ABSTRACT
Puppet shadow shows frequently tell a story of characters facing choices of dilemmatic moral problems. Dilemmatic moral problems in Lakon Kresna Duta are related to the power conflict between two families of the Pandawas and the Kurawas which started the great war of Baratayuda. This research analyses the moral consciousness stages in the character of Kresna Duta, through the moral development theory of Lawrence Kohlberg (1927–1987) in the context of Habermas Discourse Ethics (b.1929). The first aim of this article is to identify the moral consciousness stages according to Lawrence Kohlberg, as shown by the characters of the lakon (play) when facing dilemmatic moral problems. The second aim of this article is to analyse the dilemmatic moral problems using the issue scoring, a scoring system used by Kohlberg to identify the way of thinking, which is of formal and structural moral consideration. Thirdly, this research analyses discourse ethics as the procedure to overcome justice issues in the Kresna Duta’s lakon. The result shows that in Lakon Kresna Duta, the characters have high moral consciousness, a post-conventional one, based on the fifth and sixth stages of the moral consciousness theory, and that ethical discourse can be applied as a way of solving dilemmatic moral problems.
