Moral maturity and autonomy: appreciating the significance of Lawrence Kolhberg's Just Community

Abstract

Lawrence Kohlberg's Just Community program of moral education has conceptual significance to his theoretical work in the field of moral development. This argument contends that a perspective recognizing the Just Community as conceptually significant provides a more comprehensive picture of Kohlberg's work than do critical perspectives that limit their scope to his Structural Stage Model of moral development. Apprehending the Just Community's conceptual significance provides the opportunity to respond to critics, like Carol Gilligan and Helen Haste, who have suggested that Kohlberg's work is inattentive to notions of attachment in morality, but who either neglect or dismiss consideration of the Just Community in making these conclusions. The argument concludes by stating that a more philosophically comprehensive and mature understanding of morality was developing in Kohlberg's Just Community, a project undertaken well in advance of these major criticisms.

Notes

See Kohlberg et al. (1984) for the most comprehensive treatment of Kohlberg's theory.

Four brief paragraphs in the second volume of Essays on moral development mention the Just Community's experimental consistency with Gilligan's perspective (Kohlberg, 1984, pp. 233–234). The argumentative weight of these paragraphs is relatively very low and limited to a short technical point. Kohlberg's reply to Gilligan does not depend upon this reference and so continues without any further development of the Just Community's significance.

Carol Gilligan introduced her criticism of Kohlberg's theory in the 1977 Harvard Educational Review paper, ‘In a different voice: women's conceptions of the self and of morality’.

The conceptual congruence between autonomy and care assumes that autonomy was implicitly in mind during the Cluster years. Power et al. give no suggestion that they have changed their view.