Ethical Communication: Moral Stances in Human Dialogue

4. Carol Gilligan: Ethics of Care

33 Carol Gilligan Ethics of Care Lee Wilkins Philosophy was too seldom the work of women. Until Carol Gilligan . In her early forties Gilligan decided to listen to women who were themselves making an important choice: whether to abort. The twenty-four women Gilligan worked with were in the first trimester of pregnancy. For some, the pregnancy was planned, for others it was not. For at least one woman, the pregnancy was the result of rape. They repeatedly used the words “selfish” and “responsibility” to explain their thinking. Thus began Gilligan’s intellectual journey into what she has sometimes characterized as kitchen-sink philosophy. One woman, listening intently to other women, heard what other scholars also may have heard before but misunderstood: the moral power of sustaining connections, a different way to conceptualize ethical problems. The women Gilligan studied spoke In a Different Voice, the 1982 book described by Harvard University Press as the little book “that started a revolution.” Like many revolutions, much of Gilligan’s book was mischaracterized at first. Critics claimed that Gilligan asserted the way the women examined ethical questions was primarily the result of their gender. Gilligan had made no such assertion. In addition, Gilligan’s sample was small. Questions about generalizability ensued. So, how does a psychological, empirical study conducted by a middle-aged woman with few credentials in philosophy prompt a philosophical revolution? To some extent, it goes back to intellectual nurture. 4 4 34 . Lee Wilkins Carol Gilligan was born in New York City in 1936. She earned her bachelor’s degree in English literature from Swarthmore College in 1958 and a master’s degree in clinical psychology from Radcliffe in 1960, at the end of the era when that institution was the equivalent of a “woman’s” Harvard because Harvard did not yet admit women. By the time Gilligan was ready to pursue her doctorate in social psychology , Harvard had changed, and Gilligan obtained her degree there in 1964. About two decades later, in 1986, she became the first female tenured full professor in Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. With this kind of lived experience, it is at least possible that Gilligan found herself “unlistened to” in the male-dominated academy. Regardless , her credentials as a feminist scholar owe something to her own professional experiences. While those experiences may have formed her in some ways, there were other, more traditionally intellectual influences. Gilligan began teaching part-time at Harvard about five years after she completed her doctorate. The first faculty member she team-taught with was the distinguished psychologist (and Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer ) Erik Erikson. By this time in his career, Erikson had published two important biographies, one of Martin Luther and the other of Mohandas Gandhi. Both of these figures had much to contribute to contemporary understandings of ethics, morality, and politics. In addition, Erikson’s seminal work on human intellectual and moral growth, Childhood and Society, was published earlier in that same decade . In that book, Erikson outlined stages of human development from childhood to extreme old age. While the book is psychological in orientation, many of the developmental issues Erikson discusses in it, such as development of trust in infancy, include an ethical dimension . Significantly, Erikson applied his insights in that book to real human beings of both genders. The course that he and Gilligan taught focused on the human life cycle, and Gilligan has said since that time she was influenced by Erikson’s analysis of crises and turning points in people’s lives. Her next colleague in the classroom was Lawrence Kohlberg, arguably the most influential scholar on human moral development writing at that time. Kohlberg’s empirical work, which employed lengthy interviews with Harvard undergraduates (all men in that era) as they moved through the college experience focused on rights and justice. As a stage theorist, Kohlberg believed that people grow morally in .   35 Carol Gilligan separable stages, beginning with an extreme focus on self, moving through a stage of conformity to external rules and forces, and, for the rare few, moving again to a stage where universal principles are internalized and applied. Kohlberg said that people grew ethically when they were exposed to ethical problems that their current stage of thinking would not help them resolve. But, he also believed that most people, for most of their lives, function in the social conformity stage of ethical thinking. Gilligan notes that...