The Current Formulation of Kohlberg’s Theory and a Response to Critics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article is a synopsis of the monograph Moral Stages: A Current Formulation and a Response to Critics. Recent changes in the theory of moral stages are presented, including a broadening of theoretical and research concerns, differentiation of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ stages, clarification of the form-content distinction, revision of A and B substages, clarification of Stages 6 and 7, discussion of moral action, listing of nine metaethical assumptions made prior to research, etc. In response to critics of the theory, it is pointed out that the primary concern is with justice reasoning per se, and it is argued that there is no sexual, cross-cultural, or ideological bias to the theory in any strong sense of the term. Directions for future research include clarifying the conceptions of stage structure and transformation, the relationship between judgment and action, and the psychological and normative-ethical status of Stage 6.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.060 | 0.086 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.042 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.023 |
| Open science | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.018 | 0.028 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".