[citation][nom]Silmarunya[/nom]At what stage in Kohlberg's theory am I stuck? Clearly none of us is in the sixth and highest, as it doesn't exist (it assumes there must be a universal ethical reasoning, which there clearly isn't - ethics are a cultural concept). Even the lower stages are questionable at best.[/citation]
I would suggest reading it in its entirety and judging for yourself. I don't mean to be insulting in any way but Kohlberg showed that most of the time, you cannot understand a stage above your own, until you get there. There is no particular requirement for getting there, it's like having an epiphany; plus, each stage is much more in depth than a sentence that summarizes it. Each stage leads to the next, eventually. Some people might never progress, very few digress, and in the end I always think of it like a level of maturity. I've read all of your posts through these six pages, but that doesn't tell me which stage you are, because the criteria aren't based on characteristics we can describe with any few words. I do agree with you most of the time though.
As an example, Martin Luther King Jr. was a stage 6, because not only did he see that what was going on was ethically wrong, he knew why, he knew how it should be, AND he did something about it, because there was no better moral thing he could give his life for than fixing that injustice. He didn't see it as a choice. However, he abhorred violence and those who committed it in the name of his cause, for the same reasons he took up the cause. Malcom X would be more like a stage 4, or stage 3, picking up the cause without truly understanding it, and then campaigning for it in the wrong way.
Jesus of Nazareth/Buddha/Muhammed...etc was a stage 6 too, most likely, because the moral values he tried to communicate to his followers were truly revolutionary in civilizing the peoples of the region. That does not mean that his followers are in most cases as morally developed, and in fact someone who is a religious fanatic is most likely a stage 3 on Kohlberg's scale.
If you read that and think I'm crazy, then that's just proving the validity of the scale to those who do know what I mean...
Once again, I don't want to insult anyone, but what I was saying is that the entirety of the entire debate going on in this thread boils down to how Kohlberg's Stages are represented in various demographics. Similarly, when people support one party or the other, it's mostly because the some core values resonated, or not, and after that the details are just a result of petty fighting by the stage 3 and 4's over how to implement the moral ideology of some stage 5 or 6, while they lack -complete- understanding of the concepts over which they argue. This is quite the conundrum, which boils down further into Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's concept of society's cyclical nature on it's path to something called Absolute Freedom, the whole of which Marx and Engels misinterpreted (again, a lower stage of moral development missing the point) into what they called communism, in it's pure form, which was further botched by European radicals of the early 20th century (think Bulshevic) into what we see and fear as the "evil" communism and socialism oft misunderstood and deservedly feared today.
My interpretation comes from several philosophy books, plus my own interpretal nuances, plus studies in US History, European History, Humanities, Psychology, and especially Philosophy throughout college, just in case anybody feels like calling me out on facts. (I will happily rescind a statement if someone can show me evidence is wrong)
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