Justice, Care, and Gender: The Kohlberg-Gilligan Debate Revisited

Abstract

In 1958, G. E. M. Anscombe wrote, "It is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy; that should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology, in which we are conspicuously lacking" (p. 186). Anscombe hinted (and she and many others pursued the hint) that the Aristotelian tradition was the best place to look for a richer and less shadowy conception of moral agency than either utilitarianism or Kantianism had provided. In the same year Anscombe published "Modern Moral Philosophy," Lawrence Kohlberg completed his dissertation at the University of Chicago, a dissertation that laid the foundations for what has been the dominant program in moral psychology for the last twenty-odd years. The contrast between the sort of Aristotelian philosophical psychology Anscombe envisaged and Kohlberg's program could not have been starker. Anscombe recommended that the concepts of "moral obligation and moral duty ... and of what is morally right and wrong, and of the moral sense of 'ought,' ought to be jettisoned ... because they are survivors ... from an earlier conception of ethics which no longer survives, and are only harmful without it" (p. 186). Kohlberg meanwhile claimed that people at the highest stage of moral development "answer [moral dilemmas] in moral words such as duty or morally right and use them in a way implying universality, ideals and impersonality" (1981, p. 22). And while Anscombe pointed to Aristotle as the possibility proof that ethics could be done with a more robust and realistic conception of moral agency than the will-o'-the-wisp Enlightenment conception which Iris Murdoch describes as "thin as a needle" (1970, p. 53) and Alasdair MacIntyre depicts as "ghostlike" (1982), Kohlberg derided Aristotelianism, calling it the "bag of virtues" model; and he explicitly rejected the view that personality is divided up "into cognitive abilities, passions or motives, and traits of