ABSTRACT
Research on moral development attempts to respond to the following question: how is it that people grow morally, and what infl uences the development of a moral life? Moral development research makes some important assumptions that are seldom addressed in the literature but which are nonetheless central to it:
All human beings have the capacity for moral thinking. • Moral thinking is linked to experience. While philosophers have contributed enormously • to a thoroughgoing analysis of the implications of choice within experience, no legitimate ethical theory divorces human action, and hence experience, from moral thinking, learning and growth. Moral thinking can be both general and particular. There are general moral questions-is • it right to lie or to kill-to which all human beings have a response. But, there are particular elaborations of moral questions-is it ever appropriate for a journalist to deceive a source who is attempting to deceive the journalist-to which professionals must respond within a particular context.
