Kohlberg's Theory of Moral Development & Christian Ethics

While working through the possibility of free will (discussed in my previous post), I went over my psychological model again, and also referenced Kohlberg's theory of moral development, and realized that it seemed like I could identify various forms of Christian ethics within Kohlberg's theory.

To summarize, Kohlberg believed in 6 stages of moral development:
1. Avoiding punishment
2. Instrumental morality
3. Good boy morality
4. Law based morality
5. Social contract
6. Principle-based morality

It seems to me that human beings are hardwired to seek after the good and try to avoid the bad. By default, we associate pleasure with the good and pain with bad, but our ideas of good and bad can be quite detached from pleasure and pain. For instance, we might come to believe that telling the truth is good, but this has nothing directly to do with physical pleasure or pain. Or we might believe that another's pleasure is good, even though it does not directly affect ourselves. So, our ideas of good and bad are rooted in our biology, but experience can teach us to think of almost anything as being good or bad.

The level we start at is to seek immediate gratification. But next we learn that daddy (or mommy) punishes us if we do certain things. So, we learn that doing some things we might otherwise like is painful due to the punishment, and so we don't do them. Then a higher level of abstraction is to desire to please mommy & daddy as a goal in itself, rather than as a way of getting what we want. Then a higher level of abstraction is to value the contents of what daddy says, rather than the mere fact that he was the one who said it. Then a higher level is to see social organization as being dependent on these laws being carried out. Then the higher is to see the laws as coming from universal principles, which (perhaps) there is some freedom to choose.

I will use the issue of premarital sex as an example. Obviously, sex feels good, so the immediate impulse is to do it when there is an opportunity. But I can think of these reasons not to do it:

• Possibility of unwanted pregnancy
• Possibility of disease
• Unnecessary drama and heartache
• Ruin your ability to pair-bond
• Possibility of wasting time and money trying to seduce a woman who is unsuitable for long-term commitment
• Possibility of false accusations
• Disrespects your future husband (why should he pay to have you when you gave yourself to another man for free?)
• Does not create a good environment for raising children
• Uncommitted sexual relationships make later sexual commitments less credible

So, the immediate pleasure of the sexual act might not always produce the maximal good in the long run.

So, I see that the moral development of refraining from premarital sex, according to Kohlberg's model, as follows (it seems to me that for the lower levels, Dad and God can fill the same role):

0. Sex feels good, so I will do it
1. Daddy/God might punish me, so I won't do it
2. I will do what I have to do to get Daddy/God to give me what I want
3. I will not have premarital sex because I want Daddy/God to be happy
4. It is wrong to have premarital sex (it's the law)
5. Society (and possibly our relations with God) would break down if we don't keep up our end of the bargain
6. Refraining from premarital sex is part of loving myself and my neighbor (here I'm taking love of self and neighbor as a principle, but I suppose in theory, some other principle could be used as a part of the Kohlberg model)

It is interesting to me that Christianity can appeal to a person at so many levels simultaneously.

In the past, when I have discussed why I don't believe in premarital sex, I have often gotten the response, "God does not exist." But this answer shows very limited intellectual or moral development, because my arguments for the likely bad outcomes from premarital sex do not depend on the existence of God. I wonder if most people cannot get to the end principle because secular society has gutted out the earlier steps (Don't make God/Daddy angry).

When I was younger, I had the same attitude as above, but then, many things in my life did not go the way I wanted. I thought a lot about how to keep the bad things from happening again, and found very often that the conclusions I came to myself were the same as what the Christians had told me the whole time. It is my policy now, whenever there is something in the Bible that makes no sense to me (there still are some things), rather than mocking the Bible and concluding that it's stupid, I suspect that perhaps there is something that I don't fully understand yet. This doesn't even come from dogmatic faith that it's the word of God; it comes from repeated experience of finding wisdom in it.


I think very many Christians are stuck in one of the earlier steps, since they focus a lot on the personhood of Jesus, but don't think much at all about his commandments. It's like they think that so long as they are on Team Jesus, then they will get rewards in heaven. They don't seem to have much appreciation for the content of his message.

Many of the more serious Christians have very detailed ideas of sanctification and atonement (like exactly when at baptism/being born again/communion are you saved/sanctified). I wonder if this comes from a social contract model? Do they see our relationship with God as a contract (like he does xyz, so we have to do abc), and so they see the need to explain the nature of the contract in great detail? But it always seemed to me that I have never experienced the supernatural and that the Bible doesn't explain most of these things in great detail, so that it's impossible to know the truth of these detailed doctrines.

Also, it seems to me that the only thing I can actually do in a given moment, when I see a choice between doing better or worse, is to choose better. If grace is in the hands of God, then it's kind of futile for me to think over the manner in which his grace is extended in great detail, since I cannot directly affect it by my own efforts.

And the more I think about Jesus' commands (to love God and love one's neighbor), the more impressed I get with them and the more necessary they seem. If we think of God as whatever the highest thing we can think of is, then trying to love God means that we do the best thing that we can think of. "Do the best thing you can think of" seems like a reasonable moral command. Also, if I were not to treat a being similar to myself similar to how I'd want to be treated, then it means that I do not have an objective morality at all, but only a set of excuses for doing what I'd be doing anyway. It seems to me that Jesus' command to love our neighbors as ourselves is roughly equivalent to Kant's categorical imperative, and that this is a minimum necessary requirement for any consistent moral system. It also seems to me that these commands are actually aimed at an orientation of the heart, and that many of Jesus' other parables/commands help flush out how to orient one's heart properly.

It is frustrating for me sometimes when dealing with Christians, because they very often seem to get stuck in arguments over Christology or the supernatural aspects of sanctification or atonement, when all I want to do is think about how to orient my heart properly. This seems good and beautiful to me, so I'd be interested in doing it with or without the promise of supernatural reward. But this is a bit side-tracked from the original purpose of this post.