Preconventional

• Because of egocentricity, young children’s judgment of right and wrong is based on doing what is good for them

• Stage 1: Punishment - Obedience

  • Rules are obeyed to avoid punishment

  • Actions are judged “good” or “bad” by their physical consequences

  • Limited sense of reciprocity

  • “You may scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.”

• Stage 2: Personal - Reward

  • “Right” and “wrong” are determined by personal needs

  • Favors are paid back as in “you do something good for me and I’ll do something good for you.”

  • Those who never progress beyond this stage – choose to spend their lives engaged in organized crime

Conventional

• The child takes into view the perspective of others

• Adherence to traditional values, law and order, loyalty to others, and society

• Approval of one’s beliefs, actions, and laws are of paramount importance

• Stage 3: Good-Person

  • “Good” is determined by what is approved of or by what pleases others

  • Being …:

    • Nice

    • Approved of

    • Pleasing others

    • Performing “appropriate behavior”

    • Fulfilling mutual expectation

    • Conforming

  • The golden rule is observed

• Stage 4: Law-and-Order

  • Respecting authority

  • Doing one’s duty

  • Maintaining social order for its own sake

  • The concern enlarges to an awareness of societal, national, and religious values that extend beyond the immediate group of family and friends

Postconventional

• Moral principles are defined independently of either authority or group identification

• Stage 5: Social-Contract

  • While laws are necessary, they are relative rather than absolute

  • Laws are perceived to reflect a social consensus, or agreement, among people to maintain social standards and to protect individual rights

  • Laws may be changed democratically if they no longer meet society’s needs

  • The purpose of laws is to enable people to live in harmony and maintain a sense of community while not transcending such individual liberties

  • Laws serve people and must not interfere with higher-order rights (i.e. individual liberties)

• Stage 6: Universal - Ethical - Principle

  • Jesus, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr.

  • Have a clear vision of abstract moral principles such as justice and fairness

  • They not only teach these principles to others but sacrifice their lives, if necessary, to stand up for them

  • Moral reasoning and behaving morally are not the same

    • Even though moral reasoning is associated with moral behavior, it does not guarantee that moral behavior will occur

    • There are other factors (inconvenience, personal risk, gender role orientation, perspective taking) that enter into moral decisions

  • There is an inevitable overlapping between stages

    • Occasional tendency to appear to move in a backward direction

    • The complexity of moral decision making based on the number of factors involved may lead to the kind of inconsistency and unpredictability for which a systematic theory of discrete stages has difficulty accounting

  • Universality and Generality of the Stages

    • Theory is biased in favor of Western cultures, and particularly among the highest social and educational levels of Western

    • In Eastern, more traditional cultures, the universal moral principles of postconventional moral reasoning often are based on the traditional and religious beliefs

    • Few people outside the Western part of the world would be classified as having reached the highest level of moral development

Emerging Adulthood

• Neither adolescence nor young adulthood

• Ages 18-25

• Theoretically and empirically distinct from both

• Distinguished by relative independence from social roles and from normative expectations

• Having left the dependency of childhood and adolescence, and having not yet entered the enduring responsibilities that are normative in adulthood, emerging adults often explore a variety of possible life direction in love, work, and worldviews

• A time of life when little about the future has been decided for certain, when the scope of independent expiration of life’s possibilities is greater for most people than it will be at any other period of the life course

• How did this happen?

  • sweeping demographic shifts have taken place over the past half century that have made the late teens and early twenties not simply a brief period of transition into adult roles

  • Distinct period of the life course

  • Change and exploration of possible life decisions

• How would someone with a sociocultural orientation react to these arguments?

  • Use the sociocultural perspective to critically examine the generalizability of “emerging adulthood” to other cultures

Urban vs Rural

• In economically developing countries, there tends to be a distinct cultural split between urban and rural areas

• In developing countries emerging adulthood is often experienced in urban areas but rarely in rural areas