moral dilemmas, the “reasoning behind the decisión was a greater
indication of moral development than the actual answer” (McLeod, 2018,
p. 1).
Mintz (2018) discussed Kohlberg’s Levels of Moral Development as
follows:
Level 1, Preconventional
Stage 1: Obedience to Rules: Avoidance of Punishment
In this first stage, the person focuses on the “physical consequences of an
action to determine the goodnes or badness of a decision and seeks to avoid
punishment while exhibiting defeerence to those in authority” (Mintz,
2018, p. 1).
Stage 2: Satisfying One’s Own Needs
The second stage sees the person defining the right behavior in a “shortsighted way” that does not at all consider “one’s reputation or
relationships to groups of people other than when it promotesone’s own
interests” as it regards rules and authority as “important only if acting” in
accordance with the manner that they satisfy one’s own needs which is
essentially egoism.
Level 2, Conventional
Stage 3: Fairness to Others
The third stage finds the person attempting “to do what is in the best
interests of others, including those in a peer or work groups and those to
whom the individual reports” (Mintz, 2018). Weber (1991) decades
earlier referred this stage as the period of Good Boy/Nice Girl Reasoning.
It is at this stage when “good behavior or right decision-making is
understood as that which pleases or helps others, so that the decision
maker is seen by others who are important as a good boy or nice girl”
(Mintz, 2018).
Stage 4: Law and Order
The fourth stage now sees a kind of behavior that focuses on the morality
of law and duty to the social order and orientation towards fixed rules,
whereby the person’s duty and responsibility to society or the community,
respect for authority, and maintaining the social order become the core of
decisión-making. The decisión maker “assumes the role of a generalized
member of society, and reasoning relies on a conception of the social
system as a consistent set of codes and procedires that apply eqally to all
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