Kohlberg, Lawrence - Historical Context
Loss of a universal moral framework
Kohlberg and other twentieth-century educational theorists had to work out notions of moral development against a dark backdrop, namely the loss of a universally agreed-upon framework for posing and answering ethical questions. Although the dissolution of what had been the Western moral consensus was noticeable enough to disturb some observers as early as the eighteenth century, the process accelerated with increasing rapidity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Charles Taylor has described this sense of loss as follows:
What Weber called "disenchantment," the dissipation of our sense of the cosmos as a meaningful order, has allegedly destroyed the horizons in which people previously lived their spiritual lives.... What is common [at...
[The entire page is 2163 words long]
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