ABSTRACT
Lawrence Kohlberg's theorizing and research clearly has been central to the work on moral judgment. In most of the research based on Kohlberg's stages of moral judgment, reasoning related to altruistic values is not salient. This is due to the nature of Kohlberg's moral dilemmas. Altruistic considerations are not central in Kohlberg's standard moral dilemmas. Moreover, even when prosocial issues have been embedded in Kohlberg's dilemmas, two duties, values, or norms are presented as being in direct conflict. To assess children's moral judgments about distributive and retributive justice, Piaget presented children with stories and questions related to the stories. The basic developmental concept underlying sociomoral perspective, from the individual formulates moral judgments. Similarly, Kurdek found that high-school and college students' prosocial moral judgment was more advanced than their reasoning concerning Kohlberg dilemmas. Thus, the bodies of research on moral judgment and self-attributions are consistent in indicating that children's reasons for performing prosocial acts change systematically with development.
