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J. MICHAEL ARMER

JOHN KATSILLIS

If indeed money was unconstrained by subjective meanings and independent social relations, there was little left of sociological interest. As a result, economists took over the study of money: There is no systematic sociology of money. Significantly, the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences devotes over thirty pages to money but not one to its social characteristics. There are essays on the economic effect of money, on quantity theory, on velocity of circulation, and on monetary reform, but nothing on money as a ‘‘réalité sociale,’’ using Simiand’s apt term (1934).

The sociological invisibility of money is hard to pierce. For instance, the current resurgence of interest in economic sociology has led to a serious revamping of the neoclassical economic model of the market, firms, and consumption (see, e.g., Smelser and Swedberg 1994). But despite the stimulus, no full-fledged sociology of money as social process has emerged. Consider the recent literature on the culture of consumption, which boldly reverses our understanding of modern commodities. The new revisionist approach uncovers the symbolic meanings of what money buys, but, curiously, the cultural ‘‘freedom’’ of money itself is seldom directly challenged (see, e.g., Appadurai 1986; Bronner 1989; Brewer and Porter 1993).

MONEY

Sociologists treat money paradoxically: On the one hand, money is considered a central element of modern society, and yet it remains an unanalyzed sociological category. In classic interpretations of the development of the modern world, money occupies a pivotal place. As ‘‘the most abstract and ‘impersonal’ element that exists in human life’’ (Weber [1946] 1971, p. 331), it was assumed that money spearheaded the process of rationalization. For Georg Simmel and Karl Marx, money revolutionized more than economic exchange: It fundamentally transformed the basis of all social relations by turning personal bonds into calculative instrumental ties.

But by defining money as a purely objective and uniform medium of exchange, classical social theory eclipsed money’s sociological significance.

A sociology of money must thus dismantle a powerful and stubborn utilitarian paradigm of a single, neutral, and rationalizing market money. It must show that money is a meaningful, socially constructed currency, continually shaped and redefined by different networks of social relations and varying systems of meanings. There is some evidence that the sociological conversion of money has begun. (See, e.g., Doyle 1992; Carruthers and Espeland 1998; Dodd 1994; Lane 1990; Mizruchi and Stearns 1994; Reddy 1987; Singh 1997; Wuthnow 1996; Mongardini 1998; Neary and Taylor 1998; Zelizer 1994, 1996.) And in anthropology, psychology, political science, geography and history there are also scattered indications that the economic model of money is starting to lose its hold. (See, e.g., Berti 1991; Bloch 1994; Cohen 1998; Guyer 1995; Heath and Soll 1996; Helleiner 1998; Kahneman and Tversky 1982; Lane 1990; Parry and Bloch 1989; Leyshon and Thrift 1997; Thaler 1990; Shafir, et al. 1997; Shell 1995.) The following two sections will first discuss the classic approach

to money and then propose the basis for a sociology of money.

MARKET MONEY: A UTILITARIAN

APPROACH TO MONEY

Many eighteenth-century thinkers saw the monetization of the economy as compatible with or even complementary to the maintenance of a morally coherent social life (see Hirschman 1977; Silver 1990). But the transformative powers of money captured the imagination of nineteenthand early twentieth-century social theorists. Money turned the world, observed Simmel ([1908] 1950, p. 412), into an ‘‘arithmetic problem.’’ On purely technical grounds, the possibility of money accounting was essential for the development of impersonal rational economic markets. But traditional social thinkers argued that the effects of money transcended the market: More significantly, money became the catalyst for the generalized instrumentalism of modern social life. As Simmel ([1900] 1978, p. 346) observed: ‘‘The complete heartlessness of money is reflected in our social culture, which is itself determined by money.’’

The task of social theory was thus to explain the uncontested revolutionary power of money. Presumably, it came from money’s complete indifference to values. Money was perceived as the prototype of an instrumental, calculating approach; in Simmel’s ([1900] 1978, p. 211) words, money was ‘‘the purest reification of means.’’ Unlike any other known product, money was the absolute negation of quality. With money, only quantity mattered. That ‘‘uncompromising objectivity’’ allowed it to function as a ‘‘technically perfect’’ medium of modern economic exchange. Free from subjective restrictions, indifferent to ‘‘particular interests, origins, or relations,’’ money’s liquidity and divisibility were infinite, making it ‘‘absolutely interchangeable’’ (pp. 373, 128, 441). Noneconomic restrictions in the use of money were unequivocally dismissed as residual atavisms. As money became nothing but ‘‘mere money,’’ its freedom was apparently unassailable and its uses unlimited. With money, all qualitative distinctions between goods were equally convertible into an arithmetically calculable ‘‘system of numbers’’ (p. 444).

