The draft for the item, “moral development”, which was edited and appeared in Kenneth D. Keith (Ed.) The Encyclopedia of Cross-Cultural Psychology. New York: Wiley (published in 2013, pp. 891-897). Moral Development Takashi Naito Ochanomizu University, Japan Although moral development has been studied from a variety of psychological perspectives, including learning theory, psychoanalysis, and others, current studies of moral development have been strongly influenced by the cognitive developmental approach of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg. Kohlberg identified several fundamental philosophical issues underlying studies of moral development, such as the question of a culturally fair definition of the construct. Psychologists studying morality or moral development must deal with the problem of moral relativism or value neutrality, which stems from the value-laden words “moral” and “development.” Moral relativism is the position that moral values differ among cultures and peoples and are therefore not universal. Conceptually, we must distinguish ethical moral relativism from descriptive moral relativism, because the relevant reasoning and evidence differ. Ethical relativism insists that basic values held in different cultures are equally right. Descriptive relativism simply holds that, factually, moral values held by people vary with culture. Ethical relativism may have value in guiding cross-cultural research in culturally fair ways. For Western psychologists, it might have the principal effect of restraining easy applications of their own conceptions to other cultures—important because Western psychologists have had more opportunities to apply the theories of their own cultures to other non-Western cultures. For non-Western psychologists, the doctrine of cultural relativism may have the effect of raising the status of their culture-bound conceptions or values. However, the doctrine of relativism has the pitfall of leading people to the position that any psychological phenomenon in a culture should be understood and evaluated only by its own cultural standards. Considering the increased