Carol Gilligan (born 1936 in New York) is an American psychologist and feminist, a professor at New York University (and earlier at Harvard). She is chiefly responsible for the formulation of the ethics of care, one of the most discussed contributions to contemporary moral philosophy, poised on the border between developmental psychology and ethics.
Her starting point was a methodological critique. Working alongside the psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, whose stages of moral development placed reasoning by abstract, universal principles at the top of the scale, Gilligan observed that these stages had been built from male samples and that, within them, women tended to “score” lower. Rather than conclude that there was a female deficiency, she reversed the question: what if there were here another moral voice, equally legitimate, that Kohlberg’s scale could not hear?
In In a Different Voice (1982), Gilligan set against an “ethics of justice” — centered on rules, rights, and impartiality — an “ethics of care,” attentive to concrete relationships, responsibility, and context. The thesis fed a vast field of research, but also strong objections: critics questioned her data and the generalization; others accused her of essentialism, for risking the naturalization of gender stereotypes. Gilligan herself later clarified that the “different voice” is thematized by gender but not biologically determined by it.
Key Concepts
- Ethics of care: a moral perspective that starts from relationship, responsibility, and the response to the concrete needs of the other, rather than from abstract principles alone.
- Ethics of justice vs. ethics of care: two moral orientations — the first thinks in terms of rules and equal rights; the second, in terms of bonds and context. For Gilligan, they are complementary, not mutually exclusive.
- Critique of Kohlberg: the stages of moral development, held to be universal, reflected a male sample and a bias in favor of “justice.”
- The “different voice”: not a feminine essence, but a mode of moral deliberation historically associated with women’s experience.
Influenced by
- Lawrence Kohlberg — by critical contrast
- Jean Piaget — developmental psychology
- Nancy Chodorow and psychoanalysis — the formation of the relational self
- Simone de Beauvoir — the critique of the feminine position
Influenced
- The ethics of care as a field (Nel Noddings, Virginia Held, Joan Tronto)
- Moral philosophy, the ethics of care work, and bioethics
- Moral psychology and education
Works
In a Different Voice (1982); Mapping the Moral Domain (1988); The Birth of Pleasure (2002); Joining the Resistance (2011).
See also
Simone de Beauvoir, Martha Nussbaum, Kant