Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice (1982) challenged Lawrence Kohlberg’s stage theory of moral development, which placed abstract justice reasoning at the apex of moral maturity. Gilligan showed that an alternative moral orientation — centered on relationships, context, and responsibility to particular others — had been systematically classified as developmentally inferior.
Kohlberg’s research had used predominantly male subjects and constructed a scale in which moral development progressed from self-interest (pre-conventional), through social conformity (conventional), to principled reasoning about justice and rights (post-conventional). Gilligan found that many of her female subjects reasoned in a pattern that did not fit this scale: they approached dilemmas by attending to relationships and responsibilities rather than by applying principles, and they were scored as having failed to reach the highest stages.
Gilligan argued that this was not a failure of reasoning but a different mode of reasoning — a “care voice” alongside the “justice voice.” The care voice asks: who will be hurt? What are my responsibilities to the people involved? How can I maintain connection while responding to conflicting needs? These are not less mature questions than “what principle applies?” — they are different questions, rooted in a different understanding of what moral situations demand.
Gilligan later clarified that the two voices are not gender-essential: both men and women can reason in both modes. The point is that Western moral philosophy and developmental psychology had treated one voice as the voice of morality itself, rendering the other inaudible.