Gender and Wisdom: The Roles of Compassion and Moral Development

Abstract

Theories of both wisdom and moral development have been divided between rationalist or cognitivist approaches and broader gauged ones that include affect, motivation, and intuition, as well as rational thinking. For example, Gilligan (1982) criticized Kohlberg's (1973) theory of moral development on the grounds that it is gender biased, privileging “masculine” reasoning based on principles over “feminine” reasoning based on relations. A similar conflict has arisen in wisdom theory and research with Baltes and Smith (1990) taking a cognitivist position criticized as limited by inattention to the affective domain (Labouvie-Vief, 1990). This conflict is unnecessary. More recent approaches have argued that wisdom is a synthesis of knowledge and character (Kunzmann & Baltes, 2005). Using the construct of compassion as a vehicle for the integration of wisdom and ethics obviates any gender-related differences in wisdom.