Custom essays on Moral Dilemma

A boy of seven years is playing a toy, a Spiderman, and he does not want to share the toy with another boy that is playing next to him and wants the toy too. The mother of the boy playing with the toy is telling him to share the toy with another boy but he refuses and tells that he wants to play the toy and that the toy is his and he will not share it with anyone else. As the mother insists the boy is about to start crying stressing that the toy is his. In such a situation, the boy faces a moral dilemma: on the one hand, he is playing the toy and he likes it, on the other hand, his mother asks him to give the toy to another boy; thus, the boy has to chose either to keep playing the toy or to obey to his mother and give the toy to another boy.
In this respect, the boy demonstrates that he has still in the pre-operational stage of the development and he transits to the concrete operational stage of the development, according to Piaget (Donaldson, 1984). According to Kohlberg, the boy is at the individualism and exchange stage (Wood, 1998). Basically, the boy meets the norms of behavior typical for these stages because he is still egocentric, although his mother still plays an important role for the boy and she is the highest authority to him. Hence, the boy is about to cry because he is torn apart between his egocentrism and obedience to the authority.

References
Donaldson, M (1984) Children’s Minds London Fontana.
Wood, D (1998) How Children Think and Learn (2nd edition) Oxford; Blackwell Publishing.