Care and moral understanding › When a measure contains an ideal

Two children hear the same dilemma. A man cannot afford a medicine that might save his wife's life. Should he steal it? One child explains why preserving life outweighs the claim to property. Another wants the people involved to keep talking: could the druggist and the husband find a way to prevent the death without the theft? An interviewer looking for a clear ranking of rights may hear the second response as uncertainty. But perhaps the child has identified a different moral problem.

Carol Gilligan examines this possibility in In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development, first published in 1982. Her discussion of Jake and Amy's responses to the Heinz dilemma asks whether a theory of moral development can mistake a difference in moral attention for a deficiency in reasoning. The question reaches beyond whether one child gave the better answer. It concerns what a method of assessment is prepared to recognize as moral thought.

Gilligan connects that question to women's experience and to the assumptions of developmental psychology. Her argument makes relationships and responsibility audible within accounts that she believes have given them inadequate standing. Reading it carefully requires distinguishing her interpretation of particular interviews from claims about populations, and her critique of a measure from a complete alternative moral theory.

Gilligan's criticism of Lawrence Kohlberg concerns the relationship between psychological assessment and an account of moral maturity. Kohlberg's stages distinguish ways of justifying a judgment. The question is not simply whether a person says that Heinz should steal. People can reach the same answer through different reasons, and the reasons matter to how the response is assessed.

In Gilligan's account of the framework, punishment and personal advantage appear at earlier levels. Conventional reasoning concerns approval and the maintenance of social order. Later reasoning appeals to principles that can be justified beyond the conventions of a particular group. Gilligan questions whether the resulting account adequately recognizes moral reasoning centered on care and responsibility in relationships.

This is a criticism of the standard as well as of its application. A developmental ranking says more than that two answers differ. It identifies one way of reasoning as more mature. If the ranking gives privileged standing to a particular understanding of morality, its apparent psychological finding can depend on a prior philosophical choice about what maturity should mean.

Consider a hypothetical assessment that gives credit for stating a general principle but no credit for explaining a person's unspoken need. Someone who reasons carefully about that need could score poorly by design. This possibility does not show that every assessment using principles is biased. It identifies something to investigate: whether the method recognizes the considerations it claims to evaluate.

Gilligan also points to the exclusion of women from important theory-building research. In discussing Kohlberg, she describes the male sample from which his original stage account developed. Her challenge is to the movement from a restricted body of experience to a general account of human development. A restricted sample does not make every conclusion drawn from it false. It does mean that generality needs evidence rather than assumption.