Women History
CAROL GILLIGAN'S ETHICS OF CARE 81
5
Carol Gilligan's Ethics of Care
Although twentieth-century feminine and feminist approaches to ethics are distinguishable one from the other, they share many ontological and epistemological assumptions. Whether a “feminine” and/or “feminist” thinker is celebrating or critiquing the virtue of care, s/he will tend to believe that the self is an interdependent being rather than an atomistic entity. S/he will also tend to believe that knowledge is "emotional" as well as "rational" and that thoughtful persons reflect on concrete particularities as well as abstract universals. This is certainly true of Carol Gilligan, whose ethics of care is definitely rooted, in "women's. ways" of being and knowing.' The questions that Gilligan poses about the relationship between gender and morality are similar to the ones that Wollstonecraft, Mill, Taylor, Beecher, Stanton, and Gilman posed. Is virtue the same or different in men and women? What is moral virtue, what is nonmoral virtue, and how are the two related? Does society encourage women to cultivate empowering or disempowering feminine psychological traits? What makes a feminine psychological trait either empowering (positive) or disempowering (negative)? Gilligan's answers to these questions are provocative ones. In her first major book, In a Different Voice, Gilligan claimed that on the aver-age, and for a variety of cultural reasons, women tend to espouse an ethics of care that stresses relationships and responsibilities, whereas men tend to espouse an ethics of justice that stresses rules and rights.' Even though Gilligan has qualified her gender-based claims over the years, she has not given them up entirely. In one of her more recent studies involving eighty educationally privileged North American adults and adolescents, two-thirds of the men and women raised considerations of both justice and care. Nevertheless, these men and women tended to focus on one more than the other of
5
Carol Gilligan's Ethics of Care
Although twentieth-century feminine and feminist approaches to ethics are distinguishable one from the other, they share many ontological and epistemological assumptions. Whether a “feminine” and/or “feminist” thinker is celebrating or critiquing the virtue of care, s/he will tend to believe that the self is an interdependent being rather than an atomistic entity. S/he will also tend to believe that knowledge is "emotional" as well as "rational" and that thoughtful persons reflect on concrete particularities as well as abstract universals. This is certainly true of Carol Gilligan, whose ethics of care is definitely rooted, in "women's. ways" of being and knowing.' The questions that Gilligan poses about the relationship between gender and morality are similar to the ones that Wollstonecraft, Mill, Taylor, Beecher, Stanton, and Gilman posed. Is virtue the same or different in men and women? What is moral virtue, what is nonmoral virtue, and how are the two related? Does society encourage women to cultivate empowering or disempowering feminine psychological traits? What makes a feminine psychological trait either empowering (positive) or disempowering (negative)? Gilligan's answers to these questions are provocative ones. In her first major book, In a Different Voice, Gilligan claimed that on the aver-age, and for a variety of cultural reasons, women tend to espouse an ethics of care that stresses relationships and responsibilities, whereas men tend to espouse an ethics of justice that stresses rules and rights.' Even though Gilligan has qualified her gender-based claims over the years, she has not given them up entirely. In one of her more recent studies involving eighty educationally privileged North American adults and adolescents, two-thirds of the men and women raised considerations of both justice and care. Nevertheless, these men and women tended to focus on one more than the other of