kids can absolutely reason morally, they just don’t have all the scaffolding to support doing so well or coming to reasonable conclusions. kids even reason about the nature of the terms themselves (especially around christmas: “why do i have to be good? what does being good mean?”).
but the same five year old who is picking the 10 dogs over the 1 human is also grabbing their toy from their little sister and bopping her on the head with it and making her cry, so i am not trying to defend some notion of a developed sense of toddler morality.
