- Length
- 216 pagesHarvard University Press, 1993 edition with a new introduction
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
In a Different Voice
A psychologist noticed that women interviewed about moral dilemmas were being scored as less developed, looked at the instrument doing the scoring, and found it had been built on boys. The book that resulted opened a field, and the field has since disagreed with a good deal of it.
- Date
- 1982
- Author
- Carol Gilligan
- Region
- Harvard, United States
- Language
- English
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Narrative — Argument carried by story, image or confession
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
Its publisher calls it the little book that started a revolution; its empirical claim about gender has not survived, and its methodological claim has.
What the book says
A short book arguing that the standard measure of moral development was built to fit one way of reasoning and scored the other as immature. The framework in question ranked people through stages, from obedience up to the application of abstract universal principles, and it had been constructed on a longitudinal study of boys. Gilligan reports interviews in which girls and women, given the same dilemmas, decline to treat them as they are meant to be treated. Asked whether a man should steal a drug to save his wife, one eleven-year-old will not answer the question as posed: she wants to know why he cannot talk to the druggist, worries what happens to the wife if he goes to prison, and treats the situation as a fabric of relationships rather than as a conflict of rights to be ranked. Scored on the standard scale this counts as a failure to reason abstractly. Gilligan's claim is that it is a different orientation - toward responsibility, context and the maintenance of connection rather than toward rights, fairness and separation - and that a psychology which knows only the second has mistaken half of human moral thinking for a deficiency.
What it argues
That there are two moral orientations rather than one scale, and that a theory recognising only the first will misread the second as a deficit. The justice orientation treats a moral problem as a conflict of claims between separate individuals, to be settled by ranking principles impartially; the care orientation treats it as a rupture in a web of relationships, to be repaired by attending to what particular people need. Gilligan does not claim the second is superior; she claims it is a way of reasoning and not a failure to reason, that maturity in it has its own developmental course, and that the exclusion of it from the standard account is a consequence of who was studied. The wider point is methodological and outlives the specific case: a measure constructed on one population and applied to another will find the second wanting, and will look like a discovery about them rather than about itself.
What it answered
Kohlberg's stages of moral development, and behind them the philosophical tradition those stages were built to model - Kant and Rawls, in which the mature moral agent abstracts from relationships and applies universal principles impartially. Gilligan's argument therefore reaches past developmental psychology into moral philosophy, and it is philosophers rather than psychologists who have made most use of it since.
How it argues
By quotation. The book's method is to reproduce what people actually said in interviews at length and to show that the transcripts contain reasoning the scoring scheme cannot see. This is its strength and its weakness: the passages are vivid and persuasive and the sample is small, unsystematic and not designed to establish the general claim the book makes from it. Gilligan is also drawing on literature and on developmental theory throughout, and the register is closer to an essay than to a research report, which is part of why it reached readers outside psychology.
The moment
Harvard in the 1970s, where Gilligan worked with Kohlberg and Erikson, in the decade when women entered academic psychology in numbers for the first time and began asking whose responses the standard instruments had been built on. The book arrived at the moment when that question was being asked across several fields at once.
How it travelled
Into ethics rather than psychology. The care orientation became the basis of a philosophical literature - Noddings, Held, Kittay, Tronto - that developed an ethics of care as a position in its own right, and it fed work in nursing, education, social policy and moral philosophy far more than it survived in developmental psychology, where the empirical claim was tested repeatedly and largely failed.
The strongest objection
That the empirical claim does not hold. Lawrence Walker's meta-analytic work in the mid-1980s reviewed dozens of studies using Kohlberg's scale and found no significant gender difference in the great majority - in one review of eighty studies, eighty-six percent showed no difference, with women scoring higher in six percent and men in nine. Jaffee and Hyde's meta-analysis in 2000 found that more than seventy percent of studies showed no significant gender difference in orientation and that gender explains under one percent of the variation. So the two voices are not distributed as the book suggests: both orientations are found in both sexes, and most people use both depending on the dilemma. The methodological criticism of androcentric measurement survives this intact; the gendered reading of it does not, and Gilligan's own 1993 introduction moves toward treating the voice as a theme rather than a female trait.
Why read it
For the interviews, which are the reason it persuaded people, and for the general argument about instruments and the populations they are built on, which applies far beyond this case. Read the 1993 introduction alongside, and read at least a summary of the meta-analytic literature; the book is more interesting when you know what happened to its central claim.
- First printed
- 1982
- First in English
- 1982
- Digitised
- No
The 1993 edition's introduction is where Gilligan clarifies what she takes the different voice to be - a theme in moral thinking rather than a property of women - and it changes how the book reads.
Written in English and translated widely. In copyright.
Where it stands
Live as philosophy and superseded as psychology. Care ethics is a standing position in moral and political theory; the specific claim about a gendered difference in moral reasoning is not accepted in the psychological literature.
On quoting this book
In copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether Gilligan ever intended a strong empirical claim about women, or only a claim about a neglected orientation, has been argued since publication and her own formulations have shifted. The adequacy of the samples and the interpretive method has been criticised from within psychology throughout. Whether an ethics of care can stand as a general moral theory or only as a corrective to justice-based accounts is the philosophical dispute. And whether associating care with women's voices reinforces the association it was meant to revalue is a criticism made from inside feminist theory, most sharply in the 1980s and 90s.