Moral Development

Piaget does a good job beginning to explain how we gain basic understanding of how the world works, but he doesn't do a good job accounting for moral development. After studying Piaget, we are left asking ourselves what makes someone a "good person"? Where do we get our ideas on moral issues from?
Kohlberg goes more into depth about an individual's moral development. He says that moral development continues throughout an individual's lifetime. He breaks it up into 6 stages.

Stage 1- Obedience and Punishment: This is when a child sees rules as absolute and unable to be changed. They do what they need to in order to avoid punishment.
An example of this would be a child knows that he is not allowed to hit his brother so he refrains from doing it to avoid punishment. He does not keep his hands to himself because he cares about his brother's feelings, but instead because he knows that if he hits him, he will get in trouble.

Stage 2- Individualism and Exchange: This is when judgment is based on individual needs. A child may be hungry and see his brother eating, so he goes and snatches the food out of his hand. He knows that he needs it and has not yet developed the moral understandings that he should be considerate of his brother and not only care about himself.

Stage 3- Interpersonal Relationships: This is a stage where the child begins to care about being a "good boy" or being nice to others. He does things that will reward him with praise and benefit other people. An example of this is when a child begins to share toys, although he would probably rather keep it all for himself, he decides to be nice and share with his brother.

Stage 4- Maintaining Social Order: This is a later stage where people begin to take into consideration society as a whole. They follow law and order and respect authority. An example of this would be someone who doesn't speed because it is a against the law and could harm other innocent people.

Stage 5- Social Contract and Individual Rights: At this stage, people begin to account for different values, opinions and beliefs of others. Rules are important to the individual but they should be generally agreed upon. An example of this is someone protesting against the death penalty. They recognize that people are going to have differing opinions on the subject, but they also don't think that it is a just law and the laws should be agreed upon by the citizens of their country.

Stage 6- Universal principles- The final stage is one where people take into consideration universal ethical principles and abstract reasoning. People follow internationalized principles of justice, even if they conflict with law and order. I would say that an example of this is environmental protests. People protest against pollution laws in order to save the environment. They go against law and order for a greater good and benefit of the entire world.

I believe these stages are pretty accurate and Kohlberg does a good job explaining how are morals develop but there are a couple of problems.
One of the problems I've noticed is that he doesn't account for differences in moral development of different genders. I think this would be very interesting to do a study on. I also noticed that he talks a lot about justice but he doesn't consider personal relationships. A person's morals may be affected differently if the conflict included their child or close friend, as opposed to a stranger. The final problem I noticed is that he talks about what people think is right in a situation but not actual application. It would be interesting to see if the people put in a situation would act the way they said was just.

The 6 stages and definitions are from: W.C. Crain. (1985) Theories of Development. Prentice-Hall. p. 118-136.