ShmoopTube

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And here's your shmoop du jour brought to you by hypothetical

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questions because if the world were to end tomorrow wouldn't you want to have [Girl thinking about the world ending]

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seen this video first.... Thomas presented with a moral dilemma

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and is asked what he would do the dilemma is that he finds a bag of money

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in an alley as he's walking to school but he doesn't know whether to keep it or

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turn it over to the police even though he knows no one saw him find the

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money and it's unlikely he would be caught Tom decides to give the money to

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the police because this action supports his values and he knows that it's the

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right thing to do what is Tom's level of moral development

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and here are your potential answers... well it's a shame the author

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of this question is spending her time on test prep scripts [Author looking at test prep scripts on laptop]

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when she could be fulfilling her lifelong dream of writing deeply

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unsatisfying crime novels but broken dreams aside this question is asking

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about Lawrence Kohlberg stages of moral development Kohlberg was an American

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psychologist who took Jean Piaget theories of adaptation and development [Kohlberg standing beside theory]

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and decided they could be judgi-er...Kohlberg was interested in

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how moral reasoning affects ethical behavior in other words how we behave

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has to do with how we rationalize situations and he came up with a model of

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how this moral reasoning develops it includes three levels pre -conventional [Hand pointing to three levels of Kohlberg's model]

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conventional and post conventional looking at our answers we see that there

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are three levels and five possible answers two of which don't have the word

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convention in them anywhere meaning we can immediately eliminate answers A and

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E now lets take a closer look at the three left not that close back up just a

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tad...In the preconventional level you wouldn't take the money because of the

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direct consequences either because you'd be punished for stealing or because [Man in prison]

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you'd be rewarded for returning the money but what's a bigger reward than

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money more money maybe the coveted money returner of [Man holding bag of money and trophy]

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the Year award but as you'll remember from the question our goody-two-shoes

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hero here knows he won't be caught so we know preconventional can't be right on

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the conventional level we find people driven to follow the rules based on what

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society expects of them so if Tom turned in

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money because he thought that's what a good person would do or because stealing [Tom thinking about consequences of turning in money]

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is against the law he would be at the conventional level of moral development

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which by the way is where Kohlberg said most of society was but Tom turns the

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money into "support his values" which puts him squarely on the

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post conventional level now the difference between conventional and post

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conventional might seem subtle but the key to remember is that post conventional is

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about pleasing principles or personal values whereas conventional is about [Postconventional and conventional definitions]

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following a rules for the sake of the rules interesting sidenote

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Kohlberg only used men in his research what level of moral development does [Kohlberg's office door with no girlz allowed sign]

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sexism fall

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