Case Study: Racial Profiling

Case Study: Racial Profiling

Heinz Dilemma

The selected case study for this paper is based on Heinz, who was faced with a situation where his wife was dying. The boys were asked, “Should Heinz steal a life-saving drug or let his wife die for lack of the drug? Why or why not?” As Kohlberg examined the boys' reasons, he discovered distinct age-related differences in the complexity of the moral reasoning they used to arrive at and justify their answers.

Values of conflict

Although the focus of attention is usually on Kohlberg's stages, an interesting aspect of the theory is the assertion that moral beliefs and reasoning are neither copies of the environment (home, school, etc.) nor simply the unfolding of predetermined moral reactions, but rather qualitatively different forms (structures) of reasoning that emerge from attempts to resolve social/moral conflict (Rest, 2006). For example, another of Kohlberg's dilemmas features conflict between a boy and his father: The father promised his son that he could keep his earnings from after-school work, but then reneged and demanded the money for the father's own fishing trip. On one hand, the son owes his father a lot for all that the father has done for him, but on the other hand, his father made a promise, and promises should be kept. According to Kohlberg, the qualitatively different reasoning that children of different developmental levels reveal show the increasing ability of these children to reconcile diverse perspectives and renders their reasoning increasingly complex and stable (or to use the Piagetian term, equilibrated). According to Piaget, Kohlberg, and other cognitive developmentalists, moral reasoning proceeds through a series of qualitative transformations in which the essence of morality justice or fairness becomes more and more separated from morally irrelevant concerns such as whether one gets punished or whether one's decision is ...