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

Thus, we have seen moral development move from a preconventional orientation, which is strongly egocentric, geocentric, biocentric, narcissistic, bound to the body's separate feelings and nature's impulses (the first three fulcrums), to a conventional or sociocentric or ethnocentric orientation, bound to one's society, culture, tribe, or race, to a postconventional or worldcentric orientation, operating in the space of universal pluralism and global grasp (these stages have been elaborated by Piaget, Baldwin, Kohlberg, Gilligan, Habermas, Loevinger, Broughton, Selman, etc.).

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 6

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

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 (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

In Integral Psychology

Integral Psychology gives Kohlberg a fuller defense against the two standard objections (gender bias, Eurocentrism) than SES does, and adds his own highest, explicitly transpersonal stage — absent from the SES treatment.

The pivotal figure here is Lawrence Kohlberg…whose work, building on that of Baldwin, Dewey, and Piaget, demonstrated that moral development goes through six or seven stages (spanning preconventional to conventional to postconventional to post-postconventional). — Integral Psychology, ch. 7

Kohlberg's highest stage—what he called stage seven—is "universal-spiritual" (post-postconventional). — Integral Psychology, ch. 7

"At this point there is little support for the claim that Kohlberg's theory is biased against females," reports the widely respected textbook Social and Personality Development. — Integral Psychology, ch. 7

Theories such as Kohlberg's have demonstrated their nonrelativistic stance precisely because, I would claim, those stages are surfing the waves of the nonrelativistic Great Holarchy, preconventional to conventional to postconventional to post-postconventional. — Integral Psychology, ch. 7

Three of the most important of the self-related lines of development are those of self-identity (e.g., Loevinger), morals (e.g., Kohlberg), and needs (e.g., Maslow). — Integral Psychology, ch. 4 (footnote)

See Also

• loevinger — parallel ego-development stages Wilber treats as tracking the same underlying sequence
• Chart 5: The Self-Related Stages of Morals and Perspectives — Kohlberg is the central figure this chart correlates against 13 other researchers
• habermas — joins Kohlberg and Gilligan as a source for the postconventional stage
• Carol Gilligan — her own page, including the IP-specific point about the "cultural myth" that grew up around her work
• piaget — the cognitive-developmental framework Wilber sees Kohlberg's moral stages as running alongside