, ‘‘‘Psychologized Morality’ and Ethical Theory,or, Do Good Fences Make Good Neighbours?’’ in Getting Involved: Global Citizenship Developmentand Sources of Moral Values, ed. Fritz Oser and Wiel Veugelers (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2008),279–292.

BRUCE MAXWELL is Professor in the Department of Educational Sciences at the Universite du Quebeca Trois-Rivieres, R2061, 3351 Boulevard des Forges, Trois-Rivieres (Quebec), Canada G9A 5H7; e-mail <[email protected]>. His present research deals with conceptual issues in social and moraldevelopment and education.

Maxwell Ethical Theory and Post-Kohlbergian Moral Psychology 169

Kohlbergian paradigm might have ended up with a more expansive conception ofthe moral domain had it aligned itself with another tradition of normative ethics.Next, I turn to the question of the interpretation of the principle of phenomenalismitself. In this connection, I argue that Lapsley and Narvaez’s idea that phenomenal-ism restricts the moral domain echoes a long-standing conceptual error in moralpsychology. Going right back to Kohlberg, the mistake is to infer from the platitudethat all moral actions are necessarily intentional that they are also necessarilydeliberate. In order to explain this selective reading of phenomenalism, I introducean error theory according to which the Kohlbergian conception of the moral domainis better understood as coming from within psychology rather than the philosoph-ical ideas that influenced it. I end by raising two concerns about the viability ofLapsley and Narvaez’s proposal for a theoretically autonomous moral psychology.One is that it seems to drive moral psychology toward a paradox: the integration offunctionalist models of moral cognition, while an apparently compelling solutionto the problem of disciplinary isolation, threatens to give rise to a new form ofalienation, this time from the subjective perspective of the ethical agent. Theother consideration is about whether theoretical autonomy has any credible hopeof sheltering moral psychology from theoretical disputes. Lapsley and Narvaez’scase depends on maintaining a sharp distinction between ‘‘ethical theory’’ and‘‘psychological theory.’’ I reject this distinction on the grounds that it is not help-ful in deciding which theoretical resources are appropriate in the elaboration offrameworks for psychological research on moral education and moral development.

To those who might dismiss this study as derivative, my reply is to reiteratethat what is at stake in this battle over the corpse of Kohlbergianism is the ‘‘specialrelationship’’ between ethical theory and moral psychology that continues inpart to characterize the Kohlbergian tradition (as opposed to Kohlberg’s specificdevelopmental model) even as the field has evolved. Essentially, Lapsley andNarvaez propose to normalize this relation, and by that they mean that philosophyshould be shown the door. Ethical theory should have no more jurisdiction inmoral psychology than, let us say, the philosophy of personal identity does incurrent conceptions in the psychology of selfhood, than epistemology does incontemporary psychological models of learning, or the philosophy of the emotionsin the psychology of the emotions — intellectual enterprises that proceed in themain in a state of benightedness to each other’s existence. I would like this essay’schallenge to Lapsley and Narvaez’s declaration that the relation between ethicaltheory and moral psychology is moribund to be read as a case study that suggests abroader conclusion: open dialogue between any branch of the social sciences andphilosophy should be not be dismissed as a liability but cherished as an asset. Mostphilosophical treatments of Kohlbergianism, of course, focus on what Kohlberggot wrong. To the extent that Kohlberg valued the ongoing dialogue between


philosophy and the social sciences, this essay belongs to a microgenre of worksthat draw attention to what Kohlberg got right.5

Moral Psychology in a Cul de Sac

Cognitive developmentalism, for decades the dominant conception of research,theory, and practice in moral education, has never lacked critics. Indeed, Kohlberg’stheory seems to possess some mystical quality that raises the ire in equal propor-tion of psychologists and moral philosophers, ever ready to oblige with at-timesdevastatingly just appraisals.6 A superficial acquaintance with these writingsmight lead one to the conclusion that Kohlbergianism has long been relegated tothe dustbin of psychology. Not so. It remains the dominant research paradigmfor developmental psychologists researching moral cognition and this is so forapparently good scientific reasons.7

David Carr has suggested that, ultimately, the only possible attraction ofKohlberg’s theory — of any theory of moral development, for that matter — isthat it reflects specific normative assumptions about moral development.8 Tobe sure, part of the explanation for the initial furor in the 1960s and 1970sover Kohlberg’s theory was that it appealed to large numbers of educationalpsychologists’ hearts by cohering with their moral intuitions. The other part ofthe explanation is that the early validation studies of Kohlberg’s theory werevery promising, so it appealed to their minds as well.9 In Lapsley and Narvaez’sanalysis, if the Kohlbergian paradigm is under pressure today, it is less becausenature has shouted ‘‘no’’ back10 at it than because it exhibits features that raisethe red flag about its theoretical adequacy: the gradual erosion of its explanatorypower and the increasing alienation of its theoretical vocabulary from that ofmainstream psychological research.

First, throughout the 1970s empirical evidence began to mount againstthe important theoretical assumption in Kohlbergianism of ‘‘cognitive-affective

5. Another example of this genre is Don Collins Reed, ‘‘A Model of Moral Stages,’’ Journal of MoralEducation 37, no. 3 (2009): 57–76.

6. For example, F.E. Trainer, ‘‘A Critical Analysis of Kohlberg’s Contributions to the Study of MoralThought,’’ Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 7 (1977): 41–63; D.C. Phillips and JennieNicolayev, ‘‘Kohlbergian Moral Development: A Progressing or Degenerating Research Program?’’Educational Theory 28, no. 3 (1978): 286–301; and David Carr, ‘‘Moral Education and the Perils ofDevelopmentalism,’’ Journal of Moral Education 30, no. 1 (2002): 5–19. Kohlberg’s defense against someof these objections can be found in Charles Levine, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Alexandra Hewer, ‘‘TheCurrent Formulation of Kohlberg’s Theory and a Response to Critics,’’ Human Development 28, no. 2(1985): 94–100.

7. Lapsley and Narvaez, ‘‘Moral Psychology at a Crossroads,’’ 19.

8. Carr, ‘‘Moral Education and the Perils of Developmentalism.’’

9. For analyses of these results, see Anne Colby, Lawrence Kohlberg, John Gibbs, and Marcus Lieberman,‘‘A Longitudinal Study of Moral Judgment,’’ in Monographs of the Society for Research in ChildDevelopment 48, no. 1–2, serial no. 200 (1983); and James Rest, Moral Development: Advances inTheory and Research (New York: Praeger, 1986).

10. This expression is Karl Popper’s.


parallelism’’: that greater competency in moral reasoning parallels a stronger dis-position toward moral motivation. Kohlberg’s response, broadly, was to assertthat his theory was a theory of moral judgment, not moral action.11 This is anapproach familiar from Imre Lakatos — in effect, potentially refuting observa-tional evidence against the theory elicited a ‘‘degenerating problem shift’’ whereinthe theory retracts claims to its predictive power in order to protect the paradigm’s‘‘hard core’’ theoretical tenets.12 The consequence of withdrawing from the domainof moral action was, perhaps, all too predictable: increasing distance from whatmost parents and educators (quite legitimately) want from a theory of moral devel-opment. And indeed, as the character education movement grew in the 1980s, itdrew strength by using cognitive developmentalism as a foil for its own more holis-tic ideas about moral education. Leading character education proponent ThomasLickona, for example, never denied the scientific merits of cognitive developmen-talism. He was, nevertheless, unequivocal in his view that it was incomplete. Itseducational function was limited to improving young people’s ability to deliberatewell about moral problems, and this apparently on Kohlberg’s own admission.13

