A different moral voice: the ethics of care

The ethics of care

Carol Gilligan born 1936Alongside abstract justice, there is a morality of care and relationships.

What it claims

Morality is not reducible to rights and impartial justice: care, attention and responsibility toward others are a full moral voice. A mature ethics must bring the two together.

Why

The interviews reveal a coherent morality of caring for real people, which Kohlberg's rights-based scale ranks lower.

The same idea through history

Carol Gilligan1982In a Different Voice (article 1977, book 1982): listening to women facing real dilemmas, she hears an ethics of responsibility and care, which the psychology of her time ranked as a lag.

Nel Noddings1984Caring: ethics starts from the concrete relation between the one who cares and the one cared for. Attention to the other comes before applying universal principles.

Joan Tronto1993Moral Boundaries: care is not a women's or private matter. It is an activity every human life depends on, and how it is shared out (who cares, who is cared for, who pays) is a political question.

In short

"A different moral voice: the ethics of care" is an argument by Carol Gilligan (Gilligan, "In a Different Voice" (1977), then the book (1982), 1982) on the question "What makes something right?" (answer: virtue). Its claim: Morality is not reducible to rights and impartial justice: care, attention and responsibility toward others are a full moral voice. A mature ethics must bring the two together. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 2 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Gilligan, "In a Different Voice" (1977), then the book (1982)

Valid with an implicit premise

In the 1970s, the psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg measured "moral development" through dilemmas: should a man steal an overpriced drug to save his wife? The highest stage, for him, is reasoning with principles of justice and rights valid for everyone. But his stages came from studies of boys and men, and women often scored lower. Carol Gilligan, who worked with him, listened to women facing real choices (for instance, whether to have an abortion) and heard something else: an ethics of responsibility toward others, of attention to the precise situation and of concern not to hurt anyone. This is not a lag, she says: it is a different moral voice, wrongly held to be inferior. This is the birth of the ethics of care. It is placed here with virtue, because it puts a quality of the person (attentiveness, concern for others) at the centre rather than a rule or a calculation.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.

Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a world where Kohlberg's theory puts rights at the top, where the voice of care exists and is ranked lower, but where this ranking is correct: the voice of care would really be a less mature stage. That is what Kohlberg thought; P4 is what rejects it.

Valid with P4. P1, P2 and P3 are psychological findings: what Kohlberg's theory says, what one hears in the interviews, how the scale ranks these answers. To reach a conclusion about morality itself, P4 is needed: if a serious moral voice is ranked lower, the theory is at fault, not the voice. Gilligan does not say care is better than justice: she says half the picture is missing. The debate is mainly about P2 and P3 (are the data solid?) and about the scope of the conclusion (is care a complete ethics, or one virtue among others?).

Analogy. Imagine judging all musicians by their skill at the piano. Violinists would get poor marks, and we would say they were "behind". It is not the violinists' music that is poor, it is the exam that only listens to one instrument.

Objections

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Feminist critics (Bill Puka, Claudia Card) 1990 · attacks the conclusion

Celebrating care risks celebrating what domination has made of women. If they talk more often of care and sacrifice, perhaps it is because they were given the job of caring for others and denied power. Turning this voice into a "women's ethics" locks them into that role.

Gilligan replies

Carol Gilligan 1977 · What Gilligan already says

Gilligan does not praise self-sacrifice. In her study, the most mature ethics of care rejects precisely the conventions of feminine self-abnegation, because they do harm. Care then becomes a universal obligation, which also includes caring for oneself, chosen and owned.

Joan Tronto 1993

We must go further: take care out of "women's morality". Caring is an activity everyone depends on, and how it is shared (who cares, who is cared for, who is paid for it) is a matter of justice and politics.

The debate goes on (our summary) The debate has moved care: from "women's voice" to an ethics for everyone and a political question (poorly paid care work, often done by poor women). Some critics remain wary: as long as care remains invisible and badly paid, praising it in words changes nothing about who does it.

Peter Singer 1972 · attacks the conclusion

An ethics of care and relationships favours those close to us. But distance changes nothing about the value of a life: the neighbour's child and a child on the other side of the world count just as much. An ethics that always prefers those close is unfair to those far away.

Gilligan replies

Nel Noddings 1984

Noddings embraces partiality: the obligation to care arises from a real relation, or a possible one. We are not obliged to everyone in the same way, because real care requires attention to a particular person.

Virginia Held, Joan Tronto 2006

Other care theorists refuse to stop at those close by: we live in a world where our purchases, taxes and institutions affect distant people. Care must therefore extend to the scale of societies and the world, with the help of justice.

The debate goes on (our summary) The deep disagreement remains. For Singer, partiality is a bias to be corrected. For the ethics of care, an ethics that asks you to treat your child like a stranger is not a human ethics. Many seek a balance: special duties to those close to us, and real but weaker duties to those far away.

Lawrence Walker; Sara Jaffee and Janet Hyde 1984 · attacks premise 3

The data do not show what people think. When the many studies using Kohlberg's scale are reviewed, women do not really score lower than men (Walker, 1984). And a large review in 2000 finds only a small difference between women and men in the use of "care" and "justice": the type of dilemma matters much more than sex.

no reply

We have not yet found a direct reply by Gilligan in the texts.

The debate goes on (our summary) This objection hits the link between the voice of care and women, not the existence of that voice. Its defenders point out that already in 1977 Gilligan saw a development uniting rights and responsibilities "for both sexes", and the 2000 review suggests that everyone reasons in terms of care in some situations. The philosophical idea (morality is not reducible to rights) therefore survives, but in a less dramatic form: it is no longer "women's ethics", it is a dimension of everyone's ethics.