ABSTRACT
The most influential work on the development of moral reasoning has been that of Lawrence Kohlberg. Like J. Piaget, Kohlberg was committed to the general outlook known as cognitive structuralism. It is convenient to divide consideration of Kohlberg’s work during each of the two periods into four aspects: his definition of moral reasoning; his theory of stages; his methods for diagnosing the stage or stages found in the reasoning of an individual; and empirical evidence for the existence of stages. The bridge between the overall definitions of the types and minor features of the types is provided in Kohlberg by an appendix, giving a summary of characteristics of the moral types, and another, giving “global rating guides”. The trend for replies based on legal aspects of ownership to become prominent in late adolescence is not much in doubt, but it is possible to put a rather different construction on this than Kohlberg does.
