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| Vol. 21, No. 17 |
| September 15, 1999 |
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Reflections
As an academic trained in ethics, I have followed with interest debates about the possible similarities and differences in the ways men and women characteristically reason about moral issues. My own focus, medical ethics, has emphasized certain central principles, including doing no harm (non-maleficence), doing good (beneficence), respect for persons, and justice. My mentor at the University of Virginia, James Childress, coauthored the all-time best-selling textbook in the field, Principles of Biomedical Ethics. In the book, he supports appealing to the above four principles as the most effective approach to resolving ethical dilemmas in clinical and research settings. The appeal to principles, of course, predates the development of bioethics as a self-conscious discipline. Ethical principles have played a crucial role in the history of philosophy and remain influential in most types of modern ethical theory. And principles function in everyday debates between persons who disagree with one another. Arguments in boardrooms or across breakfast tables often involve questions such as, "Why would you say that?" or "Why do you think that's the right thing to do?" In asking such questions, something akin to a principle (a general moral maxim) is being sought. In the last two decades of moral psychology, the research of Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan has been especially prominent. Kohlberg, in his book, Essays on Moral Development, assessed the ethical maturity of his subjects by considering their responses to various hypothetical moral dilemmas. The dilemmas themselves were often interesting in their own right, since judgments about what to do differed among respondents. But Kohlberg was less interested in specific conclusions than about the reasons subjects offered to support their judgments. In his research, done exclusively with males, Kohlberg distinguished six distinct stages of moral reasoning, arranged in a hierarchy. Lower stages, according to Kohlberg, are concerned primarily with concrete features of particular cases, while higher stages involve an appeal to universal notions like love and justice, often considered in the abstract. In 1982, Carol Gilligan, a professor of education at Harvard who had closely worked with Kohlberg in his own research on adolescent moral development, published In A Different Voice, a book which took strong exception to Kohlberg's conclusions. According to Gilligan, women tend to think and speak differently when they confront ethical dilemmas, primarily because of their different perspectives on the moral self. Gilligan focused her research on her subjects' responses to the question, "How would you describe yourself to yourself?" The responses of men to that question are generally individualistic, with an emphasis on personal accomplishments and a notion of being "self-made." In Gilligan's research, women usually defined themselves not as solitary, but according to their their roles in relationship to others. When considering Kohlberg's sort of hypothetical dilemmas, women tend to downplay abstract or universal principles, independent of context. Instead, they requested more information about the actual individuals involved and their personal histories. As a result, Gilligan's women subjects generally sought ways to negotiate - not as a matter of whose "rights" should prevail, but as an effort to satisfy the interests of all concerned. Gilligan's research has often been misconstrued. She is concerned not with hard-and-fast distinctions between male and female modes of moral reasoning, but with different tendencies at work in moral psychology. More often than not, Gilligan argues, women consider dilemmas in light of an "ethic of care, while men tend to consider dilemmas according to set prescriptions and formulas according to the logic of `justice.'" Given those tendencies, Gilligan challenged Kohlberg's conclusion that abstract appeals reflect greater moral maturity. In Gilligan's judgment, Kohlberg's assessment diminishes or downgrades the moral sensitivity of concrete care and concern, relegating it to inferior status. Indeed, Gilligan notes the irony in Kohlberg's research. It is, she says, "an unfair paradox that the very traits that have traditionally defined the `goodness' of women are those that mark them [according to male theorists] as deficient in moral development." In turn, Gilligan's own research has drawn criticism on several grounds. If interpreted simplistically, her distinction between an "ethic of justice" and an "ethic of care" may tend merely to reinforce cultural stereotypes about gender-based differences in moral reasoning. Moreover, an "ethic of care" may be too narrowly drawn, while an emphasis on justice may broaden the purview of moral concern. For example, what are one's responsibilities to those in need with whom one has no immediate relationship, such as Third Worlders who face famine or devastating illness? Perhaps the best thing to say about the debate between Kohlberg and Gilligan is that it continues to inspire research and debate, and that it calls into question our assumption that men and women know, more or less, what makes one another tick. The popular success of John Gray's books on the differences between "Venetians" and "Martians" would suggest that we don't. But the Kohlberg-Gilligan debate, couched in more scholarly terms, should reinforce the importance of both caring and justice to any adequate account of the moral life.
Andrew Lustig, Ph.D.
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