This objectification of modern life had a dual effect. On the one hand, Simmel argued that a

money economy broke the personal bondage of traditional arrangements by allowing every individual the freedom of selecting the terms and partners of economic exchange. But the quantifying alchemy of money had a more ominous chemistry. In an early essay, Marx ([1844] 1964, p. 169) had warned that the transformational powers of money subverted reality: ‘‘Confounding and compounding . . . all natural and human qualities . . . [money] serves to exchange every property for every other, even contradictory, property and object: it is the fraternization of impossibilities.’’ As the ultimate objectifier, money not only obliterated all subjective connections between objects and individuals but also reduced personal relations to the ‘‘cash nexus.’’ Half a century later, Simmel ([1908] 1950, p. 414) confirmed Marx’s diagnosis, dubbing money a ‘‘frightful leveler’’ that perverted the uniqueness of personal and social values. And Max Weber ([1946] 1971, p. 331) pointed to the fundamental antagonism between a rational money economy and a ‘‘religious ethic of brotherliness.’’

The prevailing classic interpretation of money thus absolutized a model of market money, shaped by the following five assumptions:

1.The functions and characteristics of money are defined strictly in economic terms. As a qualityless, absolutely homogeneous, infinitely divisible, liquid object, money is a matchless tool for market exchange.

2.All monies are the same in modern society. Differences can exist in the quantity of money but not in its meaning. Thus, there is only one kind of money—

market money.

3.A sharp dichotomy is established between money and nonpecuniary values. Money in modern society is defined as essentially profane and utilitarian in con-

trast to noninstrumental values. Money is qualitatively neutral; personal, social, and sacred values are qualitatively distinct, unexchangeable, and indivisible.

4.Monetary concerns are seen as constantly enlarging, quantifying, and often corrupting all areas of life. As an abstract medium of exchange, money has not only the freedom but also the power to draw an

increasing number of goods and services into the web of the market. Money

is thus the vehicle for an inevitable commodification of society.

5.The power of money to transform nonpecuniary values is unquestioned, while the reciprocal transformation of money by values or social relations is seldom conceptualized or else is explicitly rejected.

As the classic view reasons, the monetization of the economy made a significant difference to the organization of social life. For example, it facilitated the multiplication of economic partners and promoted a rational division of labor. But a link is missing from the traditional approach to money. Impressed by the fungible, impersonal characteristics of money, classic theorists emphasized its instrumental rationality and apparently unlimited capacity to transform products, relationships, and sometimes even emotions into an abstract and objective numerical equivalent. But money is neither culturally neutral nor socially anonymous. It may well ‘‘corrupt’’ values and social ties into numbers, but values and social relations reciprocally corrupt money by investing it with meaning and social patterns.

TOWARD A SOCIOLOGY OF MONEY

The utilitarian model has had a remarkable grip on theorizing about money. Coleman (1990, pp. 119–131), for example, builds an extremely sophisticated analysis of social exchange yet continues to treat money as the ultimate impersonal common denominator. Even when analysts recognize the symbolic dimension of modern money, they stop short of fully transcending the utilitarian framework. Parsons (1971a, p. 241; 1971b, pp. 26– 27), for instance, explicitly and forcefully called for a ‘‘sociology of money’’ that would treat money as one of the various generalized symbolic media of social interchange, along with political power, influence, and value commitments. In contrast to Marx’s definition of money as the ‘‘material representative of wealth’’ ([1858–1859] 1973, p. 222), in Parsons’s media theory, money was a shared symbolic language; not a commodity, but a signifier, devoid of use-value. Yet Parsons restricts the symbolism of money to the economic sphere. Money,

