Lawrence Kohlberg pioneered teaching children to think morally through the use of moral dilemmas.
Kohlberg’s theory holds that moral reasoning, which is the basis for ethical behavior, has six identifiable developmental constructive stages – each more adequate at responding to moral dilemmas than the last. Kohlberg suggested that the higher stages of moral development provide the person with greater capacities/abilities in terms of decision making and so these stages allow people to handle more complex dilemmas. In studying these, Kohlberg followed the development of moral judgment beyond the ages originally studied earlier by Piaget, who also claimed that logic and morality develop through constructive stages. Expanding considerably upon this groundwork, it was determined that the process of moral development was principally concerned with justice and that its development continued throughout the life span, even spawning dialogue of philosophical implications of such research. His model “is based on the assumption of co-operative social organization on the basis of justice and fairness.”
Kohlberg studied moral reasoning by presenting subjects with moral dilemmas. He would then categorize and classify the reasoning used in the responses, into one of six distinct stages, grouped into three levels: pre-conventional, conventional and post-conventional. Each level contains two stages.
Wikipedia
I find this interesting because I think we teach children about basic morality like the golden rule, but a lot of people never progress to more abstract moral thought as they grow into adults. I am convinced if we all thought about the extent to which each and every one of our daily choices is right or wrong, the world would be a better place. We would still make some bad or selfish choices of course, but we would make more unselfish choices on balance. Instead, we go to work for companies and tend to uncritically adopt their profit-maximizing missions in place of our own values. If we thought more morally on a daily basis, we would still be under the same pressure to provide food and shelter for our families, and that would still drive a lot of our choices, but we would be weighing other considerations at the same time – for example, the suffering of other people and maybe animals, the destruction of millennia-old natural habitats, and consequences both near-term and well into the future – and that might subtly shift our small daily choices. Subtly shift a lot of small daily choices, and I believe it could add up to a large global shift for our civilization and species.
The criticism I hear of these ideas is that people make moral decisions based more on emotion than reason. But is it a valid criticism to say that if we don’t actively develop our capacity to apply rational thinking to moral choices, then our choices will be based mostly on emotion? That’s sounds more like a self-fulfilling prophecy to me.