Article Critique Of Lawrence Kohlberg's Theory On Moral Development

Article Critique

The article that I have chosen to critique is written by Ian Stuart-Hamilton, and discusses how our society develops its beliefs of right and wrong. To accompany this discussion on moral development, Hamilton has chosen to relate his article to the theory of moral development that was proposed by Lawrence Kohlberg. This article was not developed by primary research, and instead draws conclusions from secondary research and the theories of well known authors to figure out how our society builds morals.

This article 's entire purpose was not to criticise Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory on moral development. Instead the overall purpose is to outline and examine how our society develops its beliefs on what is right and wrong. There

The author argues that Kohlberg doesn’t have the authority to decide who is moral, or to decide what the highest level of morality is. Nor does he have the power to decide what level of morality people are at. It was also argued in this article that the hierarchy of moral development that Kohlberg proposed can be considered biased, since he placed himself at the top alongside Gandhi. If Kohlberg placed himself at the top out of bias, this could potentially cast doubt on the rest of the

I believe that our belief of what is right and wrong in our society depends on the situation and individual differences, and relating this to Kohlberg’s theory was very efficient in proving this belief to the reader.

I believe that this article is of enormous importance to this course, because it relates to our semester long discussion of how humans grow and develop. This theory outlined the importance there is on gaining the perspective of different cultures and genders, because all people develop and grow differently. In this specific case moral development is not the same for everyone. My personal response towards the article, is that I do agree with parts of Kohlberg’s theory. However, I also think it lacked some of the information needed for it to be a flawless theory, if Kohlberg had figured out a way to integrate individual differences into his theory than I would have agreed with it wholeheartedly. However, I believe that the fact that Kohlberg’s theory was lacking, placed importance on the information in which it lacked. Meaning that by not mentioning differences between cultures and genders, Kohlberg unknowingly outlined how important those differences are in figuring out how our society develops its beliefs of right and