A Measure of Moral Development

This book reports on some research I carried out at the Ontario Correctional Institute, where there is no construct with greater relevance for criminality than morality.  Like Loevingcr’s (1970) concept of ego development, moral development postulates a series of stages through which individuals may progress from egocentricity to a complex understanding of life in which there is respect for the dignity of human beings as individual persons, reconciliation of one’s own inner conflicts, and a strong sense of identity and integrity.

Jean Piaget’s was a developmental psychologist.  In his study of children, he observed that their thinking develops through a series of stages, that they exhibit certain distinctive common patterns of thinking in each of these developmental stages, and that no matter how bright children may be, they are not capable of understanding things beyond their cognitive developmental level.  

Turning his attention to the study of moral reasoning, he proposed several ideas which, at the time (1932) seemed rather radical: 

• that the development of moral reasoning, like reasoning in general, proceeds on a stage by stage basis,
• that children can not reason morally beyond the level at which they can reason in general.  That is, judgements about right and wrong – judgements concerning what ought to be done, and why – are limited by cognitive development in general, and 
• that growth needs to progress through these developmental stages in the order given, since the acquisition of each stage depends on mastery of the preceding stages, 
• that morality is not so much a function of what one does but of the reasoning that underlies the choice.  That is, the morality of any behaviour is not determined by what the child does but by why it does what it does, by the reasoning behind the behaviour.

Building on Piaget’s work, Lawrence Kohlberg, a psychology professor at Yale University and later at Harvard, postulated a series of six stages in the development of moral reasoning, grouped into three moral levels as follows:

Level 1: Pre-Moral Level

Stage 1: Punishment and obedience (in which action is motivated by fear of punishment)

Stage 2: Naive instrumental hedonism (in which action is motivated by hoped-for reward: the morality of the marketplace)

Level 2: Conventional Morality

Stage 3: Good-Boy/Good-Girl morality (in which action is motivated by desire for approval, avoidance of disapproval)

Stage 4: Law and Order morality (in which action is motivated by anticipation of honour/dishonour and loyalty to authority)

Level 3: Principled Morality 

Stage 5: Morality of contract and democratically accepted law (in which action is motivated by concern for community acceptance; values are relative)

Stage 6: Morality of individual moral principles (in which action is motivated by personal integrity, self-respect, universal values)

In 1974, Rest and his colleagues reported on development of the Defining Issues Test (DIT), which attempts to assess what people see as crucial moral issues in a situation by presenting subjects with a series of moral dilemmas and a list of definitions of the major issues involved.  Since that test was felt to be too difficult for use with our inmate population, I set out to develop a test of moral development suitable for use with our inmate population,  This book reports on the success of that project.

Examining the scores on this test (Opinions About Social Problems) obtained by a sample of inmates and staff, it can be seen that there is very little overlap.  A test of the significance of the difference between the mean Moral Maturity Scores of staff and those of residents shows them to be significantly different at the p<0.01 level using a two-tailed test (t = 2.88, df = 66.98).  Essentially, that means that if moral reasoning were the reason for incarceration, inmates would be seen to have come by their incarceration honestly.  Furthermore, there is very little overlap between staff and residents whether it be on the Moral Maturity Scores derived from the Kohlberg’s moral development interview procedure or from this paper-and-pencil questionnaire (as  shown in the following figure).  In fact, in twenty years spent in the correctional system, I can only remember one inmate that I judged to have just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  And I see that there was one female inmate in the above chart that didn’t fit the pattern, but let me tell you, that is relatively rare among both male and female inmates.  

There are at least two other arenas that would benefit from the measurement of moral development:

•  Judging by the “news,” too many law enforcement officers are relatively low in moral development, and new hires should be screened for criminality and/or moral development.
•  Judging by the “news,” one would think that immorality is a necessary condition for involvement in politics.  It sure would be nice to be able to screen potential political candidates for criminality and/or moral development.