To investigate how behavioral disordered (BD) children conceptualize moral, conventional, and personal issues, 20 BD and 22 normal fourth graders were asked to respond to a set of cartoon strips in which actions were depicted that violated either an explicitly stated rule or generally held cultural expectation. Ss were asked to rank the acts from "most wrong" to "least wrong/not wrong," and to supply reasons for the ranking. Ss were then asked to indicate actions depicted that they considered wrong regardless of a governing rule, and finally which of the actions should be considered the person's own business. Results indicated that BD Ss discriminate among actions in the moral, conventional, and personal domains. As expected, BD and normal Ss were more likely to identify moral than conventional or personal acts as wrong in the absence of governing rules. BD Ss judged the seriousness of moral transgressions essentially as normals. Other findings included that BD Ss were less likely than normals to identify personal actions as matters of perogative and gave different reasons for event classifications. (CL)