Role Of Moral Development In Antigone

Antigone’s Moral Development
The play Antigone by Sophocles, is about a girl who faces a family conflict over her deceased brother. The protagonist is Antigone and she stays the same morally throughout the play. Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Development helps people understand the stages individuals morally move through as they mature more. Because of Antigone’s decisions and ideas at the beginning and the end of the play, she is a morally static character through the story.
To begin with, Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Development is a way of “how individuals would justify their actions if placed in moral dilemmas” (Wikipedia contributors. “Lawrence Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Development”). It has three stages and two categories in each of those. There is Pre-conventional which has the two categories of Obedience/Punishment and Self-interest. Then there is Conventional which has Conformity/Interpersonal Accords and Authority/Social Order. Finally, there is the Post-Conventional stage which has Social Contract and Universal Ethics Principles. People cannot go to a stage without passing all of the stages before it. Antigone is in the Social Contract stage, which means that “Morally right and legally

She is being sentenced by Creon to “Living in a vault of stone. She shall have food, as the custom is, to absolve the State of her death” (776. 155-156). This means that she is to live in solitude with food to last her a little while but she will eventually starve to death and since she was given food, it will not be on the state’s record from the Gods. Antigone firmly believes she hasn’t done anything wrong and states “I have not sinned before God. Or if I have, I shall know the truth in death” (778. 69-70). This shows she is believing in God’s law over mans because even in her last moments of life she is still believing that her burying her brother was the right thing to