ABSTRACT
Moral reasoning focuses on a child’s ability to make judgments and decisions about ethical issues with ever-growing sophistication. e increasing ability to reason about moral intentions and actions is distinct from a child’s growing ability to be moral, which, in early development, may be construed as the ability to comply with adult requests. Although Aksan and Kochanska (2005) showed that compliant conduct is increasingly related to conscience as a child ages, compliance itself may be driven by factors other than the internalization of moral rules, such as attachment or fearful temperament (van der Mark, BakermansKranenburg, & Van IJzendoorn, 2002; Wachs, Gurkas, & Kontos, 2004). us, compliance is not necessarily contingent on morality. Further, some would argue that morality doesn’t necessarily involve compliance at all. erefore, the development of moral reasoning must encompass the maturation of other processes. To begin, we will briey examine some foundational theories.