Second, Kohlbergianism faces a situation where the importance of thePiagetian structural-cognitivist paradigm has greatly waned in psychology. Thescientific credentials of the cognitive developmentalist conception of moral edu-cation originally depended on the fact that Kohlberg’s theory succeeded in bothoperating squarely within a dominant paradigm in mainstream psychology (thatis, Piagetian structural cognitivism) and proceeding without recourse to habits,virtues, and traits. For one of the founding principles of twentieth-century moralpsychology, no less, was that ‘‘character’’ and derivative concepts such as ‘‘habit,’’‘‘disposition,’’ and ‘‘trait’’ are hopelessly unscientific. The classic work of HughHartshorne and Mark May is customarily credited as the origin of the notionthat ‘‘moral’’ personality traits demonstrate little cross-situational stability and agreat deal of cross-situational variability.14 That is to say, honesty on the part of achild, for instance, is a function of circumstances. Evidence of scrupulous honestytoward friends is in no way a reliable predictor of honesty toward parents. WhatGalileo had done to Ptolemaism, Hartshorne and May could now, it seemed, claimto have done to the ancient belief that virtues and vices are dispositions indelibly

11. Colby et al., ‘‘A Longitudinal Study of Moral Judgment’’; Levine, Kohlberg, and Hewer, ‘‘TheCurrent Formulation of Kohlberg’s Theory and a Response to Critics’’; and Lawrence Kohlberg, ‘‘TheCognitive-Developmental Approach to Moral Education,’’ Readings in Moral Education, ed. Peter Scharf(Minneapolis, Minnesota: Winston Press, 1978), 36–51.

12. As observed by Lapsley and Narvaez in ‘‘Psychologized Morality and Ethical Theory.’’ See ImreLakatos, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes: Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1978); and also Phillips and Nicolayev, ‘‘Kohlbergian Moral Development.’’

13. Thomas Lickona, Educating for Character: How Our Schools Can Teach Respect and Responsibility(New York: Bantam, 1992).

14. Hugh Hartshorne and Mark May, Studies in the Nature of Character, 3 vols. (New York: Macmillan,1928–1930).


marked on the essence of a human being’s character.15 Now Jean Piaget’s worktypified the first wave of the so-called ‘‘cognitive revolution’’ in psychology, anintellectual shift that sought, largely in opposition to the excesses of behaviorism,to reestablish as the central object of psychological inquiry the subject meaning ofsocial processes to the agents actually participating in those social processes.16 Itis now generally agreed in psychology that the cognitive revolution has entered a‘‘third wave’’ informed significantly by advances in social cognition theory. Sum-marily, the operating assumptions of the third wave of the cognitive revolutionare that (1) rationality does not usually govern people’s choices; (2) human beingsare equipped with not one but two distinct cognitive systems — an automatic,rapid, and largely unconscious system that operates mainly in familiar, everydaysituations and a slow, deliberate, verbalizable system that is triggered by novel,unexpected, and otherwise problematic situations; and (3) newly learned cognitiveschemas and representations do not simply replace old ones, but new and old repre-sentations can compete with one another for dominance in cognitive processing.17

Despite these developments, much empirical research specifically concerned withgaining insight into cognitive moral functioning continues to operate within theKohlbergian paradigm. The least that can be said is that significant hurdles toknowledge integration are set up by the fact that the Kohlbergian moral cognitionresearch program and mainstream research into social cognition speak incom-patible theoretical languages. This theoretical isolation of Kohlbergianism shouldbe all the more worrisome for Kohlbergians given that, by all accounts, moralcognition has in recent years become the hot research topic not only in social psy-chology but in fields as disparate as economics, biology, and sociology. The optics

15. Hartshorne and May’s conclusion seems significantly less revolutionary when considered in lightof the methods and purpose of social psychology. Historically, social psychology was conceived by anattractively simple, optimistic hunch: If we want to change human behavior for the better, all we haveto do is change the situation in which it occurs. Its fundamental methodological assumption is thathuman behavior is determined neither by culturally encrypted values and traditions (as in anthropology)nor by prior conditioning (as in behaviorism) but by the internal logic of immediate situations. SeeAugustine Brannigan, The Rise and Fall of Social Psychology: The Use and Misuse of ExperimentalMethod (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 2004). To the extent that one accepts the claim that situationalfactors influence behavior in important ways as common sense, therefore, one may begin to suspect thatHartshorne and May’s conclusions are either trivial or that they were operating with an idiosyncraticconception of ‘‘character trait.’’ In ordinary language, cross-situational stability is an essential aspectof the definition of a character trait such that it is simply inaccurate to describe as honest a childwho always tells the truth to his friends but who routinely lies to his parents. That said, the questionof the extent to which ‘‘situationism’’ threatens to delegitimize ‘‘virtue’’ as a concept in normativeethics is a complex one and not so easily settled. See discussions in Gilbert Harman, ‘‘Moral PhilosophyMeets Social Psychology: Virtue Ethics and the Fundamental Attribution Error,’’ Proceedings of theAristotelian Society 100 (1999): 315–331; John Doris, Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Kristjan Kristjansson, ‘‘An Aristotelian Critique ofSituationism,’’ Philosophy 83 no. 1 (2008): 55–76.

16. See Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1990), 2.

17. Chris Brewin, ‘‘The Role of Theory in the Evolution of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy’’ (M.B.Shapiro Award Lecture delivered at the quinquennial conference of the British Psychological Society,Manchester, United Kingdom, March 2005). See also Joanne Lawson, ‘‘CBT Dissected,’’ The Psychologist18, no. 6 (2005): 352.


are unmistakable: equipped with the latest tools of social cognition theory, a newgeneration of psychologists is sweeping into research territory once safely occupiedby Kohlberg while his scions faithfully plod on, applying a set of core constructsand theoretical models that are relics of the first wave of the cognitive revolution.

In view of this situation, it would be all too easy to grouse about researchershaving become ingrown, but Lapsley and Narvaez are at once more generousand insightful. As they see it, the Kohlbergian paradigm’s narrow concern withunderstanding the way cognitive structures develop, and its concomitant avoid-ance of personological dimensions of moral functioning, is in fact a dictate ofthe paradigm’s own fundamental and, crucially, philosophy-derived theoreticaltenets. Before proceeding to present Lapsley and Narvaez’s analysis of how theethical theory intervenes in the Kohlbergian paradigm to shackle moral psychol-ogy to a restricted conception of the moral domain, it will be instructive toreview ‘‘phenomenalism’’ and ‘‘formalism,’’ the key theoretical assumptions ofKohlbergianism in question.

Phenomenalism and Formalism

Phenomenalism is a term of art in cognitive moral developmentalism thatrefers to the idea that deciding whether an action is moral, immoral, or nonmoralor amoral requires attributing to the agent a reason for acting.18 For instance, mostwould hesitate before describing as ‘‘heroic’’ a rescue motivated not by a desireto help the victim but by a desire to win others’ approval. Lapsley and Narvaezrefer to phenomenalism as a ‘‘philosophical’’ principle.19 Whether or not thischaracterization is accurate — it is an important question for the purposes of thisessay and I will return to it subsequently — phenomenalism, in Kohlberg’s hands,has several important implications for theorizing research in moral psychology.

Phenomenalism helps set the boundaries around the proper subject matter ofmoral psychology (that is, the moral domain) by defining moral conduct as conductpreceded by moral deliberation and motivated by moral reasons.20 Kohlberg alsoseemed to take phenomenalism as implying a formalist conception of morality.Equally recognizable as a feature of Kantian ethics, formalism in Kohlberg’s stagetheory is the idea that correct moral reflection and justification demonstratecharacteristic structural-cognitive patterns.21 But Kohlberg took the Kantian intu-ition further by positing that not only does optimally rational moral reflection

18. Augusto Blasi, ‘‘Moral Functioning: Moral Understanding and Personality,’’ in Moral Development,Self, and Identity, ed. Daniel K. Lapsley and Darcia Narvaez (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum,2004), 335–348.

19. Lapsley and Narvaez, ‘‘Moral Psychology at a Crossroads’’; and Lapsley and Narvaez, ‘‘PsychologizedMorality and Ethical Theory,’’ 285.

