ABSTRACT
Kohlberg has had many critics, and he did try to reconcile his theory with many of its criticisms. Over his lifetime he made gigantic changes in his approach (see, especially, Kohlberg, 1984; 1986a; Kohlberg, Boyd, & Levine, 1990). Notably, he reformulated the stage definitions and his method of scoring; shifted his approach to moral education from a focus on individual cognitive growth through dilemma discussion to the focus on the formation of “just communities”; and narrowed the parameters of his six-stage theory, from all of moral reasoning to “the rational reconstruction of the ontogenesis of justice thinking” (Kohlberg, 1984, p. 217). Critics complain of the complexity in his later theory as compared to the relative simplicity of the early theory (e.g., Shweder, Mahapatra, & Miller, 1987), but complexity is often the price of trying to respond to one’s critics.
