Should Kohlberg's cognitive developmental approach to morality be replaced with a more pragmatic approach? Comment on Krebs and Denton (2005).

Abstract

Krebs and Denton (2005) proposed that Kohlberg's cognitive developmental approach to morality be replaced by a pragmatic approach more relevant to everyday social behavior and the cooperative moral orders of society. Although the Krebs and Denton article raises some legitimate questions, their proposal is at best premature and provokes some serious concerns. Their starting point, that Kohlberg's model of morality is inadequate, is an evaluation shared by many neo-Kohlbergians. Before the cognitive developmental approach is replaced, however, important contributions (e.g., Rest's schema interpretation of the stages) toward refining or improving the approach must be adequately considered. Evidence suggests that Krebs and Denton may have underestimated relations between moral judgment stages and social behavior, including sudden behavior in emergency situations.

The role of emotion expectancies in adolescents’ moral decision making

“…Stams et al, 2006), it is nowadays widely accepted that overly rational approaches to morality provide a distorted picture 0022-0965/$ -see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2010.08.014 of individuals' actual moral decision making and behavior (e.g., Gibbs, 2006;Krebs & Denton, 2005). Moral knowledge does not necessarily lead to the corresponding moral emotions.…”

Adolescents’ emotion attributions and expectations of behavior in situations involving moral conflict

“…Many studies of moral reasoning present people with hypothetical dilemmas involving some form of moral judgment and analyze the reasons given in support of a given decision or value, following the seminal studies of Piaget (1932Piaget ( /1965 and Kohlberg (1969; see also Tapp and Kohlberg, 1971). Studies attempting to relate such judgments to behavior have shown a clear but variable relationship, going from strong (Blasi, 1980;Gibbs, 2006;Stams et al, 2006) to weak or moderate (Gibbs et al, 1986;Krebs & Denton, 2005). Clearly, factors other than people's explicit normative reasoning must be considered to understand how choices are made in situations involving moral choices.…”

The relationship of punishment- and victim-based moral orientation to prosocial, externalizing, and norm trespassing behaviour in delinquent and non-delinquent adolescents: a validation study of the Moral Orientation Measure

“…People move in and out of moral orders, not stages of moral development. Gibbs (2006), however, and Pizarro and Bloom (2003) show that higher stage moral judgment increases resistance to low stage pulling contexts and facilitates moral action. A recent meta-analysis by Stams et al (2006) shows developmentally delayed moral judgment to be strongly associated with juvenile delinquency, even after they had controlled for socio-economic status, cultural background, gender, age, intelligence, assessment method, publication bias, institutionalization and period of incarceration.…”