20. Lawrence Kohlberg, Charles Levine, and Alexandra Hewer, Moral Stages: A Current Formulationand a Response to Critics (Basel: Karger, 1983), 69–71. See also Blasi, ‘‘Moral Functioning.’’

21. See Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals (1797), ed. and trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1996). Compare with Kohlberg, Levine, and Hewer, Moral Stages, 81–84.


take a specific form — that is, one that is universalist, principle-based, and deon-tological — but so does nonoptimal moral reflection — as characterized by thespecific structures of thought that define the stages of moral development belowStage 6. Kohlberg consistently appealed to the ‘‘assumption of phenomenalism’’ toexplain the theory’s central concern with moral-reasoning development in termsof evolving cognitive structures.22

Kohlberg deployed the assumptions of formalism and phenomenalism as atheoretical means of discrediting behaviorism and psychoanalytic theory as per-spectives for understanding social behavior in the moral domain. At risk of statingthe obvious, if the moral quality of an act hangs necessarily on the agent’ssubjective intentions, then behaviorism lacks basic theoretical resources to dis-tinguish between moral, nonmoral or amoral, and immoral acts. For its part,psychoanalysis’s ‘‘early psychological conflicts’’ and ‘‘mechanisms of repression’’might very well explain some part of an individual’s social behavior. However,once the domain of moral judgment is defined as being bound by specific con-scious rational processes, the machinations of the unconscious mind becomeeffectively ruled out as coherent explanans for an individual’s patterns of moraldeliberation.23

The principles of formalism and phenomenalism also provided conceptualleverage in Kohlberg’s campaign to expose moral subjectivism as a fallacy. Kohlbergbelieved that the strength of the empirical evidence that had been accumulated infavor of the formalist-developmental hypothesis — namely, that the developmentof moral reasoning competency follows a sequence of invariable, universal,hierarchically ordered, and increasingly adequate stages — should be enough toturn the tide of public opinion against unapologetically subjectivist conceptionsof moral education whose popularity was reaching an apex by the 1970s.24 Morallife is not just a matter of an inward quest to discover one’s unique and personalvalues and Kohlberg’s theory proved it. There are better and worse ways toreason about moral issues, and they can be encouraged through nonindoctrinatingforms of socialization, especially semi-structured discussion of moral dilemmasand attending a school that has just institutional structures and managementpractices.25 On these grounds, Kohlberg claimed that the empirical findings forstage theory ‘‘defeated relativism.’’26 Once again echoing Kantian ethics, Kohlbergseemed to believe that there was a single correct moral stance on refractory moral

22. Kohlberg, Levine, and Hewer, Moral Stages, 81–84.

23. Ibid. See also Lapsley and Narvaez, ‘‘Psychologized Morality and Ethical Theory,’’ 285.

24. I am referring primarily to values clarification. See, for example, Louis Raths, Merrill Harmin, andSidney Simon, Values and Teaching: Working with Values in the Classroom (Columbus, Ohio: CharlesE. Merrill, 1978).

25. See F. Clark Power, Anne Higgins, and Lawrence Kohlberg, Lawrence Kohlberg’s Approach to MoralEducation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).

26. Lawrence Kohlberg, Essays on Moral Development, Vol. 1: The Philosophy of Moral Development.Moral Stages and the Idea of Justice (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981).


issues such as abortion and capital punishment and that the evidence for this wouldbe that the views of optimally ‘‘rational’’ agents (those who consistently use orprefer Level 3, or ‘‘postconventional,’’ moral thinking) on such issues converge.27

In the same way, Kohlberg’s theory seemed to provide fresh insight into theperennial disagreements between rival approaches to normative ethics, if notactually settling them once and for all. Besides ‘‘defeating relativism,’’ the otherputative philosophical achievement of Kohlberg’s theory was to have shown thatthere is a coherent and, crucially, hierarchical relation between familiar folkperspectives in normative ethics. Stage 4 typifies a law-and-order orientation;Stage 3 typifies the view that interpersonal relations are the source of moralobligations; Stage 2 the eye-for-an-eye orientation; and Stage 1 blind conformity toauthority. More significant philosophically, the theory neatly implies that Kant’spreferred ideal of moral maturity as ‘‘full rational appreciation of the principledgrounds of moral association’’ (to adopt David Carr’s wording)28 — or somethingconceptually akin to it — and the social contract orientation of Jean-JacquesRousseau, John Locke, John Rawls, and others29 — or something conceptuallyakin to it — are not merely two competing perspectives on normative ethicswhose basic grounds are subject to rational disagreement among highly sophis-ticated moral thinkers. Kantian ethics is of a higher order of moral maturitythan social contract theory.30 In sum, stage theory complements normative ethicsby providing triangulating empirical support for a Kantian prescriptive accountof principle-based moral reasoning — the crowning achievement of an ambi-tion that Kohlberg called ‘‘committing the naturalistic fallacy and getting awaywith it.’’31

27. Kant asserted that certain moral acts are never rationally justifiable, citing suicide as one example.See Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Thomas K. Abbott(Buffalo: Promethius, 1987). Kohlberg made similar remarks about capital punishment, insinuating thatthose who reach his fifth stage of moral development or higher cannot rationally endorse this punitivemeasure. See Lawrence Kohlberg, ‘‘The Cognitive-Developmental Approach to Moral Education,’’ PhiDelta Kappan 56, no. 10 (1975): 670–677.

28. David Carr, ‘‘Moralized Psychology or Psychologized Morality? Ethics and Psychology in RecentTheorizing About Moral and Character Education,’’ Educational Theory 57, no. 4 (2007): 392.

29. See, respectively, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762), ed. Lester G. Crocker(New York: Washington Square Press, 1967); John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1690), ed.Peter Niddich (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); and John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge,Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1971).

30. For critical discussions of this issue, see Rawls, A Theory of Justice; Richard S. Peters, MoralDevelopment and Moral Education (London: George Allen Unwin, 1981); and Jurgen Habermas, MoralConsciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen(Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1990).

31. Lawrence Kohlberg, ‘‘From Is to Ought: How to Commit the Naturalistic Fallacy and Get Awaywith It in the Study of Moral Development,’’ in Cognitive Developmentalism and Epistemology, ed.Theodore Mischel (New York: Academic Press, 1971).


All this theoretical fecundity added further to the magnetism ofKohlbergianism but, in Lapsley and Narvaez’s analysis, was also the Kohlbergianparadigm’s hamartia.32

The Negative Side Effects of Philosophy’s Influenceon Moral Psychology

For one thing, Lapsley and Narvaez argue, tying the research agenda inmoral psychology to these normatively charged issues dragged it down into aphilosophical quagmire. Relying on a theoretical notion that Jurgen Habermaslabeled the ‘‘complementarity thesis,’’ Kohlberg assigned to normative ethics adiscrete function in the design of his theory’s architecture and the interpretationof empirical findings.33 Normative ethics complements psychological theoryon cognitive moral development not only by drawing on the principles ofphenomenalism and formalism to define what counts as moral cognition: italso establishes the end point of cognitive moral development (that is, the Kantiandeontologism that Stage 6 represents). Furthermore, empirical data may be ableto confirm (or disconfirm) that the stages of moral development are sequential,invariable, and irreversible, but only normative ethics can uncover the causalmechanism of the developmental process. People are supposed to grow into higherstages because they perceive higher stages as being more rationally adequate, butit takes normative ethics to explain how each stage constitutes a rational gain overits predecessors.34 As Augusto Blasi points out, the openly Kantian assumptions ofKohlberg’s theory had the nefarious effect of exposing it to what he called ‘‘mixedarguments.’’35 Blasi’s idea, in Lapsley and Narvaez’s rendering, is this:

According to this genre of criticism, Kohlberg’s theory can be safely dismissed because of itsaffinity with Kant or Rawls or Plato, and, as everyone knows, the views of Kant and Rawlsand Plato are just absurd. Apparently, if one’s philosophical commitments are thought to benonsense, then one’s psychological theory is thereby guilty by association.36

Kohlberg’s habit of wearing his ethics on his sleeve, in other words, made for abewildering (con)fusion of critical attention directed at the (il)legitimacy of thetheory’s ethical starting points and its credentials as a body of empirical knowledgein terms of strictly psychological criteria of adequacy.

