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Lawrence Kohlberg's

 

            Lawrence Kohlberg conducted research on moral development, using surveys as his major source of assessment. He presented surveys with moral dilemmas and asked his subjects to evaluate the moral conflict. In developing his theory, he made an intensive study using the same survey techniques of the bases on which children and youths of various ages make moral decisions. He found that moral growth also begins early in life and proceeds in stages throughout adulthood and beyond which is until the day we die. Influenced by Piaget's concept of stages, Kohlberg's theory was created based on the idea that stages of moral development build on each other in order of importance and significance to the person. On the basis of his research, Kohlberg identified six stages of moral reasoning grouped into three major levels. Each level represented a fundamental shift in the social-moral perspective of the individual. At the first level, the preconventional level, concrete, individual perspective characterizes a person's moral judgments. Within this level, a Stage 1 heteronomous orientation focuses on avoiding breaking rules that are backed by punishment, obedience for its own sake and avoiding the physical consequences of an action to persons and property. As in Piaget's framework, ego-centrism and the inability to consider the perspectives of others characterize the reasoning of Stage 1. At Stage 2 there is the early emergence of moral reciprocity. The Stage 2 orientation focuses on the instrumental, pragmatic value of an action. Reciprocity is of the form, "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours." The Golden Rule becomes, "If someone hits you, you hit them back." At Stage 2 one follows the rules only when it is to someone's immediate interests. What is right is what's fair in the sense of an equal exchange, a deal, an agreement. At Stage 2 there is an understanding that everybody has his (her) own interest to pursue and these conflict, so that right is relative in the concrete individualist sense.


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