 However, in almost all of the studies cited in the previous paragraph, the intuitively moral transgressions used were the sorts of behavior that would be familiar to children. Kelly et al. (2007) dub them “schoolyard” transgressions. This was also the case in Blair’s (1995) study in which the experimental participants included incarcerated psychopathic murderers! In a pair of more recent studies Kelly et al. (2007) and Fessler, Barrett, et al. (2015) used a range of more “grown-up” intuitively moral transgressions including whipping, slavery, stealing, wife beating and rape. Both studies found fairly dramatic departures from the pattern of criterion judgments that the natural kind defense requires.  [11]  Stich (2019) argues that these studies pose a major challenge to the natural kind defense of the claim that Turiel’s “moral” pattern of criterion judgments can be used to identify genuine moral judgments. But both the methods and the analyses used in the Kelly et al. and the Fessler et al. studies have been challenged, and these critiques have led to lively  debates.[12]  So perhaps the best conclusion to be drawn at this writing is that the success of the natural kind defense is very much an open question.