Module 3

The Moral Agent: Moral

Character Development and
Its Stages
1 The Moral Agent and
External Influence
The Moral Agent and External Influences

How do we actually determine what is right?

What will be the basis for making a decision

and believing that it’s the right way?

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The Moral Agent and External Influences

Every perspective of what is right is actually

based on one’s own moral character that we
acquired, nurtured, cultivated since our young age
until we become member of society: We are formed
in social communities and that our ways of seeing
the world are profoundly shaped by the shared
images and constructions of our group or class.
(Fowler, 1981, 91)
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The Moral Agent and External Influences

Values, beliefs, customs and behaviors are learned and

shared with a particular group of interacting persons with
particular culture and ways of thinking (Leininger, 1984; Tripp-
Reimer, 1987). This makes moral values to be culturally relative
(Gostin, 1995).
Moral character is a product of the socio-cultural
environment in which one lives and develops. One’s knowledge
of what is right and wrong is shaped by the very community
where one was born.
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The Moral Agent and External Influences
Moral character is something that springs from the will of
the moral agent. It is not something that is imposed from the
outside but, rather, it develops as individual grows into maturity.
The individual is responsible for his/her character as s/he is
active in a certain way in the shaping of it (Flanagan and Rorty,
1990: 97).
Hence, though the family and the community contribute in
shaping the character traits of the person, it is always the call of
the individual human agent in its construction.
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 Lawrence Kohlberg
2 and Carol Gilligan’s
Theory
Lawrence Kohlberg

Lawrence Kohlberg was a professor at Harvard

University best known for his theory of moral development.
“Kohlberg interviewed seventy-two lower- and-
middle-class white boys, presenting each with a moral
dilemma: whether it would be permissible for a poor man to
steal medicine for his dying wife. The children’s responses
became basis of his six-stage theory of moral development”
(Doorey, 2012).
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Carol Gilligan
Carol Gilligan is an American psychologist best known for
her work on ethical community and ethical relationships and certain
subject-object problems in ethics. Her theory was based on the
care-based morality (usually found in women).
She stated that women utilize an ethic of caring, in which
the moral imperative is grounded in relationship with and
responsibility for one another” (Burkhardt and Nathaniel, 2002, 84).
In other words, while Kohlberg’s work on men is from the
perspective of justice, Gilligan works on women from the
perspective of care.
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6 Stages Theory of Moral Development

LAWRENCE KOHLBERG CAROL GILLIGAN

Level Stage Social Orientation Social Orientation
Punishment Orientation
Pre- 1
Obedience to Authority Concern for Survival
Conventional
Pleasure Orientation What’s best for the Self
(Self-Focused) 2
“What’s in it for me?”
3 Peer and Group Approval Goodness to Others
Conventional
Legalistic Orientation What’s best for the
(Group Focused) 4
Duty towards Society Others
Post- Common Good
5
Conventional Law as servant of Rights Ethics of Care
(Universal Universal Principles Interdependence
6
Focused) Personal Conscience
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 Hence, both Kohlberg and Gilligan’s theory suggest that
moral development is not an overnight course but a life-long
process. It is something that a moral agent should work on so that
one’s moral character would grow and mature in wisdom to
expand one’s moral horizon from the self-serving act to a
conscience-based act, in Kohlberg, as well as from thinking
what’s best for oneself to an ethics of care for Gilligan.
Both of their theories are helpful for us to realize the level
of our moral character and in a way that gives us idea where we
should grow more as moral agent.
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 Thank you!
Any questions?

You can find me at cventurillo@usa.edu.ph

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