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A thought-provoking examination of how explanations of social and moral development inform our understandings of morality and culture. A common theme in the latter part of the twentieth century has been to lament the moral state of American society and the decline of morality among youth. A sharp turn toward an extreme form of individualism and a lack of concern for community involvement and civic participation are often blamed for the moral crisis. Turiel challenges these views, drawing on a large body of research from developmental psychology, anthropology, sociology as well as social events, political movements, and journalistic accounts of social and political struggles. Turiel shows that generation after generation has lamented the decline of society and blamed young people. Using historical accounts, he persuasively argues that such characterizations of moral decline entail stereotyping, nostalgia for times past, and a failure to recognize the moral viewpoint of those who challenge traditions

A history of research on the development of morality yields valuable lessons. In 1932 Piaget examined children's moral judgments, proposing that actions feedback on judgments, which in turn feedback on actions. He analyzed children's entry into the moral realm through a sense of obligation. Subsequently, Kohlberg (1971) proposed a sequence entailing differentiations of justice from non-moral considerations, emphasizing epistemology, and how one level of development is more adequate than prior levels. The Piaget and Kohlberg differentiation models of development have not held up to subsequent evidence (Turiel, 1983a); young children distinguish morality from social conventions as well as from the domain of personal jurisdiction. History points to issues requiring further analyses. These include expositions of: children's entry into the moral domain; developmental transformations and the bases for greater adequacy; interrelations between judgments and actions; and connections between judgments and emotions, including study of on-going, background dispositions labeled sentiments.

Lawrence Kohlberg first published details of his research on the development of moral judgments in <i>Vita Humana</i> (later titled <i>Human Development</i>). Along with a series of other articles and essays, he greatly influenced research on moral development. He was instrumental in moving the field out of the narrow confines of analyses of psychological mechanisms to inclusion of substantive philosophical definitions of the domain. He persuaded many researchers to take morality seriously as a realm pertaining to people's thinking about how they ought to relate to each other and how social systems should be organized. Although several aspects of Kohlberg's theoretical formulations are now not widely accepted, most researchers (though not all) are concerned with combining epistemological considerations with psychological analyses and view children as possessing moral capacities not solely imposed by adults. One of these theoretical perspectives, discussed in this essay, is based on distinctions among social domains. Problems in current research, especially on morality and neuroscience, that fails to attend to epistemological considerations are discussed.