Parsons (1967, p. 358) contends, is the ‘‘symbolic ‘embodiment’ of economic value, of what economists in a technical sense call ‘utility.’’’ Consequently, Parsons’s media theory left uncharted the symbolic meaning of money outside the market: money’s cultural and social significance beyond utility. Giddens (1990) complains that Parsons incorrectly equates power, language, and money, whereas for Giddens money has a distinctly different relationship to social life. As a ‘‘symbolic token,’’ money, in Giddens’s analysis, serves as a key example of the ‘‘disembedding mechanisms associated with modernity,’’ by which he means the’’ ‘lifting out’ of social relations from local contexts of interaction and theirrestructuring across indefinite spans of time-space’’ (1990, pp. 22, 25, 21). Giddens’s interpretation still ignores the fact that despite the transferability of money, people make every effort to embed it in particular times, places, meanings, and social relations.

Anthropologists provide some intriguing insights into the extraeconomic, symbolic meaning of money, but mostly with regards to primitive money. For instance, ethnographic studies show that in certain primitive communities, money attains special qualities and distinct values independent of quantity. How much money is less important than which money. Multiple currencies, or ‘‘special-purpose’’ money, using Polanyi’s term (1957, pp. 264–266), have sometimes coexisted in one and the same village, each currency having a specified, restricted use (for purchasing only certain goods or services), special modes of allocation and forms of exchange (see, e.g., Bohannan 1959), and, sometimes, designated users.

These special moneys, which Douglas (1967) has perceptively identified as a sort of primitive coupon system, control exchange by rationing and restricting the use and allocation of currency. In the process, money sometimes performs economic functions serving as media of exchange, but it also functions as a social and sacred ‘‘marker,’’ used to acquire or amend status, or to celebrate ritual events. The point is that primitive money is transformable, from fungible to nonfungible, from profane to sacred.

But what about modern money? Has modernization indeed stripped money of its cultural meaning? Influenced by economic models, most interpretations establish a sharp dichotomy between

primitive, restricted ‘‘special-purpose’’ money and modern ‘‘all-purpose’’ money, which, as a single currency, unburdened by ritual or social controls, can function effectively as a universal medium of exchange. Curiously, when it comes to modern money, even anthropologists seem to surrender their formidable analytical tools. For instance, twenty years ago, Douglas (1967), in an important essay, suggested that modern money may not be unrestricted and ‘‘free’’ after all. Her evidence, however, is puzzlingly limited. Modern money, argues Douglas (p. 139), is controlled and rationed in two situations: in international exchange and at the purely individual personal level, where ‘‘many of us try to primitivize our money . . . by placing restrictions at source, by earmarking monetary instruments of certain kinds for certain purposes.’’

Modern money, however, is marked by more than individual whim or by the different material form of currencies. As François Simiand, one of Durkheim’s students, argued, the extraeconomic, social basis of money remains as powerful in modern economic systems as it was in primitive and ancient societies (1934). Indeed, Simiand warned against an orthodox rationalist approach that mistakenly ignores the persistent symbolic, sacred, and even magical significance of modern money. In recent work, sociologists, as well as anthropologists, psychologists, historians, and political scientists, have finally heeded the warning, proposing long-overdue alternatives to the standard utilitarian model of money.

Impatient with their former theoretical blinders, some anthropologists are now claiming modern money for their disciplinary terrain, casting off the fallacy of a single, culturally neutral currency. Parry and Bloch’s important collection of essays (1989) demonstrates the heterogeneity of money, showing how the multiple symbolic meanings of modern money are shaped by the cultural matrix. In psychology, new studies reject the notion that money is psychologically general, maintaining that instead money involves ‘‘multiple symbolizations’’ (Lea et al. 1987, p. 335). An exciting literature on ‘‘mental accounting’’ challenges the economists’ assumption of fungibility by showing the ways individuals distinguish between kinds of money. For instance, they treat a windfall income much differently from a bonus or an inheritance, even when the sums involved are identical.

