[1] Kohlberg's work reflected and extended not only Piaget's findings but also the theories of philosophers George Herbert Mead and James Mark Baldwin.
[6] Kohlberg attended high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and served in the Merchant Marine at the end of World War II.
[7] He worked for a time with the Haganah on a ship smuggling Jewish refugees from Romania into Palestine through the British Blockade.
[8][9] Captured by the British and held at an internment camp on Cyprus, Kohlberg escaped with fellow crew members.
Kohlberg was in Palestine during the fighting in 1948 to establish the state of Israel, but refused to participate and focused on nonviolent forms of activism.
Kohlberg found a scholarly approach that gave a central place to the individual's reasoning in moral decision making.
[12] In 1969 he accepted Rebecca Shribman-Katz's invitation of the Society for Justice-Ethics-Morals (JEM) and visited Israel to study the morality of young people in that country.
Created while studying psychology at the University of Chicago, the theory was inspired by the work of Jean Piaget and a fascination with children's reactions to moral dilemmas.
[1] Kohlberg's approach begins with the assumption that humans are intrinsically motivated to explore and become competent at functioning in their environments.
Endeavoring to become competent participants in such institutions, humans in all cultures exhibit similar actions and thoughts concerning the relations of self, others, and the social world.
He would then categorize and classify the reasoning used in the responses, into one of six distinct stages, grouped into three levels: preconventional, conventional and postconventional.
[31] The purpose of these programs were to build a sense of community in schools in order to promote democratic values and increase moral reasoning.
Other works published by Kohlgainz or about Kohlberg's theories and research include Consensus and Controversy, The Meaning and Measurement of Moral Development, Lawrence Kohlberg's Approach to Moral Education and Child Psychology and Childhood Education: A Cognitive Developmental View.
Postulating that women may develop an empathy-based ethic with a different, but not lower structure than that Kohlberg had described, Gilligan wrote In a Different Voice, a book that founded a new movement of care-based ethics that initially found strong resonance among feminists and later achieved wider recognition.
[34] In other words, Gilligan's criticism of Kohlberg's moral development theory was centered on differences between males and females that did not exist.
While doing cross-cultural research in Belize in 1971, Kohlberg contracted a tropical parasitic infection,[36] causing him extreme abdominal pain.
The long-term effects of the infection and the medications took their toll, and Kohlberg's health declined as he also engaged in increasingly demanding professional work, including "Just Community" prison and school moral education programs.
He left his wallet with identification on the front seat of his unlocked car and apparently walked into the icy Boston Harbor.
His car and wallet were found within a couple of weeks, and his body was recovered some time later, with the late winter thaw, in a tidal marsh across the harbor near the end of a Logan Airport runway.
[31] After Kohlberg's body was recovered and his death confirmed, former students and colleagues published special issues of scholarly journals to commemorate his contribution to developmental psychology.