MORAL DEVELOPMENTS AND MORAL REASONING

<< THEORY OF ETHICAL RELATIVISM

MORAL REASONING:Arguments For and Against Business Ethics >>

Business Ethics MGT610

LESSON 04

MORAL DEVELOPMENTS AND MORAL REASONING

Moral Developments and Moral Reasoning

This section investigates how we examine our own moral standards and apply them to concrete

situations and issues. It first looks at the process of moral development itself.

We sometimes assume that a person's values are formed during childhood and do not change.

In fact, a great deal of psychological research, as well as one's own personal experience,

demonstrates that as people mature, they change their values in very deep and profound ways.

Just as people's physical, emotional, and cognitive abilities develop as they age, so also their

ability to deal with moral issues develops as they move through their lives.

Moral Reasoning & Kohlbergs' Resaech

Lawrence Kohlberg identified six stages of moral development:

Level One: Pre-conventional Stages

1. Punishment and Obedience Orientation - At this stage, the physical consequences of an

act wholly determine the goodness or badness of that act. The child's reasons for doing

the right thing are to avoid punishment or defer to the superior physical power of

authorities. There is little awareness that others have needs similar to one's own.

2. Instrument and Relativity Orientation- At this stage, right actions become those that can

serve as instruments for satisfying the child's own needs or the needs of those for whom

the child cares.

At these first two stages, the child is able to respond to rules and social expectations and can

apply the labels good, bad, right, and wrong. These rules, however, are seen as something

externally imposed on the self. Right and wrong are interpreted in terms of the pleasant or

painful consequences of actions or in terms of the physical power of those who set the rules.

Level Two: Conventional Stages

Maintaining the expectations of one's own family, peer group, or nation is now seen as valuable

in its own right, regardless of the consequences.

1. Interpersonal Concordance Orientation - Good behavior at this early conventional stage

is living to the expectations of those for whom one feels loyalty, affection, and trust,

such as family and friends. Right action is conformity to what is generally expected in

one's role as a good son, daughter, brother, friend, and so on.

2. Law and Order Orientation - Right and wrong at this more mature conventional stage

now come to be determined by loyalty to one's own larger nation or surrounding

society. Laws are to be upheld except where they conflict with other fixed social duties.

Business Ethics MGT610

Level Three: Post-conventional, Autonomous, or Principled Stages

1. Social Contract Orientation - At this first post-conventional stage, the person becomes

aware that people hold a variety of conflicting personal views and opinions and

emphasizes fair ways of reaching consensus by agreement, contract, and due process.

2. Universal Ethical Principles Orientation - At this final stage, right action comes to be

defined in terms of moral principles chosen because of their logical comprehensiveness,

universality, and consistency.

At these stages, the person no longer simply accepts the values and norms of the groups to

which he or she belongs. Instead, the person now tries to see situations from a point of view

that impartially takes everyone's interests into account. The person questions the laws and

values that society has adopted and redefines them in terms of self-chosen moral principles that

can be justified in rational terms.

Kohlberg's own research found that many people remain stuck at an early stage of moral

development. His structure implies that later stages are better than the earlier ones. Kohlberg

has been criticized for this implication, and for not offering any argument to back it up.

Carol Gilligan, a feminist psychologist, has also criticized Kohlberg's theory on the grounds

that it describes male and not female patterns of moral development. Gilligan claims that there

is a "female" approach to moral issues that Kohlberg ignores.

Both Gilligan and Kohlberg agree that there are stages of growth in moral development,

moving from a focus on the self through conventional stages and onto a mature stage where we

critically and reflectively examine the adequacy of our moral standards. Therefore, one of the

central aims of ethics is the stimulation of this moral development by discussing, analyzing,

and criticizing the moral reasoning that we and others do, finding one set of principles "better"

when it has been examined and found to have better and stronger reasons supporting it.

Table of Contents: