ABSTRACT
One of the more common questions asked about moral judgment research revolves around the issue of how moral judgment development relates to behavior. This question is of concern because understanding moral actions has increasingly been identified as one of the chief goals for the field (e.g., Blasi, 1980; Rest, 1983). Indeed, for many, the degree to which we can understand moral action is the acid test for the whole research endeavor. A different but equally pointed interest in moral action is often expressed by consumers of moral judgment research. These practitioners note, for instance, that the implicit assumption of much of the applied work in the field is that efforts to develop moral judgments will translate into more justifiable actions. However, if it were shown that moral judgments offered little information on how and under what conditions people act in moral situations, then there would be much less motivation to continue investing in moral education and little interest in further exploring the developmental features of these judgments. In general, most researchers would agree that a failure to support the link between moral judgments and action would severely diminish the status of the field within developmental psychology and education.
