Moral dilemmas are situations in which people must choose and justify a course of action or reasoning with respect to a moral issue. Piaget concluded that younger children’s moral judgement was governed by unilateral respect for adults and adults’ rules, with little understanding of reciprocity or the intentions of others. Kohlberg defined five stages of moral development:

1. Heteronomous morality (punishment orientation)
   Moral reasoning in which children believe that right and wrong are determined by powerful adult figures.
2. Instrumental morality (personal gain)
   Children in this stage reason from their personal gain.
3. Interpersonal normative morality (social evaluation)
   Children in this stage seek to be viewed as good and feel guilt when it is likely that others condemn their behaviour. Individuals are concerned with how the self is evaluated by others.
4. Social system morality (social order)
   Children in this stage argue that rules and laws are necessary in order to preserve social order.
5. Human rights and social welfare morality (morality of conscience)
   Individuals int his stage make use of ethical principles to guide moral judgements. The rightness of an action depends upon whether the action is consistent with the rules that individuals would accept for an ideal world.

Kohlberg claimed that development across childhood and adolescence is characterised by sequential passage through stages. Stage 1 and 2 are most common in children with stage 3 emerging in adolescents. Stage 5 appears in adulthood, even though it remains fairly rare. Individuals generally move up one stage at a time. Regression over time Is rare. There is a strong positive linear relationship between educational attainment and moral stage.

A very common criticism of Kohlberg is that the sorts of justifications offered for moral dilemmas are not associated with action. Those who reason at higher stages are more likely to act pro-socially than those who reason at lower stages. Moral stages represent ways of thinking about moral issues, not specific behavioural tendencies. Individuals at different stages can choose the same action, but for different reasons.

There is some sort of moral cognition, a set of heuristics, which is shown by the fact that most moral judgements are made fairly quick with essentially no conscious deliberation of using certain rules.

Children make sharp distinctions between moral and non-moral domains. Moral domains are unlikely to be used in reasoning about all social issues. Aggression can perhaps be understood in terms of the attributions children make rather than moral stages. Attributions refer to the belief one holds as to why people carry out a particular action or behaviour.

There is evidence for the existence of the moral stages 2, 3 and 4 in non-western cultures, although stage 5 is not present in non-western cultures.