MORAL DEVELOPMENT

Gilligan's Theory for Moral Development in Women

Abstract

In this paper I try to explore the concept of “Moral Development in Women” from the context of Carol Gilligan. The main focus of the research is on “moral development in women” and its comparison with “moral development in men”. The research also analyzes many aspects of “morals and ethics that criticizes on the morals of women”. The result of Gilligan research was a landmark book of Gilligan, titled In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. Theories on moral development prior to Gilligan's research had conceptualized moral decision making primarily using an ethic of justice. Based on her research on female responses to moral dilemmas, Gilligan concluded that this was a more “masculine” approach, and that, in contrast, females tend to base their moral decision making more on a care of ethic. Gilligan conceives that both genders have differences in decision-making of moral. These differences are because of contrasting images of self.

Carol Gilligan: In a Different Voice

Introduction

Early in the 1970s, Carol Gilligan was working as an assistant professor at Harvard University and as a research assistant to Lawrence Kohlberg. It was then that she came to the realization that caused her to question previously held beliefs concerning standards of human moral behavior. In what stands as a fine example of the kind of research efforts Rosser describes like occurring in phase two of her stages of women's participation in science. Gilligan noticed that the majority of studies of psychological and moral development including those on which Lawrence Kohlberg based his six stages of moral development. His stages had only involved privileged white men. By analyzing subjects' responses to a sequence of hypothetical moral dilemmas, Kohlberg proposed a 6-stage model by which to measure ethical maturity (Gilligan, 2007).

Taking a controversial stance, Gilligan asserted that Kohlberg's moral development theory was one-sided. His theory was against women and commenced conducting research on female subjects to investigate female moral development. The result of this research was a landmark book of Gilligan, titled In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. Theories on moral development prior to Gilligan's research had conceptualized moral decision making primarily using an ethic of justice. Based on her research on female responses to moral dilemmas, Gilligan concluded that this was a more “masculine” approach, and that, in contrast, females tend to base their moral decision making more on a care of ethic. Gilligan conceives that both genders have differences in decision-making of moral. These differences are because of contrasting images of self (Gilligan, 2008).

Although it would be easy to cast Gilligan's theory in terms of a dichotomous “we versus them” approach to gender differences, Gilligan herself does not do so. She instead sees a justice's ethic and a care's ethic as two separate, but noncompeting modes of conceptualizing moral troubles (Gilligan, 2006).

One more frequently mode related with men while the other mode is more typical of women. Both genders are capable of using either ethical perspective, although they incline to ...