It is an interesting exercise to try to locate Hand’s approach on Kohlberg’s taxonomy, particularly in light of what I think is an irresolvable tension in Kohlberg’s approach. 

Kohlberg’s stages are entirely formal—higher levels of moral reasoning are identified not in terms of the actual beliefs or judgments endorsed but the principles by which agents defend their judgments. Accordingly, Kohlberg’s version of moral education focuses on improving the routes by which students arrive at whatever judgments they settle on, but it does not allow him to identify anything in particular that they should judge to be right or wrong. While it was clear that the politically minded and liberal Kohlberg had his own opinions about the right position on any number of controversial subjects, he could only hope that students would arrive at those conclusions themselves. Towards the end of his life this inability to identify, from within his theory, specific beliefs students should be taught directly was a growing concern for Kohlberg.  

Hand can be read to be attempting to avoid the excessive formalism of an approach by Kohlberg’s by taking a step back in the direction of a bag of virtues of approach—he is willing to identify a set of values that are worthy of being directly taught. He can do this by arguing that we can identify more than rationally better forms of moral thinking—we can also identify more rationally defensible moral conclusions. This appeal to reason is also how he can avoid the charges of relativism and indoctrination that Kohlberg once directed so forcefully against bag of virtue approaches to moral education. Here, however, the debates Kohlberg engaged tell a cautionary tale. 

Hand’s appeal to reason is familiar. Although Kohlberg characterized the bag of virtues approach as inherently relativistic, in fact advocates of the direct teaching of a specific set of values typically argue it should be limited to what is reasonable, and they all come to assume the competence to identify what is reasonable for the rest of us when disagreement stubbornly persists (see Hand’s comments on sexual morality). Kohlberg was acutely sensitive to the tendency of any one person’s rationally demonstrated moral truth to remain stubbornly controversial, and little seems to have changed here. Kohlberg’s retreat into formalism was born of the recognition that even the most apparently basic moral platitudes can become controversial in the right context. Add to that the effects of what his Harvard colleague Rawls came to call the ‘burdens of judgment’ and the idea that we can identify a thick set of uncontroversial—because rationally demonstrated—moral truths can look as quixotic as ever. This remains the  fundamental challenge: the more uncontroversial the content of moral education becomes the less there is to teach, and it is hard to see how students will be prepared to tackle genuinely difficult ethical topics. The trick as ever is to find something to teach that is truly not subject to reasonable disagreement, as opposed to not subject to reasonable doubt as far as the the philosopher in question can tell.