Olalla’s observations would seem to apply to the basic relationship that Carol Gilligan has with her mentor, Lawrence Kohlberg. What Olalla has to say justifies Gilligan’s continuing relationship with and support for Kohlberg—for they are in a dance together. This dance results in the opportunity for Carol Gilligan to move beyond Kohlberg’s model of moral development and create her own revolutionary model. Their relationship was sustained midst profound differences.
Ethic of Care
Perhaps of greatest immediate importance regarding the divergence of Carol Gilligan from Lawrence Kohlberg (and the establishment of an epistemological revolution) is Gilligan’s portrait of mature adult development as an embrace of care as a fundamental virtue in life. It is necessary, according to Gilligan (1982, p.98), to recognize “the importance throughout life of the connection between the universality of the need for compassion and care. The concept of the separate self and of moral principles uncompromised by the constraints of reality is an adolescent ideal . . .”
Gilligan (1982, p. 149) expands the notion of care in both space and time. As a result:
“. . . the notion of care expands from the paralyzing injunction not to hurt others to an injunction to act responsively toward self and others and thus to sustain connection. A consciousness of the dynamics of human relationship then becomes central to moral understanding, joining the heart and the eye in an ethic that ties the activity of thought to the activity of care.”
Thus, the ethic or (more broadly conceived) virtue of deep caring becomes a thoughtful, sustained initiative (Bergquist and Quehl, 2019). This deep caring extends time and space, offering a bridge of creation and caring tying together multiple generations within the context of a generative society: “The virtue of care ties together different generations, promotes exchange between generations, and passes on values from generation to generation. Thus, generativity includes both creating and caring.” (Imada, 2004, p. 91) Most importantly, It is an ethic that is viewed as important In many cultures—existing alongside an emphasis on context-dependent knowledge.
This is another important point to be made about contextual knowledge and an ethic of care. Dynamic relationship-based knowledge is most likely to be of benefit to those in the relationship if it is being generated on behalf of a shared ethics of care. Collectively, a community that is aligned with this ethic of care holds great promise in addressing the multi-tiered epistemological challenges associated with VUCA-Plus conditions (vulnerability, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, turbulence, and contradiction). (Bergquist, 2023a; Bergquist, 2023b) Unfortunately, this is an ethic that is often strained in a society that emphasizes individualism and individual rights—such as that found in the United States.
In reflecting on the American culture in Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah and his colleagues (1985) speak of the personal emptiness that lies at the end of the successful quest for total autonomy and individual rights. Carol Gilligan similarly describes the inadequacies of individual rights when they are not integrated with collective responsibility. In studying the development of a personal sense of morality, Gilligan (1982) proposes that American society has tended to emphasize individual rights at the expense of collective responsibilities for the past two centuries.
