Lev Vygotsky

According to Piaget, when children develop the cognitive capacity to conserve (around age 7), children move into the next stage of development, concrete operations. At the second level, around ages 4 through 5, the child interprets others’ experiences, including their thoughts and feelings.

Piaget believed that children’s pretend play and experimentation helped them solidify the new schemas they were developing cognitively. As children progress through the preoperational stage, they are developing the knowledge they will need to begin to use logical operations in the next stage.

The intuitive thought substage is the second substage of preoperational thought, occuring between 4 and 7 years of age. In this substage, children begin to use primitive reasoning and want to know the answers to all sorts of questions.

Preoperational Stage During this stage (toddler through age 7), young children are able to think about things symbolically. Their language use becomes more mature. They also develop memory and imagination, which allows them to understand the difference between past and future, and engage in make-believe.

Egocentrism refers to the child’s inability to see a situation from another person’s point of view. The egocentric child assumes that other people see, hear, and feel exactly the same as the child does. In the developmental theory of Jean Piaget, this is a feature of the preoperational child.

Piaget’s stage that coincides with early childhood is the Preoperational Stage. According to Piaget, this stage occurs from the age of 2 to 7 years. In the preoperational stage, children use symbols to represent words, images, and ideas, which is why children in this stage engage in pretend play.

During the preoperational stage, children also become increasingly adept at using symbols, as evidenced by the increase in playing and pretending. 1 For example, a child is able to use an object to represent something else, such as pretending a broom is a horse.

Heteronomous Morality (5-9 yrs) Children regard morality as obeying other people’s rules and laws, which cannot be changed. They accept that all rules are made by some authority figure (e.g. parents, teacher, God), and that breaking the rules will lead to immediate and severe punishment (immanent justice).

Autonomous moral reasoning takes into account the intent of the person committing the action. The worse the person’s intentions were, the worse they should be punished for their actions. An example would be two teens who got into a car accident. This is when we start to develop our own sense of morality.

adj. 1. Subject to external or foreign laws or domination; not autonomous. 2. [hetero- + Greek nomos, law; see -nomy + -ous.]

Universalizability, Principle of. The principle of universalizability is a form of a moral test that invites one to imagine a world in which any proposed action is also adopted by everyone else. In this way, the principle of universalizability works as a litmus test to determine the morality of a proposed action.

Let’s see an example. The law says don’t steal. If you don’t steal because you believe it’s wrong, that’s autonomy at work. But if the only reason you don’t steal is because you’re afraid of being caught, that’s an external force pressuring you, or heteronomy.

Kant’s theory is an example of a deontological moral theory–according to these theories, the rightness or wrongness of actions does not depend on their consequences but on whether they fulfill our duty. Kant believed that there was a supreme principle of morality, and he referred to it as The Categorical Imperative.

To act of a “good will” means to act out of a sense of moral obligation or “duty.” In other words, the moral agent does a particular action not because of what it produces (its consequences) in terms of human experience, but because the agent recognizes by reasoning that it is the morally right thing to do and.

Kant says that the good will is the only thing “good without limitation” (ohne Einschränkung).

if a character is a stable set of maxims on the basis of which one acts, then if those maxims are endorsed because they conform to the categorical imperative, one has a good character, and thus a good will. if those stable maxims are endorsed for any other reason, then one has an evil character.

Kant argues that no consequence can have fundamental moral worth; the only thing that is good in and of itself is the Good Will. The Good Will freely chooses to do its moral duty. That duty, in turn, is dictated solely by reason. The Good Will thus consists of a person’s free will motivated purely by reason.

Kant’s most influential ethical work, The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, identifies character with the good will, a will motivated solely by duty or principles of practical reason that it legislates to itself; Kant gives character the role of making use of such qualities as courage, resolution, and …

Moral character is formed by one’s actions. The habits, actions, and emotional responses of the person of good character all are united and directed toward the moral and the good. To be of good character means that one’s habits, actions, and emotional responses all are united and directed toward the moral and the good.

Legal judgments of good moral character can include consideration of honesty, trustworthiness, diligence, reliability, respect for the law, integrity, candor, discretion, observance of fiduciary duty, respect for the rights of others, absence of hatred and racism, fiscal responsibility, mental and emotional stability.