>I don't understand this. There are six stages of moral development. The first, which you'll see in small children, is to act merely to avoid punishment. This

>I don't understand this. There are six stages of moral development. The first, which you'll see in small children, is to act merely to avoid punishment. This is a small wrapper around classical conditioning. Acts associated with things like pain are bad. The second, which you'll see in slightly older children, is to act to be rewarded. By this stage, morality is now a wrapper around operant conditioning, and children are able to seek out things they want. The third is social convention; things are moral if people are okay with your doing them. By the time a kid is 12 or 13 they're probably in this stage if their development is normal. The fourth is authority. Things are moral if an authority says they're moral. This comes with the realization that the people in your life aren't important just because they're the people in your life, they're important because they were appointed by some authority. A teacher is a representative of a school system, and a principal is a higher representative of that system. Police are representatives of governments. Politicians are higher representatives of the abstract idea of governments. There are two other stages, but the classification breaks down at this point and they represent more what the psychologist writing the paper thinks more than what actually exists, because almost nobody gets past the fourth stage. Most humans are entirely content to backend all of their reasoning on authorities. For most people, it's impossible for the government to violate laws. The government is the law. And further, it's not wrong for the government to violate laws. They're the government. They create morality. Finally, outside of the entire argument I've made up to this point in my comment, people pick politicians -- not in a meaningful sense, but they join the team surrounding the politician. A politician is either on their team or not. Politicians on the other team are corrupt all the time -- but not politicians on our team. My only hope is that eventually people wake up and realize no politician, no police officer is on their team. But I'm not holding my breath.