Lawrence Kohlberg’s six stages of moral development. We’re separating this out into its own post for space reasons, and because it’s neat enough to stand on its own.
The six stages of moral development
Lawrence Kohlberg’s six stages of moral development are a roadmap for how many of us progress and cease progressing morally. Pets and children occupy levels one and two while most adults top out at level three.
- Avoid action that results in punishment
- Act in order to earn rewards
- Align actions and attitudes to those of the peer group
- Lead by example
- Frame actions and attitudes within the social contract
- Weigh choices based on outcome across time and space
Let’s discuss the stages of moral development in a little more detail and apply them to speeding. Buckle up; the speed limit is 75mph.
Stage 1: avoid punishment
Act to avoid punishment. Don’t poop on the carpet. Don’t bite your sister.
I hate tickets, so I don’t speed more than 7mph in this county to avoid tickets. The next county over, I’m comfortable going 10mph over because they never set up radar.
Stage 2: seek reward
Act to earn rewards. Have me do a trick so I can get another treat. Clean your room so you can get an allowance.
I Googled how much I can speed before the insurance company takes away my safe driver discount.
Stage 3: blend in with your peer group
Do what everybody else does. Blend in and be part of the community. In this context, people’s religious faith is an important part of their community. It’s much easier to make friends and avoid conflict that way. It’s literally what we all do. I realize people belong to multiple peer groups, so I avoid topics that are treated differently among the groups. We generally don’t talk about religion or politics for this reason.
Everyone speeds, so I go with the flow (of traffic).
Stage 4: lead by example
If I don’t uphold the rules, then who will? Besides, you never know who’s watching.
I can’t speed around here. It would be very embarrassing if I, the deputy sheriff, was ticketed in my own county.
Stage 5: uphold the social contract
We created these rules for a reason. What’s the point of a democracy if we don’t uphold our own democratically created policies?
The speed limit is already set to the maximum safe speed. We had multiple town meetings about it! Besides, speeding would be rude to everyone enforcing the limits.
Stage 6: consider the broader consequences
Weigh your decisions against how the consequences ripple out through time and space. A great decision in this context is a horrible mistake in another. If you want to know how it’ll play out in the long term, expand the decision tree a few levels. Consider who shoulders the externalities. Is it worth it? What’s the cost-benefit analysis?
I don’t have much of a choice. Everyone else is going so fast that if I don’t follow suit, I’m a hazard to them. So depending on the length of road ahead, I usually drive somewhere between the flow of traffic and the posted speed limit.
The stages of moral development are somewhat fluid
People usually move upward through the stages of moral development with experience and maturity. Less often, some amount of downward movement can happen for various reasons too.
For example, will someone in stage 3 let their family go hungry for the tenth day before sneaking out at night to take care of some business? No, they’re going to operate at stage 1 until some mouths are fed. When there are no rewards available in stage 2, then the only thing left is stage 1.
Straddling the stages of moral development is typical too. Firefighters might be very safe when it comes to all things fire prevention, but not so much with driving safety. When your time as town sheriff ends, you might revert to stage 3. No harm, no foul. Parents too. It’s expected to provide a stage 4 example to the kiddos when they’re young, but as soon as they’re out of site, stage 3 it is.
Higher-level politicians are especially interesting examples of this. They’re stage 4 in front of cameras and stage 1 the rest of the time. Like moths to a flame, that much power attracts sociopaths. Local politicians, on the other hand, more typically believe in the office and the need for the role. Those utilitarian positions often attract well-intentioned people at stage 4 or 5.
Stages 3 and 4
Most people top out at stage 3 while straddling stage 4 at various phases of life.
The peer groups providing the moral framework are usually religious or community-based in nature. Unfortunately, as people become less connected in real life, political groups (i.e. lobbyists and mega-doners) and news channels (i.e. sponsors and owners) are filling the gap. Facebook even (i.e. moral barf).
Stage 4 gets the same morals as stage 3 but internalizes the local ethics a little more.
We become the average of the five people we spend the most time with, and when it comes to their moral compasses, this is very true with stages 3-4.
Stage 5
Decision-making is oriented around social contracts with these folks. What does that mean? Doesn’t it seem like an extension of stage 4? Stage 4 upholds based on optics toward maintaining order. Stage 5 upholds based on principle. Up here in stage 5, the morals come from the social contract rather than peers. The social contract is largely imagined but hopefully well-matched to reality. Some of that can come from the intent of the existing legislation (borrowed from ethics), but some of it can be imagined extrapolating from other sources of intent.
Intent is the key. If something within the social contract is being applied where it wasn’t intended, these folks might revolt. Conversely, if something is being left out of the implementation but was included in the intent, they might personally uphold it anyways.
Operating at stage 5 is probably tiring and costly. People here might swallow some pride and pick their battles, occasionally residing in stages 3-4 on some aspects of daily life.
Stage 6
We think this is the most interesting stage. People operating at stage 6 are quite rare indeed.
These folks are the most likely to stand up for what they think is right regardless of how the mob is threatening them to conform.
How does one consider the consequences of their actions as it ripples across time and space? To do it well, you need a model. To do it frequently, you need to be a person who views the world in terms of models.
Use models that are rich enough to predict outcomes based on your decision as input. Previous observations can be used here, but memorization alone isn’t usually a very predictive model. We need predictive models to examine and weigh consequences.
It’s easy to simply say “expand the decision tree a few steps.” It’s quite a lot harder for someone to actually do it. Operating at stage 6 is almost certainly tiring and costly. People capable of stage 6 morality probably operate within the near lower stages for certain subjects during portions of their daily lives.
We suspect that with time and wisdom, a person’s collection of models increases and improves such that they can operate at this level more easily and more often, in more facets of their lives. On the other hand, if someone becomes overconfident in their collection of models (or cognitively impaired), they could frequently act with unintended consequences.
Stage 7
Surprise! Bonus round.
Kohlberg suggested that there may be a seventh stage—Transcendental Morality, or Morality of Cosmic Orientation—which linked religion with moral reasoning. Kohlberg’s difficulties in obtaining empirical evidence for even a sixth stage, however, led him to emphasize the speculative nature of his seventh stage.
The Wikipedia article
We seriously doubt the psychologists are doing much with stage 7 when they’re having trouble finding people who operate consistently even at stage 6. Since this is a website that’s quite literally trying to foster models appropriate for this kind of thing, let’s spend a few moments thinking about it.
If stage 6 is considering how our consequences propagate out through time and space, then let’s imagine stage 7 involves considering how our consequences propagate out beyond this mere physical existence.
How on Earth are we supposed to do that?
The answer is shockingly simple. We’ve already been doing it the whole time. We refine our models with every post describing the actual rules. How things really work. How and why we are here.
But it’s even easier still! We already have the perfect yardstick for how each and every decision affects all there is. How does the decision feel? What does your inner being think about it? Your inner being is operating at stage 7. Simply taking the time to pay attention to how a decision feels is all it takes for the physical you to operate at stage 7 as well.
Afterthoughts
This post was purely to shorten one of the upcoming posts that would use these 6 stages. We had no idea going into it that there was a hypothesized 7th stage let alone that we would be able to say so much about it here! Almost every post so far has ended up surprising us in this kind of way!
