By age two, the child enters a stage of development Piaget calls the egocentric stage. For the next five years or so, the child has only a very general idea of what the rules are. As the child becomes aware of these rules, he or she tries to change them to accommodate personal needs and wants. A child's world is centered on itself. The child manipulates the world outside, then adjusts to the demands and expectations of parents and others.

By age seven, the child is ready to enter a new stage of development, which Piaget calls the heterogamous stage. In this stage, morality and what we see as right and wrong is based on outside authorities and a morality based on rules and laws. Guided by parents and other authority figures, the child begins to assert some degree of logical and moral control over his or her behavior. Between the ages of 7 and 12, the child begins to distinguish between valid and invalid ideas. Authority becomes a dominant concern, regardless of whether it is a parent, teacher, or older child who exerts it. The child often accepts an idea, attitude, or value without question, and issues tend to be seen in terms of black and white. There is little understanding of what is moral because of the total acceptance of the morality imposed by others.

As a young person enters the early teen years, he or she begins to comprehend values and apply them in original ways. This marks a transition, a turning point before one accepts full moral responsibility for one's life.

Finally, usually sometime after age 12, the young person starts moving into what Piaget calls an autonomous stage. At this level of moral development, we start thinking and acting as adults. We accept personal responsibility. We think in terms of cooperation rather than constraint. Peer interactions, discussions, criticisms, a sense of equality, and a respect for others help us develop this sense of morality and values. We begin to see other perspectives on moral and ethical issues. We may question and struggle to verify rules and ideas. If we find a rule morally acceptable, we internalize it, making it an integral part of our values.

Lawrence Kohlberg
Lawrence Kohlberg, another influential developmental psychologist, built on Piaget's model of moral development and expanded it with further insights. Instead of Piaget's egocentric, heteronomous, and autonomous stages, Kohlberg speaks of preconventional, conventional, and postconventional stages. He then divides each of these stages into two substages.

On the level of preconventional morality, the child responds to cultural rules and the labels of good and bad. This level is divided into two stages: (1) punishment and obedience orientation and (2) instrumental relativist orientation. At this level, the child expresses a total respect for the authority figure and has only a very primitive sense of morality. On the second level of preconventional morality, the child is concerned with satisfying its own needs rather than the needs of others or of society.

When we reach the level of conventional morality, our sense of values is characterized by conformity to and maintenance of the moral conventions that are expected by one's family, group, or nation (stage 3)-regardless of the consequences. When we first begin to think in terms of social conventions, we are labeled a good boy or nice girl if we conform our behavior to familial and societal norms. As we reach stage 4, our understanding of conventional morality matures, and we develop a sense of law and order, focusing on fixed rules and upholding the social order. On this level, moral behavior consists of respecting authority and maintaining the social order so that society can function smoothly.

Finally, Kohlberg describes a postconventional morality, which is very similar to Piaget’s autonomous stage. At this stage, an individual tries to define his or her own morality apart from that of authoritative figures. Stage 5, the social contract stage, is reached when an individual puts an emphasis on what is legally binding, but realizes that laws may change to meet social demands. The last stage of moral development is the level of universal ethical principle orientation. At this level, a person's conscience serves as the judge for moral dilemmas. Abstract qualities such as justice, human rights, respect for the dignity of human life, and equality become important in making decisions. For some people, adherence to an inner conscience may require them to break a law for a higher purpose.

While Kohlberg's theory is more detailed, it overlaps in many ways with Piaget's model. In a revision of his work, Kohlberg implies that a higher stage, such as stage 5 or 6, is not necessarily better than a lower stage, and that most people do not reach the sixth stage. In fact, Kohlberg's research suggests that most people seem to get "'stuck" in stage 4, where law and order is the overriding orientation. What connections, if any, can you see between these two models of moral development and the value systems based on either a fixed or process world view?

Carol Gilligan
In 1982 Carol Gilligan, a Harvard psychologist, criticized Kohlberg's theory and its conclusions, and by implication the model suggested by Piaget. She suggests that these theories break down when applied to the ways in which women deal with moral issues. Studies have shown that when female solutions to hypothetical moral dilemmas are evaluated using Kohlberg's scheme, women appear to be "'stuck" at the second level, that of conventional morality, where moral decisions are made in terms of pleasing and helping others. Gilligan rejects this conclusion. She contends that women are not deficient or immature in their moral development but that the standard against which they are measured is biased. Kohlberg's model was derived from a 20-year study of moral development in 84 boys and no girls, although the model has been generalized and applied to the moral sensitivity of both men and women.

As a result of some pilot studies of moral reasoning in women, Gilligan suggests that there is another, equally valid, moral perspective besides Kohlberg's "justice and rights" framework. She calls this second perspective the "care" perspective because it emphasizes relationships and connections between people rather than an abstract hierarchy of rules and rights. This framework stresses nurturance and responsibility to and for others. For Gilligan, the justice and the care perspectives of morality are different, but neither is superior to the other. Neither is more or less mature. Both are necessary for human survival.

Gilligan points out that the two moral frameworks are gender related, but not gender specific. For the most part, women seem to be more comfortable within the care perspective, and men within the justice and rights perspective. However, in some instances, women reason from a justice/rights view and men from a care view.

SOCIAL AND ETHNIC FACTORS IN OUR VALUES

In our personal development, socioeconomic and ethnic factors play a major role in the sexual values and attitudes we incorporate into our lives…. Etc…..