A sociological accounting of money goes even further. Anthropologists reveal the multiple symbolic representations of modern money in societies outside the centers of capitalism, and psychologists explore individual or household-based differentiations between monies. A sociological model, on the other hand, must show how, even in the most advanced capitalist societies, different networks of social relations and meaning systems mark modern money, introducing controls, restrictions, and distinctions that are as influential as the rationing of primitive money. Special money in the modern world may not be as visibly identifiable as the shells, coins, brass rods, or stones of primitive communities, but its invisible boundaries emerge from sets of historically varying formal and informal rules that regulate its uses, allocation, sources, and quantity. How else, for instance, do we distinguish a bribe from a tribute or a donation, a wage from an honorarium, or an allowance from a salary? How do we identify ransom, bonuses, tips, damages, or premiums? True, there are quantitative differences between these various payments. But surely, the special vocabulary conveys much more than diverse amounts. Detached from its qualitative differences, the world of money becomes undecipherable.

The sociological model of money thus challenges the traditional utilitarian model of market money by introducing different fundamental assumptions in the understanding of money:

1.While money does serve as a key rational tool of the modern economic market, it also exists outside the sphere of the market and is profoundly shaped by different networks of social relations and varying systems of meaning.

2.Money is not a single phenomenon. There is a plurality of different kinds of monies; each special money is shaped by a particular set of cultural and social factors and is thus qualitatively distinct. Market money does not escape extraeconomic influences but is in fact one type of special money, subject to particular social and cultural influences.

3.The classic economic inventory of money’s functions and attributes, based on the assumption of a single general-purpose

type of money, is thus unsuitably narrow. By focusing exclusively on money as a market phenomenon, it fails to capture the complex range of characteristics of money as a social medium. A different, more inclusive coding is necessary, for certain monies can be indivisible (or divisible but not in mathematically predictable portions), nonfungible, nonportable, deeply subjective, and therefore qualitatively heterogeneous.

4.The assumed dichotomy between a utilitarian money and nonpecuniary values is false, for money under certain circumstances may be as singular and unexchangeable as the most personal or unique object.

5.Given the assumptions above, the alleged freedom and unchecked power of money become untenable assumptions. Culture and social structure set inevitable limits to the monetization process by introduc-

ing profound controls and restrictions on the flow and liquidity of money. Extraeconomic factors systematically constrain and shape (a) the uses of money, earmarking, for instance, certain monies for specified uses; (b) the users of money, designating different people to handle

specified monies; (c) the allocation system of each particular money; (d) the control of different monies; and (e) the sources of money, linking different sources to specified uses.

Exploring the quality of multiple monies does not deny money’s quantifiable and instrumental characteristics but moves beyond them; it suggests very different theoretical and empirical questions from those derived from a purely economic model of market money. In fact, a utilitarian theory of money had a straightforward task: explaining how money homogenized and commoditized modern social life. Its critics have a much more complex empirical agenda. The illusion of a fully commoditized world must be rectified by showing how different social relations and systems of meanings actively create and shape a plurality of qualitatively distinct kinds of money. Specifically, a sociological theory of money must come to grips with the remarkably

different ways in which people identify, classify, interpret, organize, and use money.

Consider for instance the family economy. Domestic money—which includes wife’s money, husband’s money, and children’s money—is a special category of money. Its meanings, uses, allocation, and even quantity are partly determined by considerations of economic efficiency, but domestic money is equally shaped by ideas about family life, by power relationships, age, gender, and social class (Zelizer 1994; Pahl 1989; Singh 1997). For instance, a wife’s pin money—regardless of the amount involved—was traditionally reserved for special purchases such as clothing or vacations and kept apart from the ‘‘real’’ money earned by her husband. Or consider the case of gift money. When money circulates among friends or kin as a personal gift for ritual events such as weddings, christenings, bar mitzvahs, or Christmas, it is reshaped into a sentimental currency expressing care and affection. It matters who gives it, when it is given, how it is presented, and how spent. Within formal institutions, money is again redefined this time partly by bureaucratic legislation (Goffman 1961).

These cases are not anomalies or exceptions to valuefree market money but typical examples of money’s heterogeneity in modern society. In fact, money used for rational instrumental exchanges is simply another socially created currency, not free from social constraints, but subject to particular networks of social relations and its own set of values and norms. A sociological theory of money must explain the sources and patterns of variation between multiple monies. How, for instance, do personal monies, such as domestic and gift monies, which emerge from the social interaction of intimates, differ from the imposed institutional money of inmates? How does the social status of transactors affect the circulation of monies? What determines the relative rigidity or permeability of boundaries between monies? And what are the patterns of conversions between them?

