Care and moral understanding › Listening before ranking

Consider a disagreement in which one person keeps explaining a rule and another keeps returning to the effects on a particular relationship. Before ranking one response as mature and the other as confused, identify what question each is answering. The disagreement may involve different facts, different priorities, or different pictures of the people affected. Each possibility calls for a different response.

One useful exercise is to state the other's concern in terms they could recognize, then ask what information would change their view. This does not guarantee agreement. It creates an opportunity to discover whether a position has been misunderstood and whether an apparent refusal to reason is an answer to a question we have not heard.

That is the continuing difficulty posed by In a Different Voice. Moral assessment involves a standard of judgment, but it also involves a capacity to understand what is being judged. Gilligan asks what happens when the standard arrives with a picture of maturity so settled that some forms of responsibility become difficult to hear. A careful reader tests that charge against the interviews while also testing the alternative account against the conflicts it must explain.