Lawrence Kohlberg considers that an individual is in the lowest phase of moral development if he thinks only his own personal interest and has only selfish agenda in mind when encountering other humans. This lowest phase correspond well 16th century British moral egoism which reflects the rise of new economic order. Adam Smith wanted to defend this new economic order which is based on economic exchange between egoistic individual but he surely did not want to support moral theory of British egoism. His book “Wealth of the Nation” suit well for the world view of British moral egoism but in book “Theory of Moral Sentiments” he present a moral theory which is total opposite to the moral egoism. Contemporary German intellectuals saw contradiction in Adam Smith’s social philosophy which they called as “Das Adam-Smith-Problem”. Smith himself didn’t think that there is any contradiction in a situation where in economic sphere (civil society) individual act egoistically (which Piaget and Kohlberg considers as moral heteronomy) and in ethical sphere (encounter with the imagined Other) he feels humanity and compassion toward his fellow men (which Gilligan and Levinas considers to be part of a moral autonomy). Hegel was a passionate reader of Adam Smith and he acknowledged Das Adam-Smith-Problem. He set the task of his social philosophy to overcome this paradox. He wanted to create a theory of a social totality where economic egoism and feelings of humanity are not in contradiction. In the same time Hegel wanted to create a theory on Bildung process where human spirit develops from moral un-freedom (heteronomy) to moral freedom and maturity (autonomy) both in individual and socio-historical level. In certain Hegel’s texts notion of recognition plays crucial role. That is why modern Neohegelians Ludwig Siep, Axel Honneth and Robert Williams considers the notion of recognition to be elementary in Hegel’s three-progned theory of developing human spirit from family via Civil Society to State. For Hegel family is a sphere where people love their “concrete other” (term invented by Hegelian Georg Herbert Mead) and where feelings surpasses reason. Civil Society is a sphere of private contracts and economic exchanges where cold egoistic and calculative reason surpasses feelings. In the sphere of State the contradiction of family and Civil Society (e.g. Das Adam-Smith-Problem) is solved by “rational feeling”. According to Hegel State should protect citizens from alienating effect of egoistic reason of Civil Society and cultivate “family-feelings” to rational feelings which integrate citizen into “sittliche community” (community of manners and solidarity) through reciprocal process of recognition (citizens reciprocally recognize each other’s importance to community). This Hegelian scheme has some resemblance with Kohlberg’s model of moral development – possible because of influence of James Mark Baldwin’s and Jean Piaget’s Hegelian genetic developmental psychology - where individual starts with level of egoistic pre-conventional morality and ends up with level of post-conventional moral maturity where rational feeling of universal duty prevails. In this presentation I want to revise Kohlberg’s theory of moral development with the help of modern Neohegelian ethics of recognition.

Synthesis of Gadamerian philosophical hermeneutics and Habermasian critical hermeneutics with the touch of Derridarian deconstructive hermeneutics

Disclosure of implicit philosophic-historical roots of Kohlberg’s moral theory and possible emerging of a new revised model of Kohlberg’s theory of moral development