Episode Details

Every parent who has ever caught a child doing something wrong has heard the same defense. “But I didn’t get in trouble for it.”

The child does not argue that the action was right or that the action was justified.

The child’s entire moral framework rests on a single variable: did punishment follow? If the answer is no, the child concludes the action was acceptable.

This reasoning is normal in a seven-year-old. It is evidence of a brain that has not yet developed the capacity for abstract moral thought.

The child will grow out of it, given adequate development, socialization and guidance.

Most children do grow out of it.

Some adults never do.

In 1958, psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg began the research that would produce the most influential model of moral development in the history of psychology. Working from his doctoral thesis at the University of Chicago, Kohlberg interviewed 72 boys between the ages of 10 and 16, presenting them with moral dilemmas and analyzing the reasoning behind their answers. He was not interested in what they decided. He was interested in how they decided. The structure of their reasoning, not its conclusions, was the object of study.

What emerged from that research was a six-stage model of moral development organized into three levels, each representing a fundamentally different relationship between the individual and the concept of right and wrong.

The Three Levels

Kohlberg’s first level is preconventional morality. This is the level at which most young children operate, and it contains two stages. Stage one is what Kohlberg called the obedience and punishment orientation. At this stage, an action is wrong only if it results in punishment. No punishment, no wrongdoing. The physical consequences of behavior are the sole basis for moral judgment. A child at stage one does not steal a cookie because they will get sent to their room, not because stealing is wrong. If nobody catches them, the cookie was fair game.

Stage two, still within the preconventional level, is the self-interest orientation. Morality at this stage operates like a marketplace. Right action is whatever satisfies your own needs, and cooperation with others happens only when it benefits you directly. “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” is the highest moral principle available at this stage.

Kohlberg’s second level is conventional morality, which typically develops during adolescence. At stage three, moral reasoning is driven by social approval, the desire to be seen as a good person by the people around you. At stage four, the individual develops a broader sense of law and social order, recognizing that rules exist to maintain a functioning society regardless of whether breaking them would benefit the individual. Most adults in functioning democracies operate somewhere between stages three and four. They follow laws not because they fear punishment but because they understand that a society without shared rules collapses.

The third level is postconventional morality, which Kohlberg acknowledged most adults never reach. Stage five involves an understanding of social contracts, the idea that laws are agreements among citizens that can and should be changed when they fail to serve justice. Stage six, the rarest of all, involves reasoning from universal ethical principles, moral commitments that hold regardless of law, social convention, or personal consequence. Kohlberg placed figures like Martin Luther King Jr. at this level, people who broke unjust laws because a higher moral principle demanded it.

Where MAGA Lives in This Framework

The framework is descriptive, not political. Kohlberg did not design it to critique any ideology. But when you apply the model to the observable moral reasoning of the MAGA movement, the result is difficult to look away from.

The argument that Trump did nothing wrong on January 6th becau