Moral development: a reply to Richmond and Cummings

My paper on moral development has been criticized on three main counts: firstly, that I have confused romantic and progressive ideology; secondly, that I have failed to appreciate the teleological character of (cognitive) developmental theory; thirdly, that I have failed to show that normativity of developmental theory goes, as it were, ‘all the way down’. In this reply, I maintain that the first two charges are based on distortion and misrepresentation of my argument, and—in relation to the third charge—that my critics have simply failed to offer any discernible counter‐argument to my case that it is misguided to seek empirical theoretical grounding for developmental theories of the kind in question.