Hi, I'm Michael Corayer and this is a Psych Exam Review. In this video we're going to think about
how we develop our systems of morals and our moral reasoning. This brings us to research
by Lawrence Kohlberg conducted in the 1950s which posed ethical dilemmas to children and
then asked them to give their justifications for why they made a particular choice. Based
on his analysis of these different rationales to these ethical dilemmas Kohlberg proposed a
stage based theory of moral development. And this consisted of three main stages; preconventional,
conventional, and postconventional morality. Each of these stages has two levels for a total of six
levels. One of the dilemmas that Kohlberg posed to these young children is referred to as the "Heinz
Dilemma". so we'll look at the Heinz dilemma here; a woman was near death from a special
kind of cancer there was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium
that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make but
the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to produce. He paid $200 for the radium
and charged $2000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman's husband, Heinz, went to everyone
he knew to borrow the money but he could only get together about $1,000 which is half of what
it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him
pay later, but the druggist said no "I discovered the drug and I'm going to make money from it". So
Heinz got desperate and broke into the man's laboratory to steal the drug for his wife.
Should Heinz have broken into the laboratory to steal the drug for his wife, why or why not? Now
the important point here is that Kohlberg wasn't so interested in whether the children said "yes
he should steal the drug" or "no he shouldn't", he was interested in how they justified their
answers. How did they back up their decision. He thought this could be used to place them into
these different stages of moral development. This first stage, called the preconventional stage,
was focused on the consequences of Heinz's actions. So at level one Kohlberg thought children
mostly focused on punishment. They thought Heinz maybe shouldn't steal the drug because he might
get caught. He'll go to jail, he'll be punished, and so he shouldn't do it. Or they could say he
should do it because maybe he won't be punished. He'll get away with it. At level two we thought
they were more focused on rewards. In other words, maybe Heinz should steal the drug because
it will save his wife's life and they'll be happy together and so that will be great. And so he's
justified in stealing the drug; that would be an emphasis on the rewards. Now at the next stage,
the conventional stage, the focus was on societal approval. So at level 3, Kohlberg proposed this
was mostly about conformity to group norms and social approval for one's behavior. So at level
3 someone might say Heinz should steal the drug because that would make him a good husband, right?
That's how a husband should behave; he should do anything for his wife and so if her life is at
risk he should do whatever it takes, right? That's the expectation for Heinz, his behavior, and so
that's why he would be justified in stealing the drug. Or at level 4 they might focus on
rigid codes for a controlling behavior. You might say, well Heinz is not justified in stealing the
drug because we need to have law and order, right? You can't just run around doing whatever you want,
even if it helps, you know, your family because if everybody does that then society will fall apart.
And so law and order is important, and therefore Heinz is not justified. Or similarly we can have
codes of conduct for behavior to focus on strict etiquette; that there are certain things that you
just have to do in order to be a, you know, member of this society. And so maybe that's going to
cause Heinz to be justified in stealing the drug because he has to do anything for his wife because
that's what etiquette says, or maybe there's rules saying he shouldn't do it because you should not
violate the law and that if you violate the law you're a bad person. And therefore that means he
should not steal a drug. So again the important point is not whether they think he should steal
the drug or not, but how they explain that. Do they focus on things like law and order or strict
etiquette or group norms or societal approval? And Kohlberg thought that most people fall into
this conventional stage; that when challenged, people mostly fall back to what people should
or shouldn't do based on expectations or based on the order in society. But he thought some people
move beyond that to the postconventional stage. At this stage they're focused on overall ethical
principles. So at level 5 they might focus on things like a social contract or a public good. So
you might say, well the laws only exist to protect people, and so if if he can protect somebody
better by breaking the law then he's justified in doing so. You know, that he's going to save a
life versus committing a small crime and therefore the public good is greater served by him violating
the law rather than following it. That would be something at the level 5, where it recognizes
maybe the flexibility in how laws are enforced. At level 6, Kohlberg thought people had a personal
system that involved abstract ethical principles. So an explanation that this level 6 might be
something like, you know, Heinz is not justified in stealing the drug because he shouldn't get
to decide who lives or dies. It's not up to him, so he's not stealing the drug from the druggist,
he's stealing the drug from somebody else who needs the medicine just as bad as his wife does.
And so just because he loves his wife doesn't mean he gets to essentially steal that drug from
another potential patient. And so that might be a level 6 sort of system of ethical principles that
need to be followed and would in this case say that Heinz shouldn't steal the drug. Now again,
the point is that these levels are not about being more or less moral, right? Because it doesn't
matter which answer somebody gives. It's about how they think about the problem. It's about the
reasoning and the development in their reasoning. Now criticisms of Kohlberg have suggested that his
stage-based theory doesn't take into account considerations for things like culture;
that different societal expectations or different expectations for relationships will occur in
different cultures and therefore people might give different types of explanations and maybe it's not
correct to place those into these conventional or postconventional stages. Similarly, Carol Gilligan
proposed that his theory was androcentric; it was too focused on the way that men think about
ethical problems and didn't take into account that women might think differently about these types of
problems. So Gilligan proposed that men are more oriented towards thinking about justice, whereas
women might be more focused on relationships and empathy and that we need to take that
into consideration. And that perhaps Kohlberg's theory would unfairly prevent women from being
placed in the postconventional category because they're more focused on relationships and those
might be considered to be conventional morality according to Kohlberg. Now some more recent ways
of thinking about morals and how we make moral decisions includes the idea of moral intuitions.
This is something that's been written about by Jonathan Haidt, and this is the idea that people
don't actually reason through when they make moral decisions. They actually go with their instincts;
they go with their gut feelings for things. They have these moral intuitions, these emotional
responses, and they have these feelings and then he thinks they use reasoning to justify those.
So we have a reaction to something like, oh, he should or shouldn't do this, and then we ask why
then we use reasoning to try to justify. Another way of thinking about this is the idea of system
1 and system 2 dual-processing theory and the idea that we have emotional reactions to things
and then we have sort of rational, logical, slow ways of thinking about things. Research by Joshua
Greene and colleagues has looked at how people respond to ethical dilemmas, whether they're
personal or abstract. What Greene and colleagues have found is that when people are asked ethical
dilemmas that they're personally involved in they tend to rely on emotional judgments;
they go with their feelings. But when those same ethical dilemmas are posed in ways where
the people are not personally involved, then they're more likely to use logic and sort of
rational thinking to try to come up with the explanations for behavior. Ok, so those are a
few ways of thinking about morality and moral development. I hope you found this helpful,
if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!