32. Lapsley and Narvaez, ‘‘Moral Psychology at a Crossroads’’; and Lapsley and Narvaez, ‘‘PsychologizedMorality and Ethical Theory.’’

33. Jurgen Habermas, ‘‘Interpretive Social Science vs. Hermeneutics,’’ in Social Science as MoralInquiry, ed. Norma Haan, Robert Bellah, Paul Rabinow, and William M. Sullivan (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1983).

34. For discussion of these issues, see Daniel K. Lapsley, Moral Psychology (Boulder, Colorado: Westview,1996), 41ff; and, more recently, Daniel K. Lapsley and Patrick L. Hill, ‘‘On Dual Processing and HeuristicApproaches to Moral Cognition,’’ Journal of Moral Education 37, no. 3 (2008): 313–332.

35. Augusto Blasi, ‘‘How Should Psychologists Define Morality? Or, The Negative Side Effects ofPhilosophy’s Influence on Psychology,’’ in The Moral Domain: Essays in the Ongoing DiscussionBetween Philosophy and Psychology, ed. Thomas Wren (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1990),38–70.



More significantly for Lapsley and Narvaez’s purposes, there are the negativeside effects of the phenomenalist assumption itself. They hold the principle ofphenomenalism to account for the Kohlbergian paradigm’s current state of doublealienation from parents’ and educators’ expectation about moral education andfrom the mainstream of social, cognitive, and personality psychology.37

With the advance of the cognitive revolution in psychology came the prolif-eration of so-called ‘‘dual-processing’’ models. To simplify a complex picture ofcompeting models, it has become a shibboleth in cognitive psychology to acknowl-edge two ‘‘levels’’ or ‘‘systems’’ of cognitive processing. ‘‘System 2 processing’’refers to analytic, explicit, effortful, slow, serial mental processing. It is typicallytriggered by novel, unexpected, and otherwise problematic situations — such asmoral dilemmas. It can be said that System 2 processing embraces the wholeof human cognition as it was conceived in classical Piagetianism. By contrast,operating mainly in familiar, everyday situations and, accordingly, encompass-ing the vast majority of everyday human information processing is ‘‘System 1processing.’’ System 1 processing, a key innovation of post-Piagetian cognitivepsychology, is heuristic, implicit, automatic, fast, and associative.38 By restrictingthe moral domain to acts based on explicit, prior deliberation about moral reasons,the Kohlbergian paradigm in moral psychology dismisses System 1 processing asirrelevant to moral cognition.39 Reviewing the research literature on attemptsto understand the moral personality from the point of view of social cognitiontheory, Lapsley and Narvaez conclude that the habitual side of moral functioningtypically associated with traditional understandings of moral character and virtuedraw on System 1 processing. They refer to it as ‘‘moral chronicity.’’ Then theythrow down the gauntlet:

One challenge for a social cognitive theory of moral character is to specify the developmentalsources of moral chronicity. Indeed, our preference for the social cognitive option reflectsa strategic bet that it will more likely lead to integrative developmental models of moralpersonality. . . . One speculation is that moral personality development is built on thefoundation of generalized event representations, behavioral scripts, and episodic memorythat characterize early sociopersonality development. Event representations have been calledthe ‘‘basic building blocks of cognitive development,’’ and it is our contention that they arethe foundation as well of emergent moral character.40

37. Lapsley and Narvaez, ‘‘Psychologized Morality and Ethical Theory.’’

38. The System 1/System 2 distinction comes from Keith E. Stanovich and Richard F. West, ‘‘IndividualDifferences in Reasoning: Implications for the Rationality Debate?’’ Behavioural and Brain Sciences23, no. 4 (2000): 645–726. Lapsley and Hill give an overview of current models and consider theirapplicability to moral cognition research in ‘‘On Dual Processing and Heuristic Approaches to MoralCognition.’’ The distinction is also fundamental to Jonathan Haidt’s argument aimed at exposing thecommon misconception that moral reasoning leads moral decision making in his classic paper ‘‘TheEmotional Dog and Its Rational Tail,’’ Psychological Review 108, no. 4 (2001): 814–834.

39. Daniel K. Lapsley and Darcia Narvaez, ‘‘Character Education,’’ in Handbook of Child Psychology,vol. 4 (6th ed.), ed. William Damon, Richard M. Lerner, K. Ann Renninger, and Irving E. Sigel (NewYork: John Wiley, 2006), 248–296; Lapsley and Narvaez, ‘‘Psychologized Morality and Ethical Theory’’;and Lapsley and Narvaez, ‘‘Moral Psychology at a Crossroads.’’

40. Lapsley and Narvaez, ‘‘Character Education,’’ 286.


In the Kohlbergian paradigm, ‘‘cognitive structures’’ of moral reasoning aremoral psychology’s proper area of investigation because the principle of phenom-enalism requires that verbalizable motivating reasons are a prima facie crucialconsideration for establishing an act’s moral status, as we have seen. Yet it seemsthat one may point with as much right to the moral relevance of an absenceof effortful deliberation. Aristotle did. He insisted that what typifies a personof good moral character is that he or she does not deliberate before performingmorally good acts. For an action to be truly virtuous, in Aristotle’s view, it must bedetermined by the appropriately developed moral character of the agent, by whichhe meant that morally good acts are habituated, spontaneous responses in moralsituations.41 Why did Kohlberg plump for elevating the deliberative rather thanthe habitual side of moral responsiveness? Lapsley and Narvaez’s answer is that acertain philosophically derived conception of the moral domain drove him to it.

Lapsley and Narvaez’s remedy to the marginalization of moral psychology, assimple as its diagnosis was complex, can be summarized in three words: no morephilosophy.42 If Kohlberg ‘‘moralized’’ the scientific study of psychology by usingethical theory to define the telos of moral development and to delineate the domainof inquiry, they contend that the future of research in moral psychology lies in the‘‘psychologization of morality.’’ Described by its authors as a ‘‘post-Kohlbergian’’conception of moral psychology, a defining methodological tenet of psychologizedmorality is that it untethers the tools proper to psychology as a scientific disciplinefrom philosophical agendas and refuses constraining philosophical startingpoints.43 In order to illuminate the psychological functioning that underlies the fullscope of moral phenomena, it proposes to draw instead on neighboring literaturesin psychology — personality psychology, cognitive psychology, evolutionarypsychology, educational psychology, and so on. As it raises the fence betweenmoral psychology and ethical theory, that is, psychologized morality lowers thefence with other domains of psychology: ‘‘a psychologized morality,’’ Lapsleyand Narvaez write, ‘‘asserts the autonomy of psychology in the study of moralfunctioning. It jettisons a priori philosophical constraints and seeks integrativepossibilities between moral psychology and other human sciences.’’44

41. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 2nd ed., trans. J.A.K. Thomson (London: Penguin, 1955), 1105a28–b1.See also Jan Steutel and Ben Spiecker, ‘‘Cultivating Sentimental Disposition Through AristotelianHabituation,’’ Journal of the Philosophy of Education 38, no. 4 (2004): 531–549.


43. Lapsley and Narvaez, ‘‘Psychologized Morality and Ethical Theory’’; and Lapsley and Narvaez,‘‘Moral Psychology at a Crossroads.’’

