This level consists of Stage One and Stage Two of the model. Stage One is referred to as the "Obedience and Punishment Orientation," in which children unquestioningly obey all authority because they assume that objectively powerful agents have handed down a fixed set of rules. Kids obey to avoid punishment. Stage Two is called "Individualism and Exchange" because children recognize that individuals differ in their concept of right and wrong. They obey to avoid punishment, but they see the existence of punishment as evidence of an action's wrongness. They begin to see right actions as a fair exchange of good deeds between individuals. In both stages, morality is external to the child's personal determinations of right and wrong, and they perform as isolated members of society.
Level Two contains Stages Three, "Good Interpersonal Relationships," and Four, "Maintaining the Social Order." During the third stage, children are entering their teens and now see morality as a call of duty toward goodness for the sake of love and empathy for others. It is no longer an arbitrary ideal but something that is valuable in and of itself. During the fourth stage, teenagers become full-fledged participants, members of the wider society, which compels them to act in morally upstanding ways for the sake of the collective. Kids now know the intent behind the law, or the spirit of the law, rather than the simple dictum that one should always obey just because an authority has deemed it so.
Stages Five and Six make up the third level. During the "Social Contract and Individual Rights" stage, individuals develop a keen sense of basic human rights and the democratic process. They have an idea of how a healthy society should function and have a desire to see ordinary people create positive change. The final stage, referred to as "Universal Principles," occurs when individuals can see the inherent dignity and value in each person and recognize that all people are equally entitled to contribute to the collective concept of morality. An overall commitment to justice as a higher ideal makes the prospect of civil disobedience justifiable. An individual at Stage Five recognizes the importance of defending human rights, but it's not until Stage Six that a person would be willing to break an unjust law to defend a greater moral truth.
Kohlberg's findings assert that children do not naturally advance through the stages of moral reasoning because of genetically coded impulses, nor are they simply socialized into moral behavior by friends and family. Maturation through the stages depends on an ongoing personal reflection on morality. Mental processes are stimulated and informed by social experiences and observations. The less children are forced to conform without challenging authority, the more freedom they will have to develop their own intellectual reasoning toward a more complete concept of morality.