ABSTRACT
Kohlberg's conception of the moralization of judgment has been hedged about almost from the beginning by the larger issue of maturation of personality generally. So much has been made of the moralization of judgment that it cannot be merely the trace of another concept, like, say, the child's conception of diagonality; it must have greater generality than that to justify the work done and the attention attracted. On the other side, only weak claims have been made for direct translation of moral judgment stage into any other realm. The strongest correlations of the measures of moral judgment are with intelligence, socioeconomic status, education, and age (Colby et al., 1983), all equivocal in import. Those are the classic confounding variables in personality measurement. The burden of proving that a test is measuring a substantial component of personality becomes heavier rather than lighter in the face of such correlations.