44. Lapsley and Narvaez, ‘‘Psychologized Morality and Ethical Theory,’’ 284–285. Integrated EthicalEducation (IEE) exemplifies their conception of post-Kohlbergian moral psychology. Briefly, IEE linksthe ancient Greek idea of virtue as a form of human excellence (arete) with current ‘‘expertise’’ modelsof human learning. These models, borrowed from contemporary learning theory (not ethics), regardknowledge development as highly domain specific and depict it as proceeding along a continuum froma ‘‘novice’’ to ‘‘expert’’ level of mastery. The basic assumption of IEE, then, is that moral characterconsists of expertise in the moral domain. For detailed overviews, see Darcia Narvaez, ‘‘IntegrativeEthical Education,’’ in Handbook of Moral Development, ed. Melanie Killen and Judith G. Smetana


Phenomenalism and the Moral Domain

I am skeptical about Lapsley and Narvaez’s idea that moral psychology’s pre-carious state can be blamed on the interaction between philosophy and moralpsychology. To what extent, I wonder, can phenomenalism be rightly considered a‘‘philosophical’’ principle, as Lapsley and Narvaez claim it is? And, even supposingit can be, how reliable is Kohlberg’s inference from phenomenalism to the min-imalist conceptualization of the moral domain associated with the Kohlbergianparadigm?45

It seems plain enough to me that their global indictment of ‘‘ethical theory’’ istainted with syncretism. Lapsley and Narvaez concede themselves that Aristotleheld that characterological discourse is foundational to ethical evaluation.46 Trulyvirtuous acts, according to Aristotle, are precisely not the result of reasoned reflec-tion but emanate spontaneously from the agent’s good moral character. There isalso David Hume who, in light of the observation that people try to abdicate moralresponsibility for actions they regard as being out of character, was not the least bitshy about considering actions that are an expression of character as falling withinthe moral domain. Excuses for immoral behavior like ‘‘I wasn’t myself’’ and ‘‘Ilost my head,’’ Hume argued, imply a connection between moral responsibility,personality, and identity: one is fully responsible only for those actions that are‘‘in character’’ — that is to say, actions that are typical of one’s personality quiteapart from the nature of the cognitive processes underlying them.47 One of the hall-marks of Kantian ethics, by contrast, is to emphasize the necessity of evaluatingmotive and intention in judgments of responsibility. Kantian ethics tends to regardhuman beings’ capacity to freely choose to act on the basis of moral reasons (thatis, ‘‘moral autonomy’’) as the ground of human dignity and a necessary supposi-tion of the common idea that morality is unconditionally binding. The conceptualsingularity of moral law, in Kant’s view, lies in the fact that we are responsible for

(Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005), 703–733; Darcia Narvaez, ‘‘How Cognitive andNeurobiological Sciences Inform Values Education for Creatures Like Us,’’ in Values Education andLifelong Learning: Principles, Policies, and Programmes, ed. David N. Aspin and Judith D. Chapman(Dordrecht: Springer, 2007); and Lapsley and Narvaez, ‘‘Character Education.’’

45. In the interest of fairness, I must reiterate that I am sympathetic to Lapsley and Narvaez’s worriesabout the poor integration of moral psychology with the mainstream of psychological science. Thehistory of science suggests that disciplinary isolation poses a real danger for specialized branches ofinquiry. Furthermore, Lapsley and Narvaez’s appeal for accountability to public demands for trait-centered approaches to moral development and education is animated by the compelling precept that‘‘character education must be compatible with our best insights about psychological functioning;character education must be compatible with our best insights about teaching and learning’’ (Lapsleyand Narvaez, ‘‘Character Education,’’ 250, emphasis in original). In spirit the principle is hard togainsay — even more so now that personality and social cognition theory have made advances thatenable psychological science to bring traits and dispositions back from the grave of the Hartshorneand May studies (Ibid., 268–269). Larry Nucci expresses similar optimism about the promise of socialcognition theory to provide a reconceptualization of moral character for psychology in Education in theMoral Domain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 124ff.

46. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1105a28–b1.

47. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 411.


both legislating it and for imposing it on ourselves.48 Enough material has beendredged up from the history of philosophy, I think, to demonstrate this point:whether judgments of ethical responsibility are grounded in assessments of theagent’s character or the agent’s motivating reasons is itself philosophically contro-versial. In light of these considerations, it looks very much as if the Kohlbergianparadigm’s restricted conception of the moral domain, far from being an inevitableconsequence of allowing ‘‘philosophy’’ to influence moral psychology, is an importfrom Kantian ethics and a mark of cognitive moral developmentalism’s Piagetianpedigree.49 This invites speculation on how a Kohlberg, having discovered util-itarianism or virtue ethics (rather than Kantian ethics), might have given birthto an altogether different ‘‘Kohlbergian paradigm’’ by combining these alternativeconceptions of normative ethics with Piagetian cognitive developmentalism.50

Conceding this point, it may seem promising to revise the initial objection to‘‘ethical theory.’’ Perhaps the assumption of phenomenalism is not the inevitableresult when moral psychologists draw on ethical theory in the elaboration ofresearch models. Perhaps the restriction of the moral domain in the Kohlbergianparadigm derives instead from a desire for convergence, not with philosophicalideas about moral psychology, but with folk moral psychology. Indeed, Kohlbergand Blasi both repeatedly say as much. The very label ‘‘phenomenalism’’ refersto the fact that the principle is meant to reflect the ‘‘phenomenon’’ of ordinary,prephilosophical moral discourse and practice.51 Under this interpretation, onemight claim, what moral psychology needs to spurn are not philosophicalconceptions of moral responsibility attribution. The lesson to be drawn from theKohlbergian experience is that moral psychology is threatened with irrelevance anddisciplinary isolation when it ties itself to theoretical consistency with ordinarymorality. But this proposal fares little better.

First, on the question of the defining ambit of the moral domain, it is farfrom obvious that there is any consensus in common sense. A case in point is

48. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1996), 6:379ff. See also Thomas Hill, Respect, Pluralism, and Justice: KantianPerspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

49. The application of Kantian ethics to the investigation of moral development is hardly original inKohlberg. The basic philosophical framework of Kohlberg’s theory was grandfathered in from Piaget’sresearch program on the moral reasoning of the child. See Jean Piaget, The Moral Judgment of the Child(New York: Norton, 1965). Kohlberg’s theory was an overt attempt to refine Piaget’s model, whichdivides moral development into two phases: the morality of constraint and the morality of cooperation.See Lapsley, Moral Psychology, 41ff.

50. Presumably, Millian cognitive developmentalism would define a similarly minimalist conceptionof the moral domain through reference to the harm principle (rather than the assumption ofphenomenalism), and a full rational appreciation of the higher pleasures (rather than fundamentalmoral principles) would feature centrally in its ideal of moral maturity. The telos of an Aristoteliantheory of cognitive moral development, for its part, would describe an agent possessed of a trueunderstanding of the behaviors, emotions, judgment, taste, and attitudes that are constitutive of theexcellence of humans as a natural kind with a duly expansive definition of the moral domain.

51. See Blasi, ‘‘Moral Functioning’’; and Kohlberg, Levine, and Hewer, Moral Stages, 69–71.


Owen Flanagan’s strenuous argument in his book Varieties of Moral Personalityin favor of conceiving morality broadly — in terms of conflict resolution, socialharmony, and the protection of rights and conceptions of a good person, of matureindividual personality, and of a good life.52 When his argument wanders into theKohlbergian program at one point, Flanagan registers his main reason for rejectingthe Kohlbergian supposition that the essential function of morality is conflictresolution: he claims that this view goes against common sense!53 Moreover, iflatter-day attempts at ‘‘experimental philosophy’’ are anything to go by, in a recentreview of literature on moral responsibility attribution, Joshua Knobe and JohnDoris conclude that, far from appealing to intentionality as the only criterionof moral responsibility, folk theories of the moral domain draw on multiple,situation-specific (what they call ‘‘variant’’) criteria.54 Particularly problematic forphenomenalism is Knobe and Doris’s finding that people will readily assign moralblame for wholly unintended acts — like accidentally running down a carelesspedestrian while driving drunk.

