Stages of Moral Development

Kohlberg identified three distinct levels of moral reasoning: preconventional, conventional, and postconventional. Each level has two sub-stages.

Kohlberg defined three levels of moral development: preconventional, conventional, and postconventional. Each level has two distinct stages.

• Stage 1 (Pre-Conventional) Obedience and punishment orientation (How can I avoid punishment?)
• Stage 2 (Conventional) Interpersonal accord and conformity (Social norms, good boy – good girl attitude)
• Stage 3 (Post-Conventional) Social contract orientation (Justice and the spirit of the law)

People at this stage develop their own set of moral guidelines that may or not fit into the law. According to Kohlberg, most people will reach the highest stage of moral development.

Definition. Postconventional morality, a concept developed largely by psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, identifies the ethical reasoning of moral actors who make decisions based on rights, values, duties, or principles that are (or could be) universalizable.

Conventional. The conventional level of moral reasoning is typical of adolescents and adults. To reason in a conventional way is to judge the morality of actions by comparing them to society’s views and expectations. The conventional level consists of the third and fourth stages of moral development.

Preconventional moral reasoning is the first of three levels of moral reasoning in Kohlberg’s Structural Theory of Moral Development, a cognitive-developmental approach to moral development that describes six invariant, sequential, universal, and progressively complex structural stages of moral judgment across the life …

Morality develops across a lifetime and is influenced by an individual’s experiences and their behavior when faced with moral issues through different periods’ physical and cognitive development.

After the age of two, up to the age of seven, children are in the first stage of Piaget’s moral development, where they are very rigid in their beliefs of moral concepts. Piaget termed this first stage the “Morality of Constraint” .

Spiritual & Moral Development. “Moral Education is the source of that spiritual equilibrium on which everything else depends and which may be compared to the physical equilibrium or sense of balance without which it is impossible to stand upright or to move into any other position.

Spirituality has everything to do with morality. Morality is everything that spirituality is. Being moral allows us to live honestly and purely in a world that doesn’t always take notice.