26 Quotes by Lawrence Kohlberg

The arguments about parents being too permissive and kids growing up without superegos are not based on fact. Our research tells us that the family is not the only purveyor of morality.

It is hardly plausible to view a whole succession of logics as an evolutionary and functional program of innate wiring, particularly in light of the fact that the most mature logical structures are reached only by some adults.

If our psychology seems crude and weak in what it can say about the great human experiences, it is better to make that clear and to mark where we must go than to ignore it.

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.

All individuals in all cultures use the same thirty basic moral categories, concepts, or principles, and all individuals in all cultures go through the same order or sequence of gross stage development, though they vary in rate and terminal point of development.

The normative theoretical claim that a higher stage is philosophically a better stage is one necessary part of a psychological explanation of sequential stage movement.

If I can see my own recollections, like many adolescents, I was a Platonic realist. I believed in the reality of ideas, of the big nouns, and believed that one's life was determined by the ideas of the true, the good, and the beautiful which one held.

For the first time in human history, there seems to be a radical increase in the proportion reaching principled morality.