Second, there is a good reason to reject the idea that phenomenalist assump-tions about the preconditions of moral responsibility attribution (that is, that onecannot be held accountable for unintentional acts) entail the exclusion of System 1cognitive processing from moral psychology’s legitimate range of investigation. Inorder to appreciate this argument, the commonsense content of phenomenalismmust be untangled from the more controversial theoretical content that has beensmuggled into it by cognitive developmental theory.

Let us assume, despite Knobe and Doris’s evidence to the contrary, thatpeople’s moral judgments generally are consistent with the principle that moralresponsibility attribution depends on a prior judgment about the agent’s motivesor intentions — or, in other words, that phenomenalism does reflect commonsense.55 Notice, however, that the assumption of phenomenalism radically departsfrom common sense. Namely, phenomenalism requires that an effortful, explicit‘‘System 2’’ cognitive process precede and inform the formulation of an action

52. Owen Flanagan, Varieties of Moral Personality: Ethics and Psychological Realism (Cambridge,Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991).

53. Speaking about what he considers to be contentious philosophical assumptions underlyingKohlbergianism, Flanagan writes: ‘‘To conceive of the domain of morality as exclusively concernedwith issues of justice or fairness — although an understandable restriction for the purposes of studyinga manageable domain — factually misconstrues both our ordinary conception of morality and moralexperience’’ (Ibid., 21).

54. Joshua Knobe and John M. Doris, ‘‘Strawsonian Variations: Folk Morality and the Search for a UnifiedTheory,’’ in Handbook of Moral Psychology, ed. John M. Doris et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,forthcoming).

55. The principle of phenomenalism, in this sense, has been given an interesting new application bythe primatologist Frans de Waal in his work investigating morality from the perspective of evolutionarypsychology. It is virtually nonsensical, de Waal points out, to talk about the evolutionary appearance ofmorality in primates outside a framework of ‘‘cognitive ethology,’’ which imagines animals as creaturesthat are able to understand social situations, reflect on them, and formulate and act on intentions. SeeFrans de Waal, Le bon singe [The Good Monkey] (Paris: Bayard, 1997), 9 and 24.


intention. Yet any definition of an intentional action that includes such a require-ment is unacceptably narrow for the simple reason that it would rule out paradig-matic cases of moral behavior. Obviously, many acts typically regarded as ‘‘moral’’and ‘‘immoral’’ are undertaken in the absence of any conscious deliberation in thatthey do not necessarily involve such psychological processes as consciously con-sidering the outcomes of action alternatives, weighing pros and cons, comparingapplicable principles, and explicitly formulating an intention. The principle ofphenomenalism, in other words, would imply that such mundane nondeliberateacts as telling a joke to cheer up a friend or committing a foul in the heat of a sportsmatch are thus unintentional and hence that the agent cannot be held morallyresponsible for performing them. But this is absurd. And it is absurd because, toput it a bit pompously, while all deliberate acts are intentional, not all intentionalacts are deliberate. Intentionality only implies acting for a reason — that is to say,with some end or purpose in view — not on the basis of reasoned reflection.56

The Character Education Problem: An Error Theory

If Lawrence Kohlberg were alive today, he would have the right to take excep-tion to Lapsley and Narvaez’s charge that his insistence on grounding psychologicalresearch in the moral domain as defined by ethical theory is responsible for theexclusion of character and virtue (that is, moral traits and dispositions) as legiti-mate topics in moral development research. For starters, the problematization ofnotions of character and virtue in psychology predates Kohlberg. As mentionedpreviously, received wisdom in moral psychology has it that Hartshorne andMay’s conclusions about the deep cross-situational instability of personality traitssounded the death knell for the cause of character psychology and education.Furthermore, given the lack of any viable alternative theoretical framework formoral education, they also marked the beginning of a generation-long moratoriumon psychological research on moral education.57 Further doubt is cast on thesuggestion that his assumption of phenomenalism had anything to do with theKohlbergian paradigm’s exclusion of personological aspects of moral functioningwhen one recalls Kohlberg’s own grounds for skepticism about them. His argu-ment, in short, was that character made for a hopelessly vague and arbitrary ‘‘aimof moral education’’ — arbitrary because no two people’s lists of morally desirabletraits ever seem to be the same and vague because, even if consensus on sucha list could be reached, the question of practical interpretation of these traitswould always remain open. My ideal of ‘‘honesty’’ may better fit your definitionof ‘‘tactlessness.’’58 Finally, one must not overlook the distinct possibility that

56. G.E.M. Anscombe, Intention (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1957).

57. As Lapsley and Narvaez themselves remind us in their far-reaching presentation of the state of theart in character education and psychology in their essay ‘‘Character Education,’’ 250–255. For moreon this standard interpretation of the influence of the Hartshorne and May studies on research andpractice in moral education in the latter half of the twentieth century, see Power, Higgins, and Kohlberg,Lawrence Kohlberg’s Approach to Moral Education.

58. Lawrence Kohlberg and Rachelle Mayer, ‘‘Development as the Aim of Education,’’ HarvardEducational Review 42, no. 4 (1972): 449–496.


feeding these scientific doubts about character psychology and education are somepervasive ethical worries. There is a continuing grim fascination in the popularimagination about the way things turned out at the heart of Europe in the firstdecades of the twentieth century. Rightly or wrongly, many suspect that tradi-tionalist, character-centered approaches to moral education were a contributingfactor in the Holocaust and other moral horrors of the period. By making insuffi-cient allowances for the development of autonomous moral reasoning, charactereducation fails to provide a necessary cognitive prophylactic against getting drawninto blind conformity to authority and mob rule.59 In sum, it looks to me as ifLapsley and Narvaez’s analysis mistakes the philosophical tail for the psycholog-ical dog. The history suggests that it was less a concern for adherence to viablephilosophical principles or ‘‘ordinary moral language’’ that dictated the restrictionof moral development research to moral judgment. The more plausible story isthat a prior paradigmatic interest in making ‘‘postconventional thinking’’ the corepreoccupation of research in moral psychology led the search for post hoc ‘‘philo-sophical’’ legitimation. That legitimation was found in a conveniently selectiveinterpretation of Kantian ethics and the presuppositions of ‘‘commonsense’’ moralresponsibility attribution. That, at any rate, is my error theory.

The moratorium that the Hartshorne and May studies placed on psychologicalresearch on moral education ended with that other watershed moment in thehistory of twentieth-century moral psychology: Lawrence Kohlberg’s 1958 dis-sertation. Restoring moral character as the overarching metaconstruct for moralpsychology and moral education featured nowhere on Kohlberg’s agenda. Yet ascharacter education began to dominate the educational discourse on social andmoral development, it became increasingly difficult for moral psychologists toignore.60 For one thing, the scientific heft of cognitive developmentalism, coupledwith its admittedly limited focus on the improvement of social competenciesinvolved in negotiating social problems from a moral perspective, made the cogni-tive developmental approach to moral education vulnerable to attack. Not surpris-ingly, it became a favorite target in the character education campaign.61 For anotherthing, the more extensive the implementation of character education programs inschools, the more reason educational psychologists had to be concerned about theirlack of scientific credibility. In fact, some of the new character education programs

59. For one articulation of this point, see Mary Warnock, ‘‘Moral Values,’’ in Values in Education andEducation in Values, ed. John Mark Halstead and Monica Taylor (London: Falmer, 1996).

60. In 1990, the character education movement in the United States had little support outside a circleof radical, politically conservative educationalists. By 2000 it had become an established presence inAmerican schools. With the introduction of No Child Left Behind, however, pressure to concentrate onmeeting standards of numeracy and literacy seems to have diverted the initial enthusiasm for charactereducation at the institutional level.

