Lawrence Kohlberg

“Insofar as each of us has been through the moral stages and has held the viewpoint of each stage, we should be able to put ourselves in the internal framework of a given stage.”

“These youngsters hold that all morality is relative but that middle class morality is just plain bad.”

“It is hardly plausible to view a whole succession of logics as an evolutionary and functional program of innate wiring, particularly in light of the fact that the most mature logical structures are reached only by some adults.”

“If I can see my own recollections, like many adolescents, I was a Platonic realist. I believed in the reality of ideas, of the big nouns, and believed that one's life was determined by the ideas of the true, the good, and the beautiful which one held.”

“Intelligence may be taken as a necessary, but not sufficient, cause of moral advance. All morally advanced children are bright, but not all bright children are morally advanced.”

“The crowds, the praise, and the power are neither just nor unjust in themselves. As they are typically used in the schools, they represent the values of social order and of individual competitive achievement.”

“I have always tried to be clear that my states are stages of justice reasoning, not of emotions, aspirations, or action.”

“Right action tends to be defined in terms of general individual rights and standards that have been critically examined and agreed upon by the whole society.”

“The individual makes a clear effort to define moral values and principles that have validity and application apart from the authority of the groups of persons holding them and apart from the individual's own identification with the group.”

“The problem of moral change would appear to be one of presenting stimuli which are both sufficiently incongruous as to stimulate conflict in the child's existing stage schemata and sufficiently congruous as to be assimilable with some accomodative effort.”

“The human's being right to do as he pleases without interfering with someone else's rights is a formula defining rights prior to social legislation.”

“If our psychology seems crude and weak in what it can say about the great human experiences, it is better to make that clear and to mark where we must go than to ignore it.”

“All individuals in all cultures use the same thirty basic moral categories, concepts, or principles, and all individuals in all cultures go through the same order or sequence of gross stage development, though they vary in rate and terminal point of development.”

“At this level, the individual perceives the maintenance of the expectations of his family, group, or nation as valuable in its own right, regardless of immediate and obvious consequences.”

“The first meaning of 'cognitive' for us is that observations of others are made phenomenologically: i.e., by attempting to take the role of the other, to see things from his or her conscious viewpoint.”

“It seems obvious that moral stages must primarily be the products of the child's interaction with others rather than the direct unfolding of biological or neurological structures.”

“In our society, authority derives from justice, and in our society, learning to live with authority should derive from and aid learning to understand and to feel justice.”

“The unit of effectiveness of education is not the individual but the group. An individual's moral values are primarily important for society as they contribute to a moral social climate, not as they induce particular pieces of behavior.”

“For the first time in human history, there seems to be a radical increase in the proportion reaching principled morality.”

“Essentially, social education is moral education, and moral education is preparation for citizenship... When Jefferson and others advocated public education, it was to prepare for citizenship in a new, constitutional, democratic society.”