How do people make decisions about morality?
Gilligan has found that men and women use fundamentally different approaches. And since men have dominated the discussion of moral theory, women's perspective is often not taken seriously, and is considered to be less developed and sophisticated.
Her findings are based on interviews.The male approach to morality is that individuals have certain basic rights, and that you have to respect the rights of others. So morality imposes restrictions on what you can do.
The female approach to morality is that people have responsibilities towards others. So morality is an imperative to care for others.
Gilligan summarizes this by saying that male morality has a “justice orientation”, and that female morality has a “responsibilty orientation”.
She also outlines 3 stages in moral development. The first is a selfish stage, the second is a belief in conventional morality, and the third is post-conventional. This is a progression from selfish, to social, to principled morality.
Female children start out with a selfish orientation.
They then learn to care for others, and that selfishness is wrong. So in their second, conventional, stage, women typically feel it is wrong to act in their own interests, and that they should value instead the interests of others. They equate concern for themselves with selfishness.
In the third, post-conventional stage, they learn that it is just as wrong to ignore their own interests as it is to ignore the interests of others. One way to this understanding comes through their concern with connecting with others. A connection, or relation, involves two people, and if either one is slighted, it harms the relationship.
“The moral imperative that emerges repeatedly in interviews with women is an injunction to care, a responsibility to discern and alleviate the ‘real and recognizable trouble’ of this world. For men, the moral imperative appears rather as an injunction to respect the rights of others and thus to protect from interference the rights to life and self-fulfillment. Women's insistence on care is at first self-critical rather than self-protective, while men initially conceive obligation to others negatively in terms of noninterference. Development for both sexes would therefore seem to entail an integration of rights and responsibilities through the discovery of the complementarity of these disparate views. For women, the integration of rights and responsibilities takes place through an understanding of the psychological logic of relationships. This understanding tempers the self-destructive potential of a self-critical morality by asserting the need of all persons [including themselves] for care. For men, recognition through experience of the need for more active responsibility in taking care corrects the potential indifference of a morality of noninterference and turns attention from the logic to the consequences of choice [refs]. In the development of a postconventional ethical understanding, women come to see the violence inherent in inequality, while men come to see the limitation of a conception of justice blinded to the differences in human life.”
One benefit of reading this book is coming to appreciate “I’m really not sure; it depends on the situation” as a thoughtful and sophisticated response to a question of morality.
