Essays on Moral Development

In 1984, I was a participant in a six-week moral development summer workshop at Harvard with Dr. Kohlberg. This book, read beforehand, brilliantly outlines his theory of moral development and I've never forgotten its huge impact on me. Indeed, Dr. Kohlberg's work was the most exciting, profound study of my life. Moreover, Carol Gilligan, to whom we were exposed during the workshop, did not convincingly argue, in my estimation as a woman, that the conclusions of Dr. Kohlberg's research approach were flawed because his research subjects were all men. To the contrary, after reading Gilligan's book and debating her during our workshop, I was convinced that her argument that love should be substituted for justice as the central moral spine for women seemed merely feminist defensiveness to me. I, too, am a strong liberal feminist, but to change justice to love in order to argue that most women are not arrested in their moral development at what Dr. Kohlberg found to be the third of six levels because traditionally they don't progress beyond a family oriented perspective unjustly undermined Dr. Kohlberg's life work while not advancing the study of human moral development.