Objective 20| Discuss moral development from the perspectives of moral thinking, moral feeling, and moral action. In Piaget’s view, moral judgments reflect the developing child’s reasoning powers. Lawrence Kohlberg proposed three levels of moral thinking. Preconventional morality is self interested morality based on reasoning that attempts to avoid punishment or gain concrete rewards. Conventional morality is law-abiding morality based on reasoning that existing laws must be upheld. Post conventional morality (not everyone attains this final stage) is self-defined morality based on abstract reasoning about what is ethical, right, and fair. The social intuitionist view of morality proposes that moral feelingsprecede moral thinking and judgments. Some brain-imaging experiments confirm that the brain’s emotion areas are active when people consider moral dilemmas. The moral action perspective focuses on social influences on decisions to do the right thing. Programs based on the moral action perspective teach children to empathize with others’ feelings and to delay gratification to enable bigger rewards later.