Shaking her head and frowning disapprovingly at the teenager who was slipping a candy bar from the shelf into the pocket of his jacket, an elderly shopper lectured, "You know as well as I do that shoplifting is against the law. What if everyone just took what they wanted?" Indicate the level of moral reasoning demonstrated by the elderly shopper.

The shopper is in stage 4.

Explanation:

In psychology, Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development is a theory that states that, as we grow up, we go through several stages where our understanding of what's right and what's wrong, or moral reasoning, develops and refines. Kohlberg identifies six different stages, each one of them more sophisticated than the previous one. In our case, the shopper is exhibiting a moral reasoning that fits within stage 4. This stage, also known as the social systems morality, is part of the conventional level of moral understanding and has a law and order orientation, where the sense of morality is guided by the idea that society has laws and rules that we must respect because it is what keeps society from falling apart. The elder lady clearly shows this when she reprimands the teenager by saying: "you know as well as I do that shoplifting is against the law. What if everyone just took what they wanted?"