ABSTRACT
Children's epistemic and moral lives, although seen to be manifestly different in content, were nevertheless generally understood to be only phenotypically different expressions of one and the same underlying thing. Piaget is particularly noted for his claims that the same underlying form of equilibrium and formal structures were central to both children's intellectual and moral reasoning development. Young people's maturing conceptions of such conventional matters are argued to follow a different developmental trajectory from that characteristic of morality and to be subject to contextual and cultural variations not evident in the strictly moral domain. Important, for our argument, functional accounts, with their antecedent-consequence structure, do not exhaust the ways that distinctive forms of moral and secular reasoning might relate. If one were to accept Kohlberg's more functionalistic reading of Piaget, it follows that the question of how children's intellectual or conceptual development relates to moral reasoning is to be answered in straightforward causal terms.,.
