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Carol Gilligan (a professor of education at Harvard) began examining the psychology of moral development as a graduate student. She worked as a research assistant for Laurence Kohlberg, who had produced a "scale" of moral development characterized by three levels (each level having two stages):

1. In the preconventional level, (stages one and two) one operates first out of fear of punishment, then in terms of satisfying one's own needs. This stage largely applies to children.

2. In the conventional level (stages three and four) one no longer looks to one's own needs or fears, but adopts the rules and conventions of the majority -- moral acts are those that preserve social norms, "doing one's duty", etc. The primary moral goal is to please others, whether they be friends or a larger social group.

3. In the post-conventional level (stages five and six) the standards one now abides by are no longer those of the community, but ones that the agent believes apply to all persons -- universal principles.

Differences Between Men’s Voices and Women’s Voices. When Gilligan began doing her research with female subjects, she noticed that their responses didn’t seem to fit neatly into Kohlberg’s framework. It’s not that the responses couldn’t be squeezed into that framework, but rather that something essential and distinctive was lost in the process and other things were misinterpreted or misvalued. Gilligan’s study showed, first of all, that women tended much more often than the men of Kohlberg’s studies to see the moral life in terms of care rather than justice, in terms of responsibility rather than rights. Whereas men see things as moral issues when they involve competing claims about rights, women see problems as moral when they involve the suffering of other people. Whereas men see the primary moral imperative as centering around treating everyone fairly, women see that moral imperative as centering around caring about others and about themselves. Men typically make moral decisions by applying rules fairly and impartially, whereas women are more likely to seek resolutions that preserve emotional connectedness for everyone. Similarly, men tend to look back and to judge whether a moral decision was correct or not by asking whether the rules were properly applied, whereas women tend to ask whether relationships were preserved and whether people were hurt. The quality of the relationships, rather than the impartiality of the decisions, is the standard for evaluating decisions for women. The meaning of responsibility also changes. For men, being responsible is primarily a matter of being answerable for actions, for having followed (or failed to follow) the relevant rules. For women, the focus of responsibility is in taking care of the other person, including (and sometimes especially emphasizing) their feelings. Moreover, it is directed toward what the other person actually feels and suffers, not what "anyone" (i.e., an abstract moral agent) would experience. Responsibility is directed toward real individuals, not to abstract codes of conduct.

These differences tend to reflect deeper differences between men and women, differences in the ways in which they conceive of the self. Men are much more likely to see the self in terms of autonomy, freedom, independence, separateness, and hierarchy. Rules guide the interactions among people, and roles establish each individual’s place in the hierarchy. In contrast, women tend to see the self in terms of relatedness, interdependence, emotional connectedness, and responsiveness to the needs of others. Instead of depending on rules as men do, women are much more likely to show an immediate response to the plight of the other person. They experience themselves, first and foremost, as connected; the self is its network of relationships.

These differences also affect what men and women will tend to experience as comfortable or threatening. Typically, men will think of the top of a social or professional hierarchy as appealing, as attractive to their sense of autonomy, as compatible with their sense of separateness. Women are more likely to experience it as isolated and detached, as threatening to their sense of connectedness. Conversely, men are more likely to feel at risk in situations which threaten their sense of autonomy and separateness—especially in situations of dependency and intimacy. Women are more likely to feel at risk in situations which threaten their sense of responsiveness and connectedness—and these are typically situations of independence and hierarchy.

The Stages of Women’s Moral Development. Gilligan sees women as developing through stages of moral growth, just as men do, but the stages are different in important respects. She divides her schema into three levels, just as Kohlberg did. However, instead of having two stages under each level, Gilligan has three full stages and a transitional period between each stage. Thus there are three full stages and two transitional stages.

Moral development for females begins, according to Gilligan, with the concern for individual survival as paramount. This is the First Level of moral development, corresponding to Kohlberg’s pre-conventional level. It is followed by the transition from selfishness to responsibility, in which women start to become aware of morality as requiring that they be responsible for the well-being of others. Level Two, which corresponds to Kohlberg’s level of conventional morality, is one in which goodness comes to be equated with self-sacrifice. Many of us have probably had mothers or grandmothers who saw their lives in precisely these terms: to be a good person was to take care of other people (husband, children, family) at the expense of themselves. For them, it wasn’t a struggle to motivate themselves to take care of other people—the struggle came when they tried to give themselves permission to take care of themselves. It is precisely this struggle to include the self that constitutes the second transitional phase. It is often a difficult struggle, for initially it feels more like moral regression than moral progress, since morality is equated with self-sacrifice. Gradually, however, this experience gives way to a third level, one in which moral goodness is seen as caring for both self and others. This highest level is one which takes inclusiveness and nonviolence as ideals, and which condemns exploitation and hurt.

The Voice of Care. A clear theme emerges throughout these stages: women’s moral voices are voices of care. Whether it be a narrowly-defined care for one’s own survival, an altruistic care for other people, or an inclusive care for both self and others, morality is primarily about caring. It is not about rules, universalizability, the impartial computation of consequences, or anything like that. It is about a direct relationship of emotional responsiveness to the suffering of persons, both self and other.

