Moral Education and the Perils of Developmentalism

Many conceptions of moral formation--not least some influential modern accounts--are developmental in character: they aspire to trace progress to moral maturity through or across some sequence or other of more or less well defined stages of cognitive, conative and/or affective growth. In so far as accounts of this kind are often less than mutually consistent, however, the logical status and/or evidential basis of such developmental theories remains less than clear. This article argues that such accounts are inherently normative--precisely, more evaluative than descriptive--and proceeds to explore some of the more problematic moral educational implications of this claim.