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Theory of Moral UnderstandingStudent’s name Institutional affiliation Date Abstract According to Kohlberg, morality starts during the early childhood years. In his research, he used dilemma stories as a technique for understanding the moral standing of children at different ages. In his theory, he established that there were distinct stages to moral development to establish how morally upright an individual is. He also determined that not everyone could go through all stages. In this paper, I will discuss his contributions towards the proper understanding regarding the approach used, the stages of the development and how each stage acts as a contributing factor. Kohlberg approached this concept as an expansion of Jean Piaget's work which was a cognitive theory. The approach was unique as it adopted the element of a dilemma in moral issues stipulating how children in 10 – 16 years handled morality and values issues. The paper, therefore, addresses his results of moral reasoning as classified under various stages of pre-conventional, conventional and post-conventional morality. Also, the essay discusses further classification in each stage. The first level was the pre-conventional morality level that incorporates both punishment-obedience and instrumental relativist orientation as its classifications. He explained that people would be good to avoid punishment. In the latter stage, he states that the morality of an action depends on how it satisfies the needs of the doer, such as stealing medicine to treat a sick poor patient. Here, he established that different people have differences of opinion on moral issues (Sincero, 2014). Level two entailed
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