Morality and Crime.

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Morality and Crime

Plan

  • What is morality?
  • Society’s rules
  • Right and wrong
  • Piaget and Kohlberg
  • Kohlberg theory of moral development
  • Locus of control
  • Attribution theory

(B)

  • Ethnocentrism
  • Male orientation
  • Empathy
  • Palmer and Hollin

Morality is a system of ideas of right and wrong conduct in relation of conformity or nonconformity to the moral standard or rule set by a society.

Moral thinking and moral development (that is, the way right and wrong for that society are learnt) is a product of socialisation. It is a product of the child's upbringing and the social values of the time.

Some theorists have looked upon criminal behaviour as a failure of appropriate moral development and reasoning.

  By internalising social rules through modelling, conditioning and identification in a process known as socialisation, we in turn conform to society’s rules.

   Every single person in society has a role to play, as in they are a jigsaw piece in a massive jigsaw. So with this in mind, usually one learns moral reasoning through their parents, who are at first the predominant role models. Apart from parents friends and teachers also play a part in ones moral development.

   According to Freud, due to the nature of human beings, we wouldn’t want to follow those rules, which in turn would bring forth our wild behaviours. But in order to avoid punishment and reap rewards such as social acceptance and a sense of belonging, we learn to distinguish between right and wrong for our own benefit.

  Piaget and Kohlberg (1959) on the other hand argued that moral development was derived from cognitive needs and a wish to understand the reality of the world. Both suggested that children actively absorb moral rules through social interactions, but instead of simply accepting it they bend it in order to suit themselves, thus constructing their own moral beliefs.

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  Initially adolescents would look upon adult rules as fixed, but then the older they become the more they would realise that those rules are merely guidelines and not actual statements. And so they can substitute their own beliefs into that framework in order to create what seems to them to be acceptable.

  In a follow up of Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, Kohlberg (1976) stated that the three main levels of moral reasoning he proposed corresponded with Piaget's stages of preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational thought. These three levels, each in turn had two stages. According to ...

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