Silence Reigns! A communitarian critique of the ethics of Lawrence Kohlberg

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to analyse and criticize the ethics of the widely influential psychologist and ethicist Lawrence Kohlberg from a communitarian perspective. The article starts with a summary of Kohlberg's ethics. It is an attempt to present a formal, abstract and universal ethics. The question is whether this kind of liberal ethics really is as universal and formal as it claims. Communitarianism maintains that any conception of the right or the good is always dependent on its social context. According to Kohlberg's criticis, even Kohlberg's ethics is actually a socially dependent ethics, which privileges the moral vision of Western liberal society. Since Kohlberg's ethics is presented as a universal ethics, though, there is no intrinsic necessity for it to take account of other moral visions. The essay concludes that Kohlberg's ethics is a monological ethics.