| Kasz216 said: So in otherwords... you didn't even bother reading the full Wikipedia article on Kohlbergs stages.... if you did... you would of noticed this. "Although Kohlberg insisted that stage six exists, he found it difficult to identify individuals who consistently operated at that level." Kohlberg never observed ANYBODY to be in stage 6 consistantly. Instead he only hypothisized that some of man's greatest civil rights leaders were stage 6. Jesus, Gahndi, Martin Luther King... Much like Maslow's hierarchy of needs... the "Top level" isn't a stage people reach permanently...but instead something someone may claw up to temporarily... outside extreme cases. This bit betrays your ignorance of Kohlbergs system. You aren't argueing Kohlbergs system. What you are argueing is your own moral development belief which you've superimposed over Kohlbergs for credibility... twisting and distorting the meaning of his different stages to fit your own world view. You see stage six as being much more vast... because you don't truley understand what his stage 6 means.
Also worth noting is that neither you nor Prof noticed another sentence in there... which I really didn't want to bring up... until Kohlberg's moral reasoning principles were understood... because like I've mentioned before. I think Kohlberg work sucks... and this really tends to ratchet up the debate 1000% fold for stupid reasons... but to hell with it. Lets go all in, shall we. "Kohlberg suggested that there may be a seventh stage—Transcendental Morality, or Morality of Cosmic Orientation—which linked religion with moral reasoning"
Stage 7 answering "What is moral" in the truist sense of the word... by becoming one with the "Nature of God." Kohlberg saw Moral reasoning and Relgious Reasoning as different things altogether... even had a different six point scale for religous reasoning... one had to reach the top of both, and then move beyond merging the two. Hence the ultimate folly of trying to use Kohlbergs stages for religion is that... Kohlberg has a totally different scale for it.
Perhaps the 7th level will finally exorcise your opinions from the misapropriated husk of Kohlberg's work... For Kohlberg... religion is needed for "Ultimate moral enlightenment..." and I really wanted to avoid people jumping in and trying to start the old stupid "Can atheists be moral" arguement based on a hypotehtical 7th stage that's beyond a hypothetical 6th stage. |
One can understand and then not entirely agree. I look at Kohlberg's stages, and I view the sixth stage as something that can be considered part of society's development - that is, people will reach the sixth stage more often as society matures. As for the "seventh stage", it sounds very much like an artificial way to try to enforce religion in what should be a secular topic of discussion. And if Kohlberg truly believed that there's a level of morality that can only be described as "cosmic-level", then I simply disagree with him. Kind of like how one can consider, say, Miyamoto to be the greatest game developer in the world, and still consider one of his games to be entirely bad. Nobody is perfect, and you take from the theory up until you consider it to not make sense.
And again, I wasn't applying the stages to religion, but to the religious. There's a difference. I do not comment on the morality of murder, but on the way that people arrive at that morality - and the bible establishes it as simple obedience, "god says do not murder". This doesn't mean that all religious people are stage 1, but that the bible operates as a stage 1 morality.
The very fact that you think that the 7th stage imples "atheists can't be moral", or opens up discussions on that topic, shows that YOU don't understand the stages. They're not about the morals themselves. That's made abundantly clear. They're about how one FORMS the morals. It's about the justification BEHIND the morals. One could be at stage 6 and consider murder to be morally acceptable.
