“In a study published in the Merrill Palmer Quarterly in 1988 (“Two Moral Orientations: Gender Differences and Similarities”), Jane Attanucci and I looked at the relationship between moral orientation and gender. Analyzing the responses of medical students to Kohlberg’s hypothetical moral dilemmas, we found that the men divided 50/50 between those who oriented to justice only and those who introduced considerations of both justice and care into solving moral problems. With the women, a third considered justice only, a third spoke about both justice and care, and a third oriented to care only. Care is not essentially or exclusively a woman’s concern, although, at least in this sample of medical students, concerns about care and caring were articulated more often by women, and only women responded to moral problems by speaking solely about care.”
Thus, it seems that women are more oriented to Gilligan’s ethics of care—but the male medical students were not always inclined toward Kohlberg’s way of thinking. Do male medical students differ from most other men or is the matter of gender differences a bit fuzzier than Gilligan (or at least many of her feminist followers) concluded?
In her continuing work, Carol Gilligan comes to a new perspective regarding difference among both women and men regarding moral reasoning and the acquisition of knowledge. She points not to gender differences but instead to the role played by power in the way people think and act. It is a dominant patriarchal view of the world that saturates the way people in our society come to their views about ethical actions and reality (Gilligan and Snider, 2018). Carol Gilligan (2023, p. 9) turns to Manon Garcia who proposes that women are not born submissive; rather, it is patriarchy that shapes women’s lives.
Gilligan acknowledges that even her own distinction between male and female reasoning is strongly influenced by the patriarchal viewpoint. At the end of her remarkably telling book on the Human voice (rather than the “Different” voice), Carol Gilligan (2023, p. 109) offers the following powerful statement regarding the way we think and act in the world:
“I find myself asking what stands in the way of our seeing what is right in front of our eyes and listening to voices that are in our midst? What investment do we have in not hearing girls’ voices as courageous, or recognizing girls’ resistance as a healthy resistance, or not seeing the emotional intimacy of boys’ friendships or recognizing boys’ tenderness and emotional intelligence? I find these questions painful, in part because I know the costs of not seeing and not listening, the price of carelessness and indifference. I know that morality and gender scripts can blind us to the obvious. And keep us from hearing what is surprisingly accessible.”
