Question

Describe the basic ideas included in Kohlberg's theory of moral development (see video lecture and Barkan, p. 114). How is moral development related to crime and deviance according to Kohlberg? Compare and contrast Moral Development theory with one other psychological explanation for crime

Answer 1

Kohlberg studied moral development by posing moral dilemmas to groups of children as well as adolescents and adults. He identified three general levels of moral reasoning: preconventional, conventional and postconventional and described two stages at each level. The stages are,

Preconventional Level	Stage-1 Punishment-obedience orientation Stage-2 Instrumental-exchnage orientation
Conventional Level	Stage-3 Good-boy-nice-girl orientation Stage-4 System-maintaining orientation
Post Conventional Level	Stage-5 Social-contract situation Stage-6 Universal-ethical-principles

Moral reasoning of preschool children was influenced by a concern for obedience and punishment and for satisfying personal needs. When children enter the stage of concrete operations, they are able to turn away from their egocentric thinking, growing more concerned about appearing ‘good’. According to Kohlberg this shift in focus is characteristic of conventional level of moral reasoning. Concern with law and order is an important aspect of conventional reasoning. Rule breaking is considered to be inherently immoral because it creates chaos in a stable social system. Reasoning at this level fits what many societies consider to be acceptable moral rules.

The research studies has been shows that in the majority of the criminal casess, norms stay on the level of punishment and obedience. Stages of moral development and social perspective are mutually connected. Under the influence of punishment and reward in early childhood, the child who is still focused on his or her own "being", forming image of an herself or himself as a physical entity, but at the same time takes into consideration the existence of other persons as a physical entities. As a concequence during the next stage, the development and satisfaction of personal needs represents a central theme in childrens thninking. However, not all forms of exchanges at the intrumental level can be resolved to the mutual satisfaction. Based on these experiences, a child realises that not all situations are those where others have the same expectations as he/she. In the beginning, expectations have a characteristic of stereotypes, but the experience that not all people have the same expectations as the child, practically binds him/her to think about them. The individual factors of risk include stressors which an individual has confronted with or confronts with during the period of his/her development. Those stressors can be caused by different things such as death someone close, rejection by peers etc, Every individual responds to those things depending on individual characteristics. That is why persons who cannot deal with those stressors, and those are most often persons who are emotionally, and not rarely, cognitively instable, fall into delinquency.

During their moral development, juvenile delinquents usually stop developing on a level at which they perceive the world in an overly simplified way. They are not capable of understanding the needs, feelings and motives of others. They perceive social environment only as an arena in which people are manipulated in order to achieve personal gain.

Rest and his associates speak about macro-morality and micro-morality and their differences. Namely, according to these authors, macro-morality refers to a formal social structure which is defined by social institutions, rules and roles. Micro-morality refers to an individual relationship which people have every day, where the subjects themselves are expected to be moral and to act according to the unwritten moral norms.

Piagets argued that moral development is primarily an intellectual process. In other words, the same way in which cognitive development goes through certain stages whose sequence is unchanging, moral development goes through an unchangeable sequence of moral stages. Also, the essence of morality, according to Piaget, consists of respect, which is felt by a person according to the rules of the social order, and the way in which that person understands justice. Piaget has displayed a scheme of moral development which consists of two general stages. The first stage is a stage of heteronomy and coercion, that is, moral realism, which gradually transfers into the second stage of moral reasoning which is based on autonomy and cooperation, that is, moral relativism. The stage of moral autonomy – a more mature type of morality, autonomous morality, starts to develop around the age of 10 and its basic feature is responsiveness (reciprocity): being good means being righteous, unlike the previous feature when being good has meant being obedient. This more mature type of morality is a consequence of changes in opinions, on the one side, and on the other, changes in interaction with the social environment. When it comes to cognitive changes, there is a gradual loss of egocentric perspective, distancing from the self-centred focus, an increase of the ability to take someone else’s point of view and to understand other people’s opinions and feelings. Moral heteronomy reflects in the fact that authority determines what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is not. Punishment and reward determine whether a certain act will be considered good or bad, right or wrong. If a person with authority punishes a child for what he/she has done, this act is considered bad, but if the child is rewarded, the act is considered as good.