Carol Gilligan is an American feminist ethicist and psychologist whose In a Different Voice (1982) initiated the tradition of care ethics. Working initially within developmental psychology, Gilligan demonstrated that Lawrence Kohlberg’s influential stage model of moral development — which placed abstract justice reasoning at the apex of moral maturity — had been constructed from predominantly male subjects and treated relational moral reasoning as developmentally inferior.
Core ideas
- The “different voice”: a moral orientation centered on relationships, context, and responsibility to particular others, as distinct from the justice orientation centered on rights, principles, and impartiality.
- Critique of developmental psychology: moral maturity is not a linear progression toward abstract principle; relational reasoning is not a failure to reach the principled stage but a different mode of moral engagement.
- Two moral orientations: the “care voice” and the “justice voice” are distinct but not gender-essential — both men and women can reason in both modes, but the care voice had been systematically excluded from models of maturity.
Significance for this research
Gilligan’s work is the origin point for care ethics as a philosophical tradition. Her demonstration that abstract principle-based reasoning is not the neutral standard of moral maturity but a specific orientation with gendered assumptions connects to the broader critique of procedural liberalism developed throughout this research.
Notable works
- In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (1982)
- Mapping the Moral Domain: A Contribution of Women’s Thinking to Psychological Theory and Education (1988)
- Joining the Resistance (2011)
Related
- Care Ethics — the tradition she initiated
- Gilligan school — her school within care ethics
- Nel Noddings — who grounded Gilligan’s insights philosophically
- Joan Tronto — who extended them into political theory
- Lawrence Kohlberg — whose model she critiqued