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 because he was not convicted is stage one reasoning. The action is evaluated exclusively by its consequences for the actor. The insurrection was broadcast live. The violence was documented from hundreds of angles. Police officers were beaten with flagpoles. Members of Congress were hunted through hallways. The entire country watched it happen in real time.
None of that enters the moral calculus for a stage one reasoner. The only question that matters is: did punishment follow? Trump was impeached but not convicted. He was indicted but the cases were delayed. He was not imprisoned. For a person operating at stage one, that sequence of events does not mean Trump was lucky, or that the system failed, or that political dynamics prevented accountability. It means he was innocent. Because innocence, at stage one, is defined as the absence of punishment.
This reasoning appears with remarkable consistency across MAGA defenses. “If it was really a crime, why wasn’t he arrested?” “If he really did something wrong, why is he still free?” “If January 6th was an insurrection, why wasn’t he charged with insurrection?” Each question applies the same moral logic a child uses when arguing that eating cookies before dinner was fine because nobody stopped them.
The Leader Who Models the Reasoning
The framework becomes particularly revealing when applied to the leader himself. Trump’s public behavior maps almost perfectly onto preconventional moral reasoning. His moral vocabulary consists almost entirely of winners and losers, punishment and reward, loyalty and betrayal. He does not frame his actions in terms of whether they served the public good, upheld constitutional principles, or advanced justice. He frames them in terms of whether he won or lost, whether he was punished or got away with it, whether the people around him were loyal or disloyal.
When Trump pardoned every January 6th defendant on his first day back in office, he did not argue that their actions were constitutionally protected or morally justified. He called them “hostages” and “patriots,” reframing the question away from the morality of their actions entirely. The pardon removed the punishment. And in a stage one framework, removing the punishment removes the wrongdoing. If the president says you are free, you did nothing wrong.
This is not a sophisticated legal argument. It is the reasoning of a child who was told by a parent that the rules no longer apply.
Why They Never Moved Past It
Kohlberg’s model assumes that moral development proceeds through the stages in sequence, and that progression requires certain conditions: exposure to moral reasoning above your current stage, social environments that reward more complex thinking, and the cognitive capacity for abstraction.
What happens when those conditions are absent or actively reversed? Kohlberg’s own research suggested that environments which reward obedience to authority and punish independent moral reasoning can freeze development at the preconventional level. If the only moral framework available to you is one in which power determines right and wrong, you will never develop the capacity to evaluate actions on their own merits.
Consider what 25 years of right-wing media has done to moral reasoning. Fox News and its ecosystem operate on an explicit moral framework: our side is good, their side is evil, and the leader is always right. Complexity is weakness. Nuance is betrayal. Questioning the leader is disloyalty. This is not an environment that encourages progression to conventional or postconventional morality. It is an environment specifically designed to keep its audience at stage one. Obey the authority. Avoid punishment from the in-group. Evaluate every action by whether our side won or lost.
The result is tens of millions of adults whose moral reasoning has been systematically held at the level Kohlberg documented in young children. They did not arrive there because they are unintelligent. Many of them are perfectly capable of complex thought in other domains. They arrived there because the information environment they inhabit has spent decades training them to reason about morality the way a seven-year-old does.
The Inversion
The most troubling application of Kohlberg’s framework to the current political landscape is not that MAGA supporters defend Trump’s actions because he avoided punishment. It is what happens to their own moral definitions over time.
Every time Trump escapes consequences, his supporters do not update their view of Trump. They update their definition of what is right and wrong. The boundary of acceptable behavior expands to include whatever he just did. Calling for the termination of the Constitution becomes acceptable because he said it and nothing happened. Storing classified documents in a bathroom becomes acceptable because the case was dismissed. Attempting to overturn an election becomes acceptable because he was not convicted.
This is moral reasoning running in reverse. Instead of measuring behavior against a fixed standard of right and wrong, the standard of right and wrong is being continuously adjusted to accommodate the behavior. The result is a moral framework with no floor. There is no action so extreme that it would cause a stage one reasoner to break with the leader, because the definition of “wrong” is always one step behind whatever the leader just did.
Kohlberg spent his career documenting how moral reasoning develops. He mapped the progression from simple to complex, from self-centered to principled, from obedience to conscience. The MAGA movement represents something his model described but never fully reckoned with: what happens when an entire political culture moves backward through the stages, actively dismantling the moral development of its members until all that remains is the question a seven-year-old asks after taking a cookie.
Did I get in trouble? No?
Then I didn’t do anything wrong.
Sources
Lawrence Kohlberg, “The Development of Modes of Moral Thinking and Choice in the Years Ten to Sixteen,” doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago, 1958
Lawrence Kohlberg, “Stage and Sequence: The Cognitive-Developmental Approach to Socialization,” Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research, 1969
Lawrence Kohlberg, The Psychology of Moral Development: The Nature and Validity of Moral Stages (Essays on Moral Development, Volume 2), Harper and Row, 1984
Jean Piaget, The Moral Judgment of the Child, 1932
James Rest, “Morality,” Handbook of Child Psychology, Volume 3, 1983
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