Approaches to the Development of Moral Reasoning

This text offers a survey of approaches to the development of moral reasoning - those of Freud, ego psychology, Piaget and Kohlberg. The book argues that the impressive nature of Kohlberg's later evidence for his view that moral reasoning passes through a sequence of stages is in part illusory, because his theory predicts that specific types of reply will show specific developmental patterns. However, as data are always reported in terms of stages, which amalgamate very disparate types of reply, it is impossible to know whether the specific types of reply follow their predicted developmental courses or not.; The book also examines findings from non-Kohlbergian interviews and other methods, advocating that weakly interpretive and largely descriptive presentation of findings is preferable to strongly interpretive techniques. It is argued that a wide variety of mechanisms suggested by the theories outlined in the first part of the book, as well as others drawn from general theories of personality development,are able to explain existing descriptive developmental findings. The task of the future is to assess the relative importance of these findings.