Carol Gilligan’s work initiated care ethics by identifying a moral orientation that existing developmental psychology had systematically excluded. In In a Different Voice (1982), Gilligan demonstrated that Lawrence Kohlberg’s influential stage model of moral development — which treated principled justice reasoning as the highest form of moral maturity — had been constructed almost entirely from male subjects and reflected a specifically masculinized understanding of morality.
Gilligan documented an alternative orientation in her research subjects (initially women, though she later argued it was not gender-exclusive): a “care voice” that approached moral dilemmas not by asking “what is the just principle?” but by asking “how do I maintain relationships and respond to the needs of the people involved?” This voice reasoned through context, connection, and responsibility rather than through abstraction, impartiality, and rights. Kohlberg’s framework scored it as morally immature — as failing to reach the principled reasoning of the higher stages.
Gilligan’s intervention was not to claim that women reason differently by nature but that a relational moral orientation exists, that it had been systematically devalued, and that this devaluation reflected gendered assumptions about what counts as mature moral reasoning. The “different voice” is not essentially female — it is a mode of moral attention that dominant frameworks had rendered inaudible.
For this research, Gilligan’s contribution matters as an origin point: she showed that the privileging of abstract principle over situated response is not a neutral methodological choice but a substantive moral and political commitment with concrete consequences for whose reasoning counts.
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- Noddings — developed the phenomenology of the caring relation Gilligan identified
- Tronto — extended Gilligan’s insights into political theory
- Held — defended care ethics as a comprehensive moral framework
- Carol Gilligan — person page
- Lawrence Kohlberg — whose model Gilligan critiqued