Developing a sociological model of multiple monies forms part of a broader challenge to neoclassical economic theory. It offers an alternative approach not only to the study of money but to all other aspects of economic life, including the market. In the long run, a proper sociological

understanding of multiple monies should challenge and renew explanation of large-scale economic change and variation. It should illuminate such phenomena as aggregate expenditures on consumer durables, rates of saving, response to inflation, income redistribution, and a wide range of other phenomena in which individual consumer actions make a large macroeconomic difference. In the sociological model, economic processes of exchange and consumption are defined as one special category of social relations, much like kinship or religion. Thus, economic phenomena such as money, although partly autonomous, intertwine with historically variable systems of meanings and structures of social relations.

SEE ALSO: Economic Sociology

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VIVIANA ZELIZER

MORAL DEVELOPMENT

Morality refers to the set of values that people use to determine appropriate behavior, that is, what is right versus what is wrong. Determining which behavior is morally appropriate, or ‘‘right,’’ is

essentially a cognitive decision-making process called moral judgment.

Moral judgment is but one component of the process leading to the actual performance of morally appropriate behavior (Rest 1986). However, research on moral development over the past forty-five years has focused primarily on the development of moral judgment. This is due in large part to the influence of psychologists Lawrence Kohlberg (1969, 1971, 1976) and Jean Piaget ([1932] 1948).

Both Piaget and Kohlberg maintained that moral behavior largely depends upon how one perceives the social world and oneself in relation to it. Furthermore, they viewed moral decision making as a rational process and thus linked the development of moral judgment to the development of rational cognition. In this way, moral development is seen largely as changes in one’s way of thinking about questions of morality as he or she gets older.

The present discussion will provide a brief historical description of the theoretical foundation laid down by Piaget and Kohlberg; the method used by Kohlberg to assess moral development as well as alternative methods that have emerged more recently; some of the major criticisms and reconceptualizations of Kohlberg’s theory of moral development; and recent research that has pursued those criticisms in the areas of cultural differences, gender differences, and continued adult development.

THEORETICAL FOUNDATION

Kohlberg built on Piaget’s theory or cognitive development to hypothesize a sequence of six specific stages of moral judgment in individual development. This theory of moral development is based on a fundamental idea from Piaget that the way people think about the physical and social world is the result of an ‘‘interactional’’ process between the human organism’s innate tendencies and influences from the environment.

This ‘‘cognitive-developmental’’ approach is thus distinguished from both maturational and environmental theories of development. Maturational theories (Gesell 1956) maintain that patterns of behavior express the organism’s inherent

tendencies. Development is seen as the natural unfolding of a process determined by hereditary factors. In contrast, environmental theories argue that behavior is determined primarily by external influences. From this point of view, behavior is not innately patterned but is essentially learned, whether as a result of conditioning processes that associate the behavior with particular stimuli, rewards, and punishment, or as a result of observing (and subsequently modeling) the behavior of others.

Social learning theory (Bandura 1977) has produced considerable research on how observational learning explains a variety of behaviors relevant to morality, including prosocial behavior (e.g., sharing, cooperation), aggression, resistance to temptation, and delayed gratification. More recent developments have pursued the question of how individuals exert control over their behavior, thus providing some balance to the theory’s focus on environmental influences. Bandura’s self-effi- cacy theory (1982), for example, emphasizes the individual’s expectations as important to the successful performance of a behavior. However, social learning theory has not addressed moral action and moral character in terms of a broad developmental course (Musser and Leone 1986).

Cognitive-developmental theory, on the other hand, focuses on the developmental process by which people come to understand and organize, or ‘‘cognitively structure,’’ their experience. It attempts to resolve the ‘‘nature-nurture’’ controversy by emphasizing the development of these cognitive structures as the result of the interaction between organismic tendencies and influences from the outside world. While particular ways of understanding experience may reflect innate tendencies, they develop in response to the individual’s specific experiences with the environment.