Gilligan’s Traditionalism. One of the striking things about Gilligan’s work, especially in light of its strong impact on feminist thinking, is the traditional, almost stereotypical picture of women that it seems to promote. Women emerge as more concerned about relationships, emotional connectedness, and care-giving than men, who seem more independent, rule-oriented, and emotionally detached. Gilligan herself states that her findings are only generalizations and that it is certainly possible that some individuals do not fit into the pattern she associates with their biological sex. It seems that the danger here is that this moral theory may perpetuate traditional sex-based stereotypes. Yet I think there is a way of retaining many of Gilligan’s insights about masculinity and femininity without necessarily tying those as closely to males and females as she does. Let’s look at the issues raised by this gender-based morality.

A deep ambiguity runs through Gilligan’s work. Clearly, her work is descriptive. It articulates women’s moral voices and the differences between their voices and men’s without necessarily making any values judgments about which are better. However, at times her work also seems to have normative implications, suggesting that one voice may be as good as, perhaps even better than, another. Some of Gilligan’s statements suggest that she thinks both men’s voices and women’s voices are of equal value in morality; other statements suggest that she may see women’s voices as superior. In this context, we can set aside the question of what Gilligan herself says about this question and look at the various possible positions on this issue and consider them on their own merits.

The Separate but Equal Thesis. Assuming that, in general, men and women have different moral voices, one of the ways in which we could deal with the differences is to keep the two separate but equal. Men and women have different moral voices. Men’s voices are right for men, women’s voices for women. Neither is superior to the other; they are just different.

The problem with this thesis is four-fold. First, it is very difficult to retain the "but equal" part of such a position. Once the two voices have been separated, it is all too easy to dismiss the second voice as less important. Second, such a position tends to perpetuate gender-based stereotyping, since only males are given male voices and only females are given female voices. Third, it suggests that men and women have nothing to learn from one another, since each sex has its own moral voice. Fourth, males who have a "female voice" and females who have a "male voice" are looked down upon. The separate but equal approach is, as it were, a form of sex-based isolationism.

The Superiority Thesis. The second possible position is to maintain that one of these two voices is superior to the other. Historically, this has been the dominant position, most often with men maintaining (usually implicitly, occasionally explicitly) that men’s voices are superior to women’s voices in morality. In recent times, the roles have sometimes been reversed, with women claiming the superiority of women’s voices.

There are two problems with this position. First, to say that one voice is completely true for everyone in all situations is interesting but obviously false. To say that one voice is partially true for some people in some situations is accurate, but it is so vague as to be unhelpful without further elaboration of the particular conditions under which one voice takes precedence over the other. Such additional elaboration then yields a position that is significantly different from the original thesis.

The second problem with this position is that it is exclusionary. It excludes whichever position is seen as not true—and that usually means that we cannot learn from that other, excluded voice. If, on the other hand, we admit that we can learn from the other voice, then we find ourselves defending a version of one of the next two positions.

The Integrationist Thesis. The integrationist maintains that there is ultimately only one moral voice, a voice which may be the integration of many different voices. The integrationist need not claim to know precisely what this voice is, but must be committed to the claim that ultimately there is only one voice.

The principal difficulty with the integrationist thesis is that it is susceptible to losing the richness that comes from diversity. The integrationist position tends to be assimilationist, blurring the distinctive identities of the sources of its components. It celebrates a moral androgyny as a replacement for the sex-based voices.

The Diversity Thesis. The final thesis claims that we have diverse moral voices and that this diversity is a principal source of richness and growth in the moral life. We can learn from one another’s differences as well as from similarities. The diversity thesis in the area of gender most closely embodies the pluralistic approach characteristic of this book.

The diversity thesis has two complementary sides. First, there is the external diversity thesis which suggests that different individuals have different (gender-based) moral voices, and that here is a fruitful difference from which we can learn. Men can learn from women, just as women can learn from men. What makes this an external diversity thesis is that it sees diversity as something that exists among separate individuals.

The internal diversity thesis sees diversity as also existing within each individual. Each of us, in other words, has both masculine and feminine moral voices within us, and this diversity of internal voices is considered a positive thing. One of the attractions of this position is that it minimizes gender stereotyping, for it denies that men have an exclusive claim to masculinity or that only women can have a feminine dimension. Men can have both masculine and feminine dimensions to their moral voices, just as women can have both.

Nor is it necessary to think an increase in one type of voice necessarily leads to a decrease in another. Sandra Bem has suggested that masculine and feminine traits in general may be mapped along two different axes, such that an individual may be high in both (androgynous), low in both (undifferentiated), high in femininity but low in masculinity (traditional feminine), or high in masculinity but low in femininity (traditional masculine). This leads to the following schema.

Excerpt taken from Chapter Ten of Ethics: A Pluralistic Approach to Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace 1997).