Lawrence Kohlberg Quotes

It seems obvious that moral stages must primarily be the products of the child's interaction with others rather than the direct unfolding of biological or neurological structures.

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

My early research - I'm a social psychologist, and my early research was on how people make moral judgments. When I entered the field in 1987, everybody was looking at moral reasoning - how do kids reason about a moral dilemma? Should a guy steal a drug to save his wife's life?

Insofar as each of us has been through the moral stages and has held the viewpoint of each stage, we should be able to put ourselves in the internal framework of a given stage.

The main experiential determinants of moral development seem to be amount and variety of social experience, the opportunity to take a number of roles and to encounter other perspectives.

At around nine or 10 years of age, young people start to decide for themselves what's moral or not, and that's why I like writing for that age group so much.

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

Morality is often seen as an innovation, like agriculture and writing. From this perspective, babies are pint-sized psychopaths, self-interested beings who need to be taught moral notions such as the wrongness of harming another person.

I think you're a good person or a todd by the age of eight.

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

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

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.

Human models are more vivid and more persuasive than explicit moral commands.

Education is the art of making man ethical.

That a science, which distinguishes the criterions of right and wrong; which teaches to establish the one, and prevent, punish, or redress the other; which employs in its theory the noblest faculties of the soul, and exerts in its practice the cardinal virtues of the heart; a science, which is universal in its use and extent, accommodated to each individual, yet comprehending the whole community; that a science like this should ever have been deemed unnecessary to be studied in an university, is matter of astonishment and concern.

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

The first idea that the child must acquire, in order to be actively disciplined, is that of the difference between good and evil.

We become moral when we are unhappy.

My work is based on the assumption that clarity and consistency in our moral thinking is likely, in the long run, to lead us to hold better views on ethical issues.

A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives - of approving of some and disapproving of others.

What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?

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

We are naturally moral beings, but our environments can enhance - or, sadly, degrade - this innate moral sense.

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.