Lawrence Kohlberg Quotes

Education is the art of making man ethical.

If you do not know the laws of right conduct, you cannot form your character.

Students should learn about the long-standing values of truth, beauty, and goodness, think hard about them, and interrogate them skillfully.

Force cannot transmit a moral principle: moral ideas can be received only through the reason of the heart.

I've been deeply influenced by Aristotle's idea that virtue is a habit, something you practice and get better at, rather than something that comes naturally. 'The control of the appetites by right reason,' is how he defined it.

Our moral traditions developed concurrently with our reason, not as its product.

Characters have changed my mind about some very fundamental moral issues, and that's the real satisfaction in the way I write - the ultimate learning experience.

For Aristotle, habits reigned supreme. The behaviors that occur unthinkingly are the evidence of our truest selves.

The moral virtues, then, are produced in us neither by nature nor against nature. Nature, indeed, prepares in us the ground for their reception, but their complete formation is the product of habit.

Those ethical choices often are made every day at a time, minute by minute in ways that you may not even relate to ethics, so I'm going to walk them through the whole story from that perspective and hopefully they'll be able to walk away with something good from it.

Morality, like language, is an invented structure for conserving and communicating order. And morality is learned, like language, by mimicking and remembering.

One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.

The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.

Morality is not only taught; it is caught.

Guided by nothing but pop culture values, many children no longer learn how to think about morality and virtue, or to think of them at all. They grow up with no shared moral framework, believing that the highest values are diversity, tolerance and non-judgmentalism.

The science of morality is about maximizing psychological and social health. It's really no more inflammatory than that.

In 'Reclaiming Virtue,' I argue that we have had an element missing in moral education. That element is 'affect.' Affect is simply the technical word for feeling or emotion.

There's a great deal of difference between thinking reflectively about moral issues and achieving higher standards of ethical behavior.

The first idea the child must acquire is that of the difference between good and evil.

It is becoming clear that the old platitudes can no longer be maintained, and that if we wish to improve our morals we must first improve our knowledge.

Our system of morals is a body of imperfect social generalizations expressed in terms of emotion.

My parents are naive in their morality of things, and so, without realising it, I landed up being ethical and having strong opinions.

The problem, of course, was that people did not seem to understand the difference between right and wrong. They needed to be reminded about this, because if you left it to them to work out for themselves, they would never bother. They would just find out what was best for them, and then they would call that the right thing. That's how most people thought.

The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.

.. we shall not be properly educated ourselves, nor will the guardians whom we are training, until we can recognise the qualities of discipline, courage, generosity, greatness of mind, and others akin to them, as well as their opposites in all their manifestations.