Lawrence Kohlberg and moral psychology: trajectory and conceptual variations Lawrence Kohlberg y la psicología moral: trayectoria y variaciones conceptuales

Abstract

Lawrence Kohlberg was a pioneer in the study of the development of moral judgment, actions of responsibility, appreciation of justice, solidarity, and commitment to others. His career, however, was marked by multiple turns and reconceptualizations. In the current article, we present some of these variations associated with the
description and characterization of the stages and understandings of morality in developing subjects. We characterize first the initial formulations of the stages of moral development, proposed in his doctoral thesis, and his work from the 60s (a period marked by an evident influence of the Piagetian perspective). Last, we address his
conceptualization exposed in the posterity of his work, where he resumed approaches to life cycle theories and non-Piagetian
development theories. We conclude that, despite the multiple criticisms and conflicts, his formulation struggles with three points:
to account for a permanent tension in the psychological approaches that are interested in moral development, to address some
of the tensions between structuralist and hermeneutical approaches, and to provide a novel formulation against the traditional discussion between forms and contents. We close, stating that Kohlberg's work
determined the different paths that followed the subsequent developments of moral psychology and was a generator of ideas and
varied ways that his followers have traveled in recent decades.