Moral development: Kohlberg, Gilligan and Rest
Last reviewed September 2026 by Dr. Andrew Wichterman · Aligned to the current NCE blueprint. Valid for exams through June 30, 2027.
AI-narrated overview made with Google NotebookLM. The written lesson below is by Dr. Andrew Wichterman.
Kohlberg's six stages of moral reasoning are tested by scenario: a person gives a reason for a choice, and you name the stage. Gilligan's critique and Rest's components round out the set.
Try to answer each from memory first, even if you have to guess. Guessing before reading makes the answer stick; reveal only after you have tried.
Kohlberg's three levels, six stages
Lawrence Kohlberg assessed moral reasoning with dilemmas such as the Heinz story: should a man steal an unaffordable drug to save his dying wife? What matters is the reasoning, not the yes or no. Preconventional level: Stage 1, obedience and punishment, right is what avoids punishment. Stage 2, instrumental exchange, right is what serves my interests, with fair trades. Conventional level: Stage 3, good boy and nice girl, right is what gains approval. Stage 4, law and order, right is what maintains rules and social order. Postconventional level: Stage 5, social contract, laws are agreements that can be changed for the greater good. Stage 6, universal ethical principles, right is defined by self-chosen principles such as justice, even against the law.
Matching reasoning to stages
"He'll go to jail" is Stage 1. "She would do the same for him" is Stage 2. "People will think he's a good husband" is Stage 3. "Stealing is against the law, period" is Stage 4. "Laws exist to protect life; this law fails" is Stage 5. "Human life outweighs property under any law" is Stage 6. Most adults reason at Stages 3 and 4; Kohlberg found Stage 6 rare enough that he later questioned it.
Gilligan's critique
Carol Gilligan argued that Kohlberg's model, built on male samples, favored a justice orientation and scored women's care-based reasoning as lower. In a Different Voice proposed an ethic of care with three levels: orientation to individual survival, goodness as self-sacrifice, and the morality of nonviolence, in which the self and others are weighed equally. The exam pairs Gilligan with the words care and relationships, Kohlberg with justice and rights.
Rest and the four components
James Rest, a Kohlberg student, argued that moral behavior requires four components: moral sensitivity, recognizing a situation has a moral dimension; moral judgment, deciding what is right; moral motivation, prioritizing the moral choice over competing values; and moral character, having the persistence to carry it out. Rest also built the Defining Issues Test, a standardized measure of moral reasoning. The four components appear in the ethics area as well.
Piaget on morality
Before Kohlberg, Piaget described two moral stages. Heteronomous morality, roughly 5 to 10: rules are fixed and handed down by authorities, and consequences matter more than intentions. Autonomous morality, 10 and up: rules are social agreements, and intentions matter. Kohlberg's Stages 1 and 2 roughly correspond to Piaget's heteronomous morality.
Without scrolling up, write everything you remember from this lesson. Then check yourself against the key terms. Recalling the whole lesson once, right after reading it, does more than reading it twice.
Ten questions from this domain, with an explanation after each answer.
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