61. See, for instance, William J. Bennett, ‘‘Moral Literacy and the Formation of Character,’’ in MoralCharacter and Civic Education in the Elementary School, ed. Jacques S. Benninga (New York: TeachersCollege Press, 1991); William Kilpatrick, Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right from Wrong: And What We CanDo About It (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992); and Edward A. Wynne and Kevin Ryan, ReclaimingOur Schools (Columbus, Ohio: Charles Merrill, 1992).


were so incompatible with current knowledge in educational psychology that thecharacter education movement could almost be seen as a populist uprising againstthe authority of psychology in American education. Indeed, the documentation ofmany of the early character education programs dispenses entirely with the usualformality of claiming legitimacy (often incredibly) on the grounds that the inter-vention constitutes an application of some basic psychological research or other.62

Thus, one might say, a particular tension has come to challenge moralpsychology to reassert itself as a branch of applied psychology: this tension isbetween (1) the strong popular appeal of the notion that moral education shouldcenter on instilling in children and adolescents morally praiseworthy charactertraits; and (2) the refractoriness of character as a psychological construct. In the faceof these pressures, one option is to eschew (1) and embrace (2) by adhering to thestandard, broadly psychoeducational approach that focuses on the developmentof various forms of morally relevant social competencies (perspective-taking,postconventional moral thinking, empathizing, and so on). This seems to be theroute taken, for example, by John Gibbs’s EQUIP Program and Larry Nucci’sdomain theory approach to social-cognitive development.63 Another is simplyto rechristen the standard psychoeducational approach ‘‘character education,’’thereby embracing (2) while nominally embracing (but tacitly eschewing) (1).Robert Selman’s Risk and Relationships Framework and spin-off interventionssuch as Facing History and Ourselves represent such a position.64 A thirdalternative involves breaking with the classical psychoeducational approach andturning instead to personality and social cognition theory in an attempt tocoherently and meaningfully embrace both (1) and (2). This, as I have alreadysuggested, is the strategy of Lapsley and Narvaez’s Integrative Ethical Educationmodel of character development.

Revolution and crisis are two sides of the same coin, and Lapsley and Narvaezfound both the origins of the Kohlbergian paradigm’s crisis and its resolution inthe cognitive-developmental tradition’s rapprochement between ethical theoryand moral psychology. I argued in the foregoing section that, far from being theinevitable consequence of adhering to ‘‘philosophical starting points’’ (specifically,phenomenalism), the Kohlbergian conceptualization of the moral domain is theresult of a founding mistake: inferring, erroneously, that if moral actions are

62. Recent school-based character education interventions are described, categorized, and evaluated inMarvin Berkowitz and Melinda Bier, What Works in Character Education: A Research-Driven Guidefor Educators (St. Louis, Missouri: Character Education Partnership, 2005).

63. John C. Gibbs, Granville Bud Potter, and Arnold P. Goldstein, The EQUIP Program: Teaching Youthto Think and Act Responsibly Through a Peer-Helping Approach (Champaign, Illinois: Research Press,1995); John Gibbs, Moral Development and Reality, 2nd ed. (London: Penguin Academics, 2009); andNucci, Education in the Moral Domain.

64. See Robert L. Selman, The Promotion of Social Awareness: Powerful Lessons from thePartnership of Developmental Theory and Classroom Practice (New York: Russell Sage Foundation,2003). For information on and resources associated with Facing History and Ourselves, seehttp://www.facinghistory.org/.


necessarily intentional then they are also necessarily deliberate. In conclusion, Iwould like to advance that Lapsley and Narvaez’s efforts to document the negativeinfluence of ethical theory on moral psychology seem to have distracted themfrom the most salient difference between the proposed psychologized moralityparadigm and the traditional psychoeducational approach to moral psychology.It is not that psychologized morality would alone enjoy ‘‘theoretical autonomy.’’Indeed, I will go on to claim that theoretical autonomy in the present sense is afalse aspiration for moral psychology. The characteristic of psychologized moralitythat represents the sharpest break with Kohlbergianism is its proposal to investi-gate moral functioning with morally neutral constructs. I will also say a word inclosing about the legitimacy of Blasi’s worries that moral psychology exposes itselfto charges of guilt by association when it aligns itself with an ethical perspectiveand steps beyond its proper disciplinary jurisdiction by testing normative claimsusing empirical findings on moral development and functioning.

Conclusion

My hunch is that modeling moral cognition on functionalist theories raisesreal worries for moral education.65 Paraphrasing something Theodore Lipps oncesaid about logic, they seem to give us at best ‘‘a physics of morality’’ (how humansdo function morally) whereas what we also need is an ‘‘ethics of morality’’ (howhuman beings should function morally).

Now it is undoubtedly true that, when viewed from the outsider’s perspectiveof the scientific observer, morality plays a crucial functional role in the regulationof human interactions and society, a role that should be continuous with andexplicable in terms of knowledge in the social sciences and ultimately groundedin the neurological makeup of humans as an evolved species. When viewed froman insider’s perspective of the ethical subject, normative claims and practicesare susceptible to justification in terms of reasons that can speak to themas ethical subjects. Ethical theorizing as it was practiced during most of thetwentieth century, it is true, tended to be hostile to the former perspective. Butin ethics today there is a quiet revolution under way that takes very seriously thecontribution of the social sciences to thoughtful reflection on how to live a decentlife and how we should and should not treat each other.66 On the relation betweenthe explanatory and justificatory levels of ethical analysis, I will only remark

65. Examples of this approach include Jonathan Haidt’s Social Intuitionist Model and Gert Gegerenzer’sHeuristic Model. In their article ‘‘On Dual Processing and Heuristic Approaches to Moral Cognition,’’Lapsley and Hill consider Haidt’s and Gegerenzer’s positive contribution to research on moral cognition.

66. This general approach to theoretical ethics is referred to variously as ‘‘moral psychology,’’ ‘‘ethicalnaturalism,’’ and ‘‘experimental ethics.’’ Discussion of the naturalist turn in ethics can be found inJohn M. Doris and Stephen P. Stich, ‘‘As a Matter of Fact: Empirical Perspectives on Ethics,’’ in OxfordHandbook of Contemporary Philosophy, ed. Frank Jackson and Michael Smith (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2005); Kwame Anthony Appiah, Experiments in Ethics (Cambridge, Massachusetts:Harvard University Press, 2008); and Joshua Knobe and Shawn Nichols, ‘‘An Experimental PhilosophyManifesto,’’ in Experimental Philosophy, ed. Joshua Knobe and Shawn Nichols (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2008).


that regarding ethics as a unique and compartmentalized domain of inquiry (thatis, as being sui generis) is an error opposite and equal to that of reducing theimportance of morality to its functional significance. Ethical justification resistsassimilation to ethical explanation. It is almost certainly true, for example, thathonest behavior is conducive to harmonious relations and that social advantagesaccrue to individuals who refrain from deceiving others. But common sense recoilsat the idea that honesty has no human significance beyond the instrumental endsthat honesty serves. The best ethical reasons for being honest are downstreamfrom the best reasons to treat others with consideration and respect — and this iswhy it might sometimes be better to lie than to tell the truth (for example, whengranny asks whether she looks nice in her new outfit).

The point I am trying to get at is this: as applied to the problems of moral edu-cation, there are strict limits on the significance of psychological knowledge aboutsociomoral functioning. The promise of psychologized morality is to maximizechildren’s and young people’s chances of being ‘‘moral’’ by better understandingthe neurological pathways, cognitive schemas, and sociomoral skills that under-lie moral behavior and the educational and socialization experiences that arefavorable to their development. How far is this from wishing for the educationalequivalent to a Good Child pill that, once ingested, would impair one’s capacityfor immoral behavior? Kohlberg’s theory is sheltered from the charge of ‘‘rela-tivism’’ by its normative content;67 moral development, in his analysis, consistsof gradually acquiring, through a series of rational, noncoercive choices, the cogni-tive resources that enable human beings to rationally scrutinize particular moralbeliefs, practices, and traditions. Everyone agrees that people should be moral butthere is no such agreement on the question of what being moral requires. Thesign of moral maturity in the Kohlbergian sense is to know the wisest answer tothat question, the answer that the ‘‘philosopher’’ (in the ancient sense of the sage)would give to it.68 Not to put too fine a point on it, Kohlberg’s theory aspiredto provide a disconfirmable account of how human beings who, as every parentknows, start out in life as simple-minded moral egoists may come to achieveheights of moral sophistication worthy of Immanuel Kant.

