That moral rationality attaches to selves who have personalities is a notion so commonplace that it is likely to be contested only in certain quarters of academic psychology. Yet ever since Kohlberg's landmark articulation of the “cognitive developmental approach to socialization” (Kohlberg, 1969), there was a way of talking about moral development that scarcely required reference to personality. One could describe the ontogenesis of moral reasoning without invoking the usual indicators of personality, such as traits, dispositions, or character. If anything, personological considerations were regarded as sources of bias, backsliding, and special pleading that had to be surmounted in order to render judgments from the “moral point of view.” Moreover, for Kohlberg, the moral stage sequence could not be used to describe persons or to chart individual differences, and he was opposed to the use of the stage theory as a way to make “aretaic judgments” about the moral worthiness of individuals. Moral stages were not, after all, “boxes for classifying and evaluating persons” (Colby, Kohlberg, Gibbs, & Lieberman, 1983, p. 11). Instead moral stages serve as a taxonomic classification of different kinds of sociomoral operations. They describe forms of thought organization of an ideal rational moral agent – an epistemic subject – and hence cannot be “reflections upon the self ” (Kohlberg, Levine, & Hewer, 1983, p. 36).