Thus, development is not seen as primarily maturational, because experience is necessary for cognitive structure to take shape. However, neither is development thought to be primarily determined by the environment. Rather, cognitive developmentalists argue that, because the underlying thought organization at each stage is qualitatively different, cognitive development is more than the progressively greater acquisition of information. Furthermore, at any given stage, the current cognitive structure can influence how the world is perceived. Thus, cognitive structure is

seen to be ‘‘the result of an interaction between certain organismic structuring tendencies and the structure of the outside world, rather than reflecting either one directly’’ (Kohlberg 1969, p. 352).

THE DOCTRINE OF COGNITIVE STAGES

Piaget’s theory of cognitive development maintains that cognitive structures are periodically transformed or restructured as they become unable to account for (or assimilate) new information from the external world adequately. These periods of restructuring result in new ways of understanding that are different from the earlier mental structures as well as from those to be developed later. This allows for the differentiation of distinct cognitive stages each identifiable by a characteristic approach to processing and organizing one’s experience of external reality.

Piaget (1960) identified four main characteristics of cognitive stages. Kohlberg (1969) maintains that these characteristics accurately describe his stages of moral development. The characteristics identified by Piaget are as follows:

1.Stages refer to distinct qualitative differences in the way a person thinks about an experience or solves a problem. Although the focus of attention may be the same, the mode of thinking about it is very different.

2.The progression of stages follows an invariant sequence in the development of individuals. That is, the order in which the stages occur is universal for all human beings. It is possible that the speed or timing at which one progresses through the stages may vary with individual or cultural environments—or even that development may stop at one point or another. However, a given stage cannot be followed by any other stage than the one that is next in the sequence. Conversely, the earlier stage must first be achieved before its inadequacies become apparent and the subsequent transformation to the next stage can occur.

3.The characteristic mode of thinking represents a structured whole. Specific cognitive responses to specific tasks depend upon

the overall organizational framework within which one processes information. It is this underlying cognitive structure that produces a logical consistency to one’s responses. Thus, the stage is not identified by specific responses to specific stimuli, but it is the pattern in one’s responses that indicates a particular underlying cognitive structure.

4.The sequence of stages is hierarchical. At each stage, the underlying structure represents a more integrated and more complex organizational system, one that adequately accounts for information that had created discrepancies within the previous structure. For example, children in the preoperational stage of cognitive development (Piaget’s second stage) cannot understand that equal-sized balls of clay formed into two different shapes still have equal amounts of clay. However, children who have achieved concrete operational thinking (Piaget’s third stage) understand the principle of conservation and thus recognize that the amount of clay remains the same (is conserved) for both pieces, even though the pieces have changed in shape (Piaget and Inhelder 1969). The underlying cognitive structure of concrete operational thinking differentiates between amount and shape and integrates the information to achieve a more complex understanding of the phenomenon. It is thus logically superior to preoperational thinking. That the later stages in cognitive development are also more comprehensive and more advanced introduces a hierarchical element to the sequence. The stages of cognitive development are not just different but also hierarchical, in the sense that they provide a progressively more differentiated and more integrated—and hence more adaptive—understanding of one’s interaction with the environment.

KOHLBERG’S STAGES OF MORAL

DEVELOPMENT

Kohlberg’s six stages of moral reasoning are divided into three levels, each consisting of two stages. The three levels are differentiated according to

what serves as the basis for the person’s moral judgment, specifically the significance given the prevailing, or ‘‘conventional,’’ social expectations and authority. Briefly, the preconventional level, which is the level of most children under 9 years old, occurs prior to the individual’s achievement of a full understanding of what is expected or required socially. The conventional level, which characterizes most adolescents and adults, refers to an understanding of the social conventions and a belief in conforming to and maintaining the established social order. The postconventional level is reached only by a minority of adults, who understand and generally accept the social rules and expectations but recognize that these have been established for the larger purpose of serving universal moral principles. Should the social conventions conflict with these principles, then moral judgment at this level will support the principles at the expense of the conventions.

Within each level, the second stage is a more advanced form than the first. More specifically, the preconventional level refers to judgment based not so much on a sense of what is right and wrong as on the physical consequences that any given act will have for the self. Accordingly, at the first stage within this level, characterized by the punishment and obedience orientation, the child will make judgments on the basis of avoiding trouble. This includes obeying authorities to avoid punishment.

