Lawrence Kohlberg
Lawrence Kohlberg
Wilber's View
Kohlberg's stages of moral development are one of the empirical anchors Wilber leans on for the preconventional-conventional-postconventional sequence that runs through SES as a general template for growth, not just morality specifically. Wilber is candid that "not everybody agrees with the details" of Kohlberg's original scheme — he flags Carol Gilligan's revision up front — but treats the disagreement as internal to the Kohlberg/Gilligan research program rather than a challenge to the underlying three-tier hierarchy itself: Gilligan, Wilber stresses, accepts Kohlberg's general hierarchical structure and only supplements the logic of justice with a logic of care, so that men and women progress through "the same hierarchy" by somewhat different routes. Kohlberg and Gilligan together, alongside Habermas, Loevinger, Piaget, and others, supply Wilber's evidence that moral maturation runs from egocentric to sociocentric to worldcentric — the same broad arc Wilber generalizes across cognition, self-identity, and needs, and treats as one more line of evidence for a single underlying developmental logic playing out across many domains of the person.
In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality
"Not everybody agrees with the details of Lawrence Kohlberg's seven moral stages"
Not everybody agrees with the details of Lawrence Kohlberg's seven moral stages, nor with the details of Carol Gilligan's reworking of Kohlberg's scheme. But there is general and ample agreement that human moral development goes through at least three broad stages.
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 1
"Gilligan … accepts Kohlberg's general three-stage or three-tiered hierarchical scheme"
It is sometimes said that Carol Gilligan denied, not just the specific nature of the stages of Kohlberg's scheme, but his entire hierarchical approach. This is simply not true. Gilligan, in fact, accepts Kohlberg's general three-stage or three-tiered hierarchical scheme, from preconventional to conventional to postconventional… she simply denies that the logic of justice alone accounts for the sequence.
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 2
"Kohlberg and Gilligan: egocentric to sociocentric to worldcentric reason"
We see it in Marx… We see it in Piaget… Kohlberg and Gilligan: egocentric to sociocentric to worldcentric reason. Hegel: Self-positing Spirit returns to itself in the form of global Reason.
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 8
"Thus Kohlberg, Gilligan, and Habermas … all refer to this general stage as postconventional"
Thus Kohlberg, Gilligan, and Habermas (to name a few) all refer to this general stage as postconventional (which doesn't mean postcultural or postsocial, but simply postconformist in some significant ways). Socrates versus Athens. Martin Luther King, Jr., versus segregation. Gandhi versus cultural imperialism.
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 6
