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Amelia asked:
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If a man was going to die and he needed to buy some medicine, but he had no money, should he
steal it?
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This is the Heinz dilemma (well, almost — in the original, it is the man's wife, and not he himself, who
is going to die). The story of Heinz was famously used by Lawrence Kohlberg in his research into
moral development — an interesting story in its own right.
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In the highest stage of moral development, as Kohlberg tells it, we make a judgement on this case on
the basis of objective moral principles. In this case, the principle may be that it is always wrong to
steal, or it may be that it is wrong to put profit above a human life. Kohlberg himself was not so much
interested in which principle the subjects of his research used, nor what answer they came to, but
more in whether the subject appealed to principles. Other answers, such as appeals to the greatest
good, or to the need to follow laws, were interpreted by Kohlberg as earlier stages of moral
development.
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As Gareth Matthews has noted (see his "Philosophy of Childhood", Harvard University Press 1994),
each of the stages Kohlberg identifies is a position seriously argued by some philosopher. Kohlberg
counts Kant's view as the most developed — a view with which followers of Mill, Hume or Aristotle
would disagree.
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Kohlberg's original study was conducted entirely with boys. When Carol Gilligan tried to replicate it
with girls (see her In a Different VoiceHarvard UP, 1982), she found that girls did not (on average)
reach as high a level of moral development as boys (on Kohlberg's scale). Given the relative rate of
imprisonment of males and females (among other things) this might seem an extremely surprising
result. Girls seem to pay more attention to caring about others, rather than following objective moral
principles. Maybe Kohlberg is wrong.
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But I haven't answered your question yet, have I? That's because I don't think it can be answered as
it is. Unlike Kohlberg, I believe that morality is about complex, nuanced moral judgements that take
full account of the detailed context (something that doesn't appear in your question), rather than strict
adherence to simple, overriding principles. We need to know more before we can answer.
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Tim Sprod
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