At Stage 2, still in the preconventional level, the individual has a sense of the needs of others but still makes judgments to serve her or his own practical interests. This is called the instrumental orientation. Although the person is beginning to understand that social interaction involves reciprocity and exchange among participants, moral judgment is still determined by the significance that the action has for oneself. Thus a child may share candy to get some ice cream.

Next, in the conventional level, moral judgment is determined by what is considered ‘‘good’’ according to conventional standards. At this level, the individual has an understanding of what kind of behavior is expected. The first stage at this level (Stage 3) is characterized by the good boy–good girl orientation. Judgment as to what is right is based on living up to the expectations of others. It involves a trust in established authority and conformity for the sake of approval.

At Stage 4, the orientation is toward doing one’s duty. This is called the law-and-order orientation. The individual personally subscribes to the existing social order and thus believes that obeying authority and maintaining the social order are good values in their own right. Whereas behaving according to the social conventions is desirable at Stage 3 because it produces approval from others, at Stage 4 the individual has successfully ‘‘internalized’’ these conventions, so that proper behavior is rewarding because it reinforces one’s sense of doing one’s duty and therefore produces selfapproval.

At the postconventional level, one’s understanding of what is right and wrong is based on one’s personal values and a sense of shared rights and responsibilities. Morality is no longer determined simply by social definition, but rather by rational considerations. Stage 5 is characterized by the social contract orientation, which recognizes that conventions are determined by social consensus and serve a social function. There is an emphasis on utilitarian agreements about what will serve the most good for the most people. Here the person recognizes that rules or expectations are essentially arbitrary. The focus on agreement or contract produces an emphasis on what is legal and on operating ‘‘within the system’’ to achieve one’s goals.

Stage 6, however, places the responsibility of a given moral decision firmly on the shoulders of the individual. The basis for moral judgment is found in universal ethical principles rather than socially established rules or expectations. One is guided by one’s own conscience and recognizes the logical superiority of principles such as respect for human dignity. At Stage 6, it is thus possible to adopt a position that is in conflict with the prevailing social order, and to maintain this position as morally correct.

In Kohlberg’s last theoretical paper, he and his colleagues attempt to articulate Stage 6 more completely (Kohlberg et al. 1990). They describe it as fundamentally characterized by a ‘‘respect for persons,’’ specifically one that successfully integrates a sense of justice that is universal and impartial with an attitude of ‘‘benevolence’’ that is empathic and understanding of the individual (see also Lapsley 1996).

MEASURING MORAL JUDGMENT

Kohlberg’s procedure for assessing moral judgment involves presenting a hypothetical ‘‘dilemma’’ that requires the subject to make a moral choice. The most famous example refers to ‘‘Heinz,’’ a man whose wife is dying of cancer. The woman could possibly be saved by a new drug, but the druggist who discovered it is charging an exorbitant amount of money for it, ten times what it costs him to make it. Heinz tried but could not raise enough money, so he steals the drug. Should he have done this?

Because Kohlberg’s scheme emphasizes cognitive structure, an individual’s stage of moral development is indicated not by the actual behavior that is advocated but rather by the pattern of reasoning behind the decision. Thus, two people may arrive at the same decision (e.g., that Heinz should steal the drug to save the life of his dying wife) but for two entirely different reasons. An individual at the preconventional Stage 2, operating within the instrumental orientation, might recommend stealing the drug because any jail term would be short and worth saving his wife. An individual at the postconventional Stage 6 might also recommend stealing the drug but with a different understanding of the dilemma: Although stealing would violate the law, it would uphold the higher principle of valuing human life and allow Heinz to maintain his self-respect.

The difference between the actual behavioral content of a decision and the cognitive structure of the decision is also illustrated when two people arrive at different decisions but for similar reasons. Thus, the decision not to steal the drug because Heinz would go to jail and probably not be released until after his wife died is also Stage 2 thinking. Even though the ultimate decision advocates the opposite behavior of what was indicated above, it is similarly based on the consideration of what would be most instrumental to Heinz’s own self-interest. On the other hand, an individual at Stage 6 might recommend not stealing the drug because, although other people would not blame Heinz if he stole it, he would nonetheless violate his own standard of honesty and lose his selfrespect.

Because the stage of moral development is demonstrated not by the behavioral content but