Moral Dilemmas and Moral Reasoning

Moral Dilemmas and Moral Reasoning

Introduction

The purpose of writing this paper is basically to present an idea to the readers regarding the moral and ethical development of children. The paper revolves around a little girl named Jane, who was relentlessly after her parents to buy her new toy which she saw on television. However, her parents refused, but one day when she was with her friend's mother in the shopping mall, she found a $20 bill. Now the main question arose at this point, whether she kept that $20 bill or she should tell her friend's mother.

Before going into the moral justification, the author highlighted some of the theories on the moral development. Kohlberg's theory of moral development dealt with a narrow component of ego and cognitive development, the hierarchical sequence of structures relating to moral decision making. On this continuum, there are three levels of reasoning: pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional.

Discussion

Although the moral development perspective was supported by many empirical studies, the popularity of the theory was later supplanted by social learning, cognitive-behavioral, and neurological approaches to criminal behavior. Kohlberg and his associates maintained that development in moral reasoning occurred through exposure to environments that challenge existing ways of thinking, as when adherence to an ancient creed simply does not help us to cope with a new experience or when the well-reasoned challenge of another individual causes us to re-evaluate our definitions of events. This is not inconsistent with social learning theories that maintain that individuals learn by imitating and being reinforced or punished by others in social situations or being consistently parented by good role models with an understanding for role modeling, monitoring, and contingencies. Moreover, this learning process extends to the learning of cognitions and cognitive processes. Although more recent social learning and cognitive-behavioral theorists might ...