ABSTRACT
Research in moral education has been dominated for two decades by the work of Lawrence Kohlberg. A crucial feature of Kohlberg's conception of moral education is his view that we ought to help students to move through natural stages of development; and his attempts to foster moral development in the schools are attempts to facilitate the attainment, by students, of the highest stage of moral development it is possible for the students to reach." Such intervention in schools is justified, according to Kohlberg, by his claim that higher stages of development are more adequate, morally, than lower stages. That is, for any given Stage S, Kohlberg claims that S is more adequate morally than the prior Stage 5-1. Kohlberg claims that his empirical research helps to substantiate the claim to moral adequacy of higher stages of development; this is why he has devoted so much attention to the question of whether or not he has committed the naturalistic fallacy in his argument for the moral adequacy of higher stages.:'
It seems clear that intervention in the schools in order to promote moral development through the stages can be justified only if Kohlberg is correct that higher stages are more adequate morally than lower stages." Thus the claim to moral adequacy of higher stages plays a crucial role in Kohlberg's conception of moral education, both theoretically and in terms of practice-that is, in terms of intervention in the schools. However, as has been recently pointed out, the argument that Kohlberg puts forth in defence of the claim to moral adequacy of higher stages has never been subjected to serious scrutiny. 5 In this paper I will examine that argument. In particular, I will be concerned to investigate the way in which Kohlberg uses his psychological research findings to support the claim to moral adequacy. I will argue that the claim to moral adequacy of higher stages is not supported by Kohlberg's empirical findings, and consequently that Kohlbergian interventions in the schools to promote development through the stages are unjustified." More generally, I will argue that judgments of moral adequacy must
Using themselves be justified by appeal to considerations of a moral philosophical sort, and cannot be justified on the basis of empirical psychological research findings. Since no judgments of moral adequacy can be justified on the basis of empirical research, it follows a fortiori that Kohlberg's claim to moral adequacy of higher stages cannot itself be so justified. And since Kohlbergian educational interventions are themselves dependent for their justification on the claim to moral adequacy of higher stages, the failure of Kohlberg's argument to justify the latter constitutes a failure to justify the former as well.
