The experience
A man's wife is dying, one druggist holds the only drug that might save her, and the price is out of reach. Should he break in and take it? The sequence above puts that question to you three times, in three arrangements, with no score at the end and nothing leaving this page — and it deliberately cannot do the thing the dilemma was built to do. Kohlberg's interviewers were not counting who said steal. The answer to "should the husband have done that?" mattered as the doorway to the question that followed it — "why?" — and it was the structure of the justification, not the choice it defended, that placed a respondent in the stage sequence; the work was about the form of moral thought rather than the content of what people think is right or wrong.Historical / descriptive So the page can show you the shape of the dilemma. It cannot tell you your stage, and it never asks you for the only answer that would have counted.
What is happening
Before it was a famous hypothetical it was an interview item. In Kohlberg's telling a woman in Europe is near death from cancer; the one drug that might save her is a radium compound that a druggist in the same town has recently discovered and is selling for ten times what it cost him to make; her husband, Heinz, can raise only about half the price, the druggist refuses both a discount and a delay, and Heinz breaks into the store to steal the drug. The interviewer then asks whether the husband should have done that, and why. In the scoring manual the story is confined to the issues of life and law, and the separate question of whether Heinz should be punished was split off into a story of its own.Historical / descriptive The dilemma exists to provoke a justification, and justifications were what was being classified. The classification was a sequence of six stages grouped into three levels: preconventional, where right is read off punishment and simple exchange; conventional, where it is read off the expectations of one's family or group and the maintenance of social order; and postconventional, where it is defined by critically examined rights and self-chosen ethical principles. The stages were claimed to be structured wholes forming an invariant sequence — under all conditions except extreme trauma movement is forward, stages are never skipped, and this was said to hold in all cultures.Historical / descriptive
What this shows
The sequence claim was the testable part, and it was tested on the sample it came from. Kohlberg's original American boys — 58 of them, first interviewed at ages ten, thirteen and sixteen — were re-interviewed six times at three- to four-year intervals across about two decades, on nine hypothetical dilemmas at each sitting, and the published analysis reports that they proceeded through the stages in the hypothesised sequence, with moral judgment positively related to age, socio-economic status, IQ and education. The measure was rebuilt as the study went: by the 1976 manual stages five and six had been collapsed and stage six was no longer scored at all.Supported, with limits That is a real result about a real cohort, and it is also the boundary of what the dilemma has established. An orderly sequence in how American boys justified their answers is not a map of moral life, and the stage meant to sit at the top of it turned out to be the one nobody could reliably find.
What this does not show
It does not sort people into better and worse, and neither answer at any step is the grown-up one. Nor does it settle the argument that has followed the theory around since the late 1970s. Carol Gilligan's objection was that the theory had been built while leaving out half the sample. Listening to women describe their own moral decisions, she heard a voice speaking about relationships and interdependence where psychological theory intoned separation and autonomy; her eleven-year-old Amy answers the Heinz dilemma by saying that he should not steal and that his wife should not die, and that the two of them should "talk it out and find some better way" — a response that sounds indecisive on a scale where sounding concerned with relationships rather than principles placed you lower.Historical / descriptive Whether that is a fault in the scale or a difference between people is what the following decades of research went after, and the answer is not the tidy one either side wanted.
Research and limitations
Take the sex-difference version of the claim first, because it has been measured rather than argued. Walker's 1984 review of studies comparing the sexes concluded that the overall pattern is one of nonsignificant sex differences in moral reasoning, and a later meta-analysis of moral orientation found only small differences — care reasoning favouring women at d = -.28, justice reasoning favouring men at d = .19 — and reported that these findings do not offer strong support for the claim that the care orientation is used predominantly by women and the justice orientation predominantly by men.Mixed / contested Gilligan's own account is that she was never writing about women versus men and did not choose that framing, so the meta-analyses land more squarely on the popular version of her claim than on hers.
Two further criticisms aim at the model's reach. A cross-cultural synthesis reports that Snarey's review of 45 cross-cultural studies in 27 countries found a basic stage trend together with the cultural specificity of Kohlberg's highest stages, and that a further 75 studies across 23 countries using a dilemma-free measure converged on common moral values and basic stage development across cultural groups; separately, a critical evaluation in Psychological Review found the cognitive-developmental model wanting and argued that it is poorly equipped to account for the ways in which people make moral decisions in their everyday lives.Mixed / contested Which is roughly where the dilemma sits now: a durable device for making moral reasoning audible, attached to a stage theory whose lower storeys have worn better than its upper ones.