Hence, even if one disagrees in substance with its ideal of moral maturity, onehas to admit that its normative content is one of the theory’s strengths because itis that content that reflects the languages people use to communicate with eachother as ethical subjects — the language of authority, relationships, concern for

67. My use of the term relativism follows the custom in moral psychology according to which a modelof moral functioning is guilty of ‘‘relativism’’ when it seems to deny is that there is any universalstandard of moral judgment and to permit that moral claims may only be justifiable relative to anindividual’s moral perspective (as in individual moral relativism or moral subjectivism) or to some setof social values and norms (as in social or cultural relativism). For instances of this usage, see Blasi,‘‘Moral Functioning,’’ and Jeremy Frimer and Lawrence Walker, ‘‘Toward a New Paradigm of MoralPersonhood,’’ Journal of Moral Education 37, no. 3 (2008): 333–356.

68. Hence Kohlberg’s repeated assertions that historical moral exemplars such as Socrates, Martin LutherKing Jr., Jesus, and Gandhi represent Stage-6 reasoning. The idea, it seems, was not hyperbole or merecompensation for a weak empirical confirmation of Stage 6, but part of Stage 6’s very conceptualization.


others’ needs and legitimate desires, community affiliation, and rights and duties.There is an important difference between the social purpose of research in moralpsychology and education and that of, say, decision-theory research in economics.Whereas the latter aims to reliably predict and effectively intervene in humanbehavior, the former seeks (or should seek) to enable agents to understand, assess,and act appropriately themselves in relation to reasons about the proper treatmentof others and the meaning of a life well-lived. I have questioned in this essay Lapsleyand Narvaez’s diagnosis that the influence of ethical theory on moral psychologybears responsibility for the current state of stage theory, but not their intuitionthat moral psychology must strive for consistency with other knowledge in thepsychological sciences, including cognitive psychology and neurobiology. How canepistemological capital borrowed from the bank of psychological moral functioningbe spent in the marketplace of moral education and moral agency, a marketplace, asI have suggested, where business is not done in the language of psychology — thelanguage of generalized event representations, behavioral scripts, episodic memory,and moral chronicity? I do not have an answer to this question, but I think thattaking this concern seriously is the key challenge for the ‘‘psychologized-morality’’approach to moral psychology and education going forward.

There remain to be addressed Blasi’s concerns about vulnerability to ‘‘mixedarguments.’’ I am not convinced that this issue is unique to moral psychology. Ina recent essay on self-research in psychology, Kristjan Kristjansson takes pains todemonstrate that moral psychology does and must ‘‘depend on moral theory.’’69

In the expansive sense in which he employs the term, I am not sure that anyonewould deny this, but the value of Kristjansson’s intervention is its insistenceon the continuity of the theoretical underpinnings of social scientific research.Terminological stipulations are useful only if they allow one to track distinctionsthat matter. Lapsley and Narvaez insist on distinguishing ‘‘ethical theory’’ from‘‘psychological theory.’’ This distinction is one that does not matter. ‘‘Comple-mentarity’’ — loosely, that social scientific research demands sound and flexibletheoretical constructs and methodological expertise70 — far from being Kohlberg’soriginal invention, is an ineluctable feature of social science. Kristjansson’s assess-ment that theory enables social science to move forward is surely correct. Butit is also clear that too much theorizing — critical theorizing, the kind of poringover excruciating conceptual minutiae that philosophers characteristically rel-ish — holds it back. The moment of theorizing is a Hamlet moment (that, for thephilosophically minded, can lapse into a Hamlet career) where the researcher, para-lyzed by uncertainty, stops doing research. Think of historiography, literary theory,the philosophy of archeology, all subdisciplines that originate in skepticism aboutthe epistemological reliability of specific methodologies as tools for investigatingthe world. Charges of guilt by association are commonplace in the social sciences,from the Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss controversy in Grounded Theory to

69. Kristjan Kristjansson, ‘‘Does Moral Psychology Need Moral Theory? The Case of Self-Research,’’Theory and Psychology 19, no. 6 (2009): 816–836.

70. Lapsley and Narvaez, ‘‘Moral Psychology at a Crossroads,’’ 23–24.


the exhausted debates over poststructural and postmodern methodologies. Thereis simply no hiding place from mixed arguments. Richard Sennett advises that theway to avoid dogmatism and dead ends in social science is by always bearing inmind the intimacy between method and theory. Referring to sociological researchinto public space, Sennett writes, ‘‘social scientists often mislead others, andthemselves, by writing as though a method were a neutral means to an end, sothat the scientist ‘applies’ a theory to a problem. In studying the erosion of publicroles, we are adopting a mode of inquiry, which is at the same time a theory aboutour subject.’’71 Moral psychology should not seek to avoid these controversies notonly because they are inevitable (which they are) but, even more importantly,because they are a sign of a healthy appreciation of theory as a mode of inquiry.

Might moral psychology be better off with theoretical models derived fromethics or psychology? The right answer has to be ‘‘it depends.’’ If the Piagetianstructural-cognitive paradigm has problems, it is not because it is ‘‘philosophical’’or insufficiently ‘‘psychological,’’ but because it fails to respond to derivative,prior criteria about whether the theory works in the research context in whichit is applied. I close with a case that I think illustrates the folly for moralpsychology of prejudging a theoretical perspective based on its disciplinaryprovenance: Kristjansson’s critique of William Damon’s classic stage theory of‘‘positive justice reasoning.’’72 Kristjansson’s main rebuke of Damon’s theoryis that it is indeterminate. The set of normative assumptions about justice onwhich it inevitably draws provides no shelter from various potential objectionsgrounded in competing conceptions about justice.73 For example, an adherent toa Feinbergian conception of justice could claim that, because Damon’s theorydoes not specifically trace the development of parallel concerns for desert andentitlement, it is not a developmental theory of ‘‘justice internalization’’ at all butmerely a theory of the emergence of ‘‘moral principles of distribution.’’74 Justicetheorists who reject equality as a legitimate principle of justice might similarlyclaim, Kristjansson suggests, that justice concerns only rightly begin to emerge inchildren once they have perceived the inadequacy of the principle of equality.75

Moral psychology is not alone in needing to get its theory straight. It is unique,however, in the fact that there just happens to exist another domain of rationalinquiry that is specifically concerned with trying to think straight about ethicaltheory. That field is moral philosophy.

71. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Norton, 1974), 32.

72. See William Damon, ‘‘The Development of Justice and Self-Interest During Childhood,’’ in TheJustice Motive in Social Behavior, ed. Melvin J. Lerner and Sally C. Lerner (New York: Plennum, 1981).

73. Kristjan Kristjansson, Justice and Desert-Based Emotions (Exeter: Ashgate, 2006), 116–118.

74. Ibid., 117.

75. Ibid.

THE AUTHOR WISHES TO THANK the University of Montreal Centre for Ethics Research (CREUM),the Neuroethics Unit of the Montreal Institute for Clinical Research (IRCM), the Canadian Institutes ofHealth Research for financial support, and David Carr, Kristjan Kristjansson, and an anonymous refereefor comments on earlier drafts.

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DOES ETHICAL THEORY HAVE A PLACE IN POST-KOHLBERGIAN MORAL PSYCHOLOGY?