Kohlberg and Moral Development Questions and Answers

Answer: B

Arunima is at the stage of morality of contract, of individual rights and of democratically accepted law (printed 'contrast').

In Kohlberg's post-conventional level, stage 5 reasoning sees laws as social agreements made to serve human welfare. When a law fails to fit a situation, it may be justified to break it in order to uphold a more basic right such as the right to life. Arunima's view that the law 'wasn't set up for these circumstances' and that stealing the drug is 'justified' is exactly this reasoning.

Social concern and conscience (stage 4) would uphold the law to maintain social order, while obedience and punishment (stage 1) and instrumental exchange (stage 2) focus on avoiding punishment or getting something in return.

Answer: B

Kohlberg studied moral development by posing moral dilemmas to children and analysing their responses.

He presented hypothetical dilemmas, the best known being the Heinz dilemma about stealing a drug to save a dying wife, and interviewed children about what the character should do and why. It was the reasoning behind the answers, not the answers themselves, that placed a child at one of his stages.

His method was a qualitative clinical interview, not a quantitative or experimental design, and he did not rely on observing children at play, which was closer to Piaget's study of rules in children's games.

Answer: C

Lawrence Kohlberg gave the theory of moral development. He proposed three levels, preconventional, conventional and postconventional, each with two stages, to describe how reasoning about right and wrong grows with age. He built it on Piaget's work on children's moral judgement.

Stanley Hall is known for his work on adolescence, John Dewey for pragmatism and learning by doing, and Jean Jacques Rousseau for natural education in his book Emile. None of them is the author of the stage theory of moral reasoning.