What morality means
Definition
Morality
A person's sense of right and wrong, and the principles they use to decide how they ought to behave. Their morals are the specific beliefs about right and wrong that they hold.
- Morality is your sense of right and wrong, and the principles you use to work out how you ought to behave.
- Your morals are the particular beliefs about right and wrong that you hold.
- Moral reasoning is the thinking you do to reach that judgement, and psychologists care far more about the reasoning than about the answer you land on.
- Two people can agree that an act is wrong and still be reasoning about it in completely different ways.
The three levels of moral reasoning
- Kohlberg described moral reasoning as developing through three levels, each using a different basis for judging right and wrong.
- At the pre-conventional level you judge an act by what happens to you, so something is wrong because it gets punished and right because it is rewarded.
- At the conventional level you judge an act by rules and by what other people expect, so something is right because it is the law or because it keeps you in good standing.
- At the post-conventional level you judge an act against principles you have worked out for yourself, such as fairness or the value of a life, and those principles can outweigh a rule.
- The levels come in a fixed order, and plenty of adults never reason regularly at the post-conventional level.
Example
- A friend asks you to cover for them after they break a school rule.
- Pre-conventional: you refuse because you would end up in detention too.
- Conventional: you refuse because lying to a teacher breaks the rules and lets people down.
- Post-conventional: you weigh loyalty against honesty and decide which principle matters more here, even if that puts you on the wrong side of the rule.
- All three can produce the same refusal, so only the justification tells you the level.
How cognitive development drives moral development
- Each level of moral reasoning depends on thinking a child cannot do until the matching stage of cognitive development has arrived.
- A pre-operational child is egocentric, so they cannot picture how an act looks to anyone else, which leaves consequences to themselves as the only basis for judging it.
- That is exactly pre-conventional reasoning, and it is why a young child explains a rule by saying you get told off.
- Once concrete operational thinking brings decentring, the child can hold someone else's viewpoint in mind and judge an act by what the group expects, which is conventional reasoning.
- Piaget and Inhelder's three mountains task is the research evidence for that shift, because children only begin choosing the doll's view rather than their own from about seven.
- Formal operational thinking then adds abstract and hypothetical reasoning, so a young person can weigh a principle such as justice against a rule, which is what post-conventional reasoning requires.
Common Mistake
- Do not label someone by the decision they reach, because the level comes from the justification they give for it.
- Do not treat the three levels as age brackets, since an adult can still reason at the pre-conventional level.
Turning this into marks
- These questions usually hand you a scenario and ask which level of moral reasoning it shows, so name the level and quote the words in the scenario that give it away.
- When you are asked to use cognitive development to explain moral development, the link has to be spelled out: name the Piagetian stage, say what thinking it makes possible, then say which moral level that unlocks.
- The mark most often lost is on listing the three levels without tying any of them to a stage of thinking.
Self review
- What is the difference between morality and your morals?
- On what basis does someone reasoning at the pre-conventional level decide an act is wrong?
- Which level judges an act against principles you have worked out for yourself?
- Which change in Piaget's stages makes conventional reasoning possible, and why?
