Gilligan's "In a Different Voice" and the Critique of Kohlberg

Carol Gilligan, a developmental psychologist at Harvard University who had earlier worked as a research assistant to Lawrence Kohlberg, published In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development in 1982 (Harvard University Press), a book that reshaped moral psychology and is now treated as a founding text of care ethics. Kohlberg's stage theory, developed from his 1958 doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago and refined over subsequent decades of longitudinal research using moral dilemmas such as the "Heinz dilemma" — should a man steal an unaffordable drug to save his dying wife — had been validated primarily on male subjects and ranked reasoning grounded in rights, rules, and abstract principle above other modes on a six-stage scale culminating in a broadly Kantian universalizability. Gilligan observed that girls and women, when scored against this male-derived instrument, clustered at a systematically lower stage, typically stage 3, described as "interpersonal concordance" or "good boy/nice girl" morality, and argued that the apparent deficiency lay not in women's moral development but in a scale that had quietly treated one culturally masculine style of reasoning as the universal standard of moral maturity.