ABSTRACT
The debates surrounding Kohlberg's approach revolve around essentially four problems. First, in view of the failure to prove experimentally the existence of Stage 6 of moral judgment, the question arises whether readers can speak of natural stages at the level of postconventional morality. Second, the discovery that regression occurs in postadolescent life casts doubt upon the normative point of reference of moral development. Third, the question of accommodating relativists or value skeptics as a group in Kohlberg's stage model remains problematic. Fourth, there is the question of whether his structuralist theory can be joined with ego psychology in ways that would give greater scope to the psycho-dynamic aspects of judging. Lawrence Kohlberg claims his critics got the facts wrong, that there are no disproportionate numbers of female subjects at lower stages. He also denies the existence of regression to earlier stages. This controversy has drawn attention to problems which, in philosophical parlance, pertain to the relation of morality to Sittlichkeit.
