Philosophy 361 Ethics Darwall Fall 1996 GILLIGAN I I Prior to the two major "structuralist" developmental theorists, Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, the leading psychological theories of moral development were behaviorist learning theory and Freudian theory. These latter two views differed enormously, but share the feature that moral character and judgment was explained as a set of dispositions molded by external forces. According to behaviorists, people come to be disposed not to lie, for example, because they are reinforced negatively for lying and positively for telling the truth, other things equal. For Freudians, the mechanism is different, but the structure of explanation is quite similar. Parents lay down rules, including, say, a rule against lying. Initially, children are disposed to obey because they fear a loss of parental love. These parental rules, then, become subconsciously motivating as part of the super-ego. On both explanations, some specific moral judgment and character develops only if it is appropriately reinforced or taught by authoritative parents. The structure and content of the acquired judgment and character depends entirely on external social forces. Moral development, on these views, is not a matter of drawing forth a potentiality in the child. It is not really a form of development at all. In 1932, the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget published The Moral Judgment of the Child, and in the late 1960's Lawrence Kohlberg, a Harvard moral psychologist, started to publish an important series of papers building on Piaget's theory. What characterized the Piaget/Kohlberg approach was the thesis that moral judgment is acquired developmentally in tandem with the development of other cognitive and intellectual skills. Kohlberg distinguished six stages of moral development; each stage developing out of the one before. REFER TO HANDOUT ON KOHLBERG II Carol Gilligan also works at the Harvard School of Education, where she was a collaborator of Kohlberg's. Throughout the 1970's, however, she became increasingly dissatisfied with Kohlberg's theory, as she came to believe that, at best, it explains the development of only one "moral voice". Kohlberg's initial study concerned young boys, and, while he included girls and women in his later studies, Gilligan became convinced that his conceptual framework concerned moral themes that are likelier to engage the thinking of boys and young men. An anomaly of Kohlberg's findings is that, while he claims universality for his stage sequence, females rarely reach his higher stages, many of whom tend to cluster around the third stage of his six-stage sequence. [More about why this is below.] Gilligan came to believe, on the basis of interviews of boys, girls, and young women, that there are, in fact, two different ways of thinking of morality, two different "themes" or "voices", one of which does not well fit into Kohlberg's categories, what she calls the ethics of care or the ethics of responsibility. These are based on notions of responsibility and loyalty to particular individuals in concrete relationships. The contrasting theme, she calls the ethics of rights. III Gilligan observes this different voice to be more characteristic of girls and young women than boys and young men. But she is careful to say: "The different voice I describe is characterized not by gender but theme. Its association with women is an empirical observation, and it is primarily through women's voices that I trace its development. But this association is not absolute, and the contrasts between male and female voices are presented here to highlight a distinction between two modes of thought and to focus a problem of interpretation rather than to represent a generalization about either sex." (2) IV In In A Different Voice, Gilligan describes this different voice, contrasts it with the more orthodox Kohlbergian view of morality and moral development, illustrates these differences in her interviews, and sketches a developmental theory of ethical judgment within this different voice. Our interest, however, is ethical, theory. What perspective does thinking about the different voice Gilligan claims to find give us on moral philosophy? To begin to make headway on that question, we need to ask more about the contrast Gilligan draws between the ethics of care and the ethics of rights and justice. An important theme for us to bear in mind is her implicit thesis that a conception of ethics is interdependent with a conception of the self and its relation to others. Perhaps the most obvious difference between the two different voices, is that they include two different views of the self. One view stresses the fundamental separateness or distinctness of persons. The other view stresses the connectedness or relatedness of persons. The respective views of ethics might then be seen as views about the appropriate relations between persons so conceived. The "ethics of rights", thus, is a conception of the appropriate relations between fundamentally distinct individuals. The "ethic of care" is a conception of the appropriate relations between persons whose very identity consists, at least partly, in their connectedness to particular others. V Gilligan believes on the basis of her interviews and other research that girls and young women tend to think of their own identity in relational terms, and that boys and young men tend, rather, to think of themselves, in the first instance, as individuals--either as "their own persons" or, at least, as people who should be. How are these differences to be explained? Agreeing with Nancy Chodorow, Gilligan maintains that, once gender roles are in place in parenting, the two "gendered" conceptions of self will tend to reproduce themselves. [N.B. This explanation only applies if strong gender roles already exist in a society. Notice what would happen to the following explanation if, for example, parenting were equally shared.] Assuming, then, that mothers play a larger role in parenting, the child's relation to the mother will play a large role in determining sense of self. If gender difference is socially salient, then mothers will tend to mother their boys and girls differently. They will tend to separate more from their boys than from their girls. The consequence will be that boys will develop more of an identity as separate, and will come to experience relationship as relatively more problematic because of the (emotionally loaded) separation from mother. Girls, on the other hand, will tend to develop an identity as related to particular others, and will come to experience separateness and autonomy as relatively more problematic. As Chodorow puts it, male development entails a "more emphatic individuation and a more defensive firming of experienced ego boundaries," while "girls emerge from this period with a basis for "empathy" built into their primary definition of self in a way that boys do not." VI But what differences in conceptions of ethics does this generate? Here we have to piece together a number of things Gilligan says. The "ethic of rights" involves: (a) the idea of a fair or just "system of rules for resolving disputes"; (10) (b) both the self and others are conceived in implicitly "universal" or "general" terms. Ethical respect or concern is for "the generalized other"; it is not particularized; (11) (c) as a corollary: it aims to be impartial; (18) (d) it expresses the ideal of (equal) concern and respect for all individuals; (19) (e) recognizes the primacy of universal individual rights. (21) On the other hand, the "ethic of care" (a) is primarily concerned with responsibilty-within-relationship, (b) and with nurturing relationship and the particular others to whom one is related, within these relationships. [Compare this with Kohlberg's level 3.] (c) Consequently, ethical issues are to be seen as problems within relationships, and can only adequately be solved, therefore, within the relationship itself. VII This last point is quite important and is somewhat obscured by Gilligan's categories. To see this, ask where utilitarianism would fit in Gilligan's two voices. It may seem inappropriate to locate it within the ethics of rights, since the utilitarian takes no such notion as fundamental. Moreover, one very plausible way of thinking of utilitarianism is as arising out of a kind of equal caring for the fate of all sentient beings. These two points seem to suggest that utilitarianism is pretty distant from anything Gilligan must have in mind in the ethics of rights, and pretty close, at least, to what she means to refer to by an ethic of care. To see that this may well not be right, consider her analysis of Amy and Jake's responses to Heinz's dilemma. Gilligan describes the difference in this way: "Thus in Heinz's dilemma these two children see two very different moral problems--Jake a conflict between life and property that can be resolved by logical deduction, Amy a fracture of human relationships that must be meded with its own thread." (31) The difference here seems to be less one between rights on the one hand, and, say, welfare on the other. The difference, rather, seems to be between seeing the ethical problem as: (1) (a) fixed by the general features of the situation to which a more or less determinate answer should exist, where (b) the problem is can be thought about, and perhaps solved, impersonally as a problem of impartial judgment, and (2) (a) a problem that arises within a network of particular relationships to particular people, and (b) which can be thought about, and solved, only by working within those relationships themselves, and not by impersonal, disengaged thought. IX This, then, is the deepest challenge that is posed by Gilligan's work. On both modern traditions we have examined, Kant and Mill, ethical thought aims to be impersonal, or, at any rate, impartial. The moral point of view is disengaged from any particular relationships to particular others, whether to family, friends, or any particular community. With Aristotle, things are less clear. I invite you to think about how Aristotle should be thought about from this perspective.