The Meaning and Measurement of Moral Development

Kohlberg suspended Stage 6 as an empirically substantiated stage, a decision some coworkers did not fully accept as final. This was a significant concession: Stage 6 had been the crown of his hierarchy—the universal ethical principles orientation that supposedly defined the most mature moral reasoning. In the lecture, Kohlberg retained Stage 6 as a useful philosophical construct but acknowledged it lacked sufficient empirical cases for psychometric validation. The 1983 formulation with Levine and Hewer later confirmed this position, though debate about Stage 6's status continued within the Kohlbergian research community.

Standard Issue Scoring was Kohlberg's revised measurement instrument, designed to improve reliability and validity over the earlier Structural Issue Scoring. Unlike the earlier system, which analyzed entire stories or large response units, Standard Issue Scoring used an atomistic method: isolated interview judgments were matched to prototypical Criterion Judgments in a standardized manual. The system limited scoring to two issues per dilemma and introduced guess scores for unscorable material. It was built empirically from seven randomly selected longitudinal cases, then validated on a blind sample. The goal was to make scoring more objective and replicable across trained raters.

Kohlberg had spent two decades defending the philosophical foundations of his stage theory—particularly in The Philosophy of Moral Development. By the late 1970s, the most pressing challenge had shifted to psychometrics. Critics and even collaborators noted persistent reliability problems: independent scorers often disagreed, and the scoring system required extensive training to use consistently. If the stage sequence could not be measured reliably, the empirical case for invariant development would collapse. This lecture represents Kohlberg's response: a final, systematic attempt to demonstrate that his structural model could be operationalized with acceptable psychometric properties.

Earlier Structural Issue Scoring required raters to make holistic judgments about the stage structure of a subject's reasoning across a dilemma—an approach that was conceptually coherent but difficult to standardize. Standard Issue Scoring broke this down into discrete, decontextualized units: individual interview judgments were matched to specific Criterion Judgments in a manual. This atomistic method improved reliability by reducing rater discretion, but critics charged that it sacrificed theoretical validity by treating responses in isolation from their context. Kohlberg acknowledged the tension, noting that reliability gains came at the cost of a more clinical, context-sensitive approach.

The 1979 Heinz Werner Lecture was an initial presentation of revisions that were later elaborated in Moral Stages: A Current Formulation and a Response to Critics, published in 1983. The lecture focuses primarily on the measurement problem—the construction and validation of Standard Issue Scoring. The 1983 volume broadened the scope to include a fuller philosophical defense, detailed replies to critics including Gilligan, and theoretical clarifications such as the distinction between hard and soft stages. Portions of both were incorporated into the 1984 collection The Psychology of Moral Development, making the lecture an early public statement of the revised Kohlbergian program.

Some coworkers did not agree that they were supposed to stop revising, according to John Snarey's account. The Standard Issue Scoring manual was intended as a final, stable instrument after years of iterative changes. But researchers who had built their careers on the scoring system saw ongoing refinement as necessary. This tension reflected a deeper question: was the bootstrapping process of theory-manual construction genuinely complete, or had it reached a point of diminishing returns? Kohlberg's decision to declare closure reflected both practical exhaustion and the need to present a fixed instrument for empirical testing.