Critical assessment of the moral cognitive development approach

The moral cognitive development theory of Rest and Kohlberg has been subjected to several criticisms, some of which were already mentioned earlier. The main critique from business ethicists is related to the employment of the theory in a business context, Rest‟s and Kohlberg‟s measurement tools and the strict stage procession of moral development.

However, most critique “stayed within” the theoretical base of the cognitive moral development approach seeing ethical problems as objective entities and individuals as being able to follow rational thought to different degrees. This section shortly summarizes some of these more “traditional” critiques.

One major line of criticism is related to the reach of the possible employment of the theory, stating that Kohlberg‟s and Rest‟s theories are only limitedly applicable to business (ethics).

In this line of critique, it is argued that their measurement tools¹¹ were not constructed for the business population and that it is therefore reasonable to suggest that people confront, perceive and judge on moral dilemmas differently in the business context than in other contexts. Marnburg (2001) asserts that if moral cognitive development is indeed “dependent on contexts”, as often claimed in the business domain, the measurements carried out in business ethics research do not produce the same results as in other contexts. Hence, as Treviño, Weaver & Reynolds (2006) summarize, moral judgment of business practitioners related to non-business oriented cases does not necessarily give an indication of how business practitioners “reflect and act within a business context”.

Psychologists and business ethicists have moreover criticized Kohlberg‟s rigid stage progression and the reliance on verbal self-reports as a primary data source. This criticism of the strict stage progression has also been linked to Rest‟s claim of a strict causal relationship of the decision-making process. It originates from Kohlberg‟s statement that an individuals‟

moral development is invariant, i.e. that development only moves in an upward direction through the stages (except under psychological regression) and never downwards. As clear distinctions and direct causal relations among the cognitive and behavioral stages are posited that may be untenable, insofar as e.g. cognition and judgment are not fully separable, Rest‟s four-component model has potential problems.

Further criticism of the cognitive moral development theory regards the normative judgment involved when creating the measurement test cases. In order to compare individual‟s moral

11 Such as Rest‟s paper and pencil survey instrument, the Defining Issues Test (DIT) or the revised version (DIT2)

reasoning capabilities, the test answer has to deem some judgments as the most advanced and thereby as the “right”, “just” or “fair” judgment to a given scenario. Evidently, as earlier discussed, this is problematic. Ferrell, Fraedrich & Ferrell (2008) rightly points out that a serious constructional issue of the cognitive moral development approach is the choice of ethical “values” in moral development theory.

Rarely discussed in existing literature is that Kohlberg‟s and Rest‟s did not “test” moral awareness as an important component of ethical decision-making at all, as their findings rely on the judgments of individuals on pre-defined scenarios. Kohlberg and Rest assumed that individuals with high moral development skills were also able to identify ethical problems, a claim from with which this paper fundamentally disagrees. The fact that models which are based on the cognitive moral development theory “anticipate” the problem identification by providing individuals with pre-defined cases for their consideration sheds new light on the deficit of this approach to answer the questions raised by Blum (1991). As pointed out earlier, Blum claims that some individuals score very high on judging the “right” answer to the problem at hand, but don‟t judge (or act) in this way in real life since they might not sense an ethical problem in the first place. This not only fundamentally challenges models that built on Kohlberg and Rests‟ theorem, it also allows to question e.g. if moral awareness and competence can be measured in such manner or at all in beforehand, since due to the ever-changing domain of business new problems are continuously “produced” (as e.g. “new”

stakeholders emerge).

The fact that moral awareness as an important part of ethical decision-making was not explicitly tested by the measurement tools used by Kohlberg‟s and Rest‟s approach, it can indeed have severe implications not only on the Kohlberg‟s and Rest‟s understandings of ethical decision-making, but also on other models which build on their findings. In fact, a huge amount of ethical decision-making literature is occupied with the individual and its level of moral reasoning, which has led to an overemphasis on applying the right normative concepts and principles for moral reflection and behavior, rather than correctly identifying (and formulating) the moral problem in the past. Most business ethicists relied in their research on a linear model of moral development and see the moral development of the individual as the fundamental explanatory variable for (un)ethical behavior (Painter-Morland, 2008). Exemplarily for this kind of argumentation are critical comments on management

practice as so by e.g. Falkenberg who states that “a number of multinational enterprises have come under ethical scrutiny over the recent decades” due to “lack of maturity of corporate moral reasoning” and thus concludes that pre-conventional and conventional moral development is “insufficient as a basis for ethical guidance”.

The following second part will elaborate on this common understanding of “lack of moral maturity”. As it was described in this chapter, the presented perspective requires conscious reasoning in a principled manner, where moral reality exists and is recognized by individuals to different degrees. This will prove to be fundamentally opposed to the findings of this paper that individuals may have sophisticated moral reasoning skills, but, if it is inconsistent with the judgments prescribed, will be poorly scored. As this argumentation highlights, a strong need to reconsider the theoretical base of the cognitive development theory is identified.

Reynolds & Ceranic (2009) correctly argue that the depth and the breadth with which Kohlberg covered the phenomenon provided a foundation upon which others could build.

However whether they were pursuing or criticizing their theory, other scholars used the cognitive moral development theory as the central stake upon which to “pitch their research tent”. This means that although many business ethicists found constructional issues or objections in regards of the employment of the theory and the normative judgment involved, their critique mostly remained within the theoretical base of the field. But while Kohlberg‟s theory created a remarkable surge in ethics research, it also entrenched the field into his cognitive approach. Unfortunately, the approach has major limitations, which will prove to be relevant not only for the understanding of moral awareness but the entire decision-making process. The first is its‟ emphasis on the role of rational thought to the point of excluding other decision-making processes such as intuition and emotions. Second, it fails to adequately account for the role of contextual factors (Reynolds & Ceranic, 2009). Lastly, Kohlberg‟s and Rest‟s theoretical base doesn‟t account for the fact that judgments and thought is often motivated to avoid conflicts of interests and to protect the individual‟s ethicality. The following chapter will be dedicated to understanding the limitations in more detail by building a critique towards “sound” moral awareness and judgments.

Summary & Limitations

In the first part of the paper, existing theoretical approaches of ethical decision-making models were presented and critically discussed. Until very recently, the state of the field was one where responsibility for unethical behavior in the business domain was mainly attributed to the lack of personal reasoning skills of individuals which follow rational thought only partly considering situational and contextual variables (e.g. Jones, 1991; Treviño, 1986), rather than to the other intuitive emotive and cognitive mechanisms that operate when individuals face ethical situations. Hence it was concluded that without (enough) moral awareness (i.e. cognitive moral development), some decisions will more likely be evaluated as a straight-forward financial decision. Most approaches have in common that they claim that individuals can make “sound” ethical judgments (hence judge in objective impartial terms) independent of their context, as the cognitive moral development theory assumes morality to be a relatively stable character attribute, which individuals possess or not, “settled in a particular stage of moral development”. However, as Tenbrunsel & Smith-Crowe (2008) highlight and already mentioned in the introduction, the empirical study of ethics that has surged in the past two decades provides “clear evidence that ethical thinking and behavior is prone to many of the same mental processes and pitfalls, some outside of consciousness, as the rest of human thinking and behavior”. Individuals across the board perceive themselves e.g. as much more moral than their peers. Due to the clear empirical evidence which contradicts the main (implicit) claims of the cognitive moral development theory, the following chapter will address the second research question in depth, discussing what potential barriers to sound ethical judgment are and built on that discussion, elaborate if existing descriptive approaches of ethical decision-making sufficiently describe the ethical decision-making process.