She is the founder of Ethics of Care: Who is Carol Gilligan?

She is a professor at New York University and a visiting professor at Cambridge University. She has lectured as visiting professor at New York University in Abu Dhabi. She wrote her best-known work, In a Different Voice, in 1982. She is the founder of Ethics of Care.

Carol Gilligan grew up in a Jewish family in New York. She was the only child of lawyer William Friedman and kindergarten teacher Mabel Caminez. She attended Walden School, an innovative private school on Manhattan's Upper West Side. She played the piano during her graduate education and continued her career in modern dance. She graduated from Swarthmore University with a high honors degree in English Literature. She earned her master's degree in clinical psychology from Radcliffe University and her doctorate in social psychology from Harvard University. She started her teaching career at Harvard in 1967, then took up staff at Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1988.

Carol Gilligan (born November 28, 1936) is an American feminist, ethicist, and psychologist, best known for her work on ethical community and ethical relationships. Gilligan is a professor of Humanities and Applied Psychology at New York University and was a visiting professor at the Centre for Gender Studies and Jesus College at the University of Cambridge until 2009. She is known for her book In a Different Voice (1982), which criticized Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development.

Gilligan served as the Pitt Professor at Cambridge University from 1992 to 1994. In 1997 she was appointed to the bestowed position of Patricia Albjerg Graham in Gender Studies at Harvard. She left Harvard in 2002 to become a professor at New York University's School of Law and Education. She is also a visiting professor at Cambridge University's Center for Gender Studies.

In her most well-known work, The Different Voice of a Woman (1982), Gilligan researched women's psychology and the development of girls and worked with her students as a co-author or editor of numerous texts. She wrote the article "Sisterhood is Pleasurable: A Quiet Revolution in Psychology" and contributed to the 2003 anthology Sisterhood is Forever: The Women's Anthology for a New Millennium edited by Robin Morgan. Gilligan's first novel, Kyra, was published in 2008. She is married to James Gilligan, a medical doctor and director of the Center for the Study of Violence at Harvard Medical School.

Psychology Understanding

Gilligan is best known for her work on the stages of moral development by Lawrence Kohlberg and her criticism of her approach to these stages. Despite being Kohlberg's assistant, Gilligan argued that her theory of stages of moral development was male-oriented and limited their ability to include women in this theory. As a result, Gilligan put forward a theory of women's moral development based on her idea of moral voices. According to Gilligan, there are two kinds of moral voices; masculine and feminine.

The masculine voice is logical and individual, and the focus of moral decisions is to protect human rights and ensure justice is served. The feminine voice, on the other hand, gives importance to the preservation of interpersonal relations and the consideration of other people. This voice calls attention to the "care perspective," which means focusing on the needs of individuals to make moral decisions.

According to Gilligan, Kohlberg's stages of moral development placed emphasis on the masculine voice, and the discrepancy in voices made it difficult to fully adapt it to the moral development of women. Gilligan argues that androgyny, or the fusion of masculine and feminine, is the best way to grasp one's power as a human being. The moral development stages of Gilligan's women were seen as an explanation for men and women to deal with moral issues in different ways, even in the workplace.

What is the Ethics of Care?

In The Different Voices of Women, Gilligan proposed her own theory of the "Ethic of Care" as an alternative to Lawrence Kohlberg's hierarchical and principled approach to morality. Contrary to Kohlberg, who claimed that girls and women generally do not maximize their moral abilities, Gilligan argued that women approach moral problems differently than men. According to Gilligan, while women's morality is concentrated on the understanding of responsibility and relationships, the morality of men is instead concentrated on the understanding of justice ethics, which is based on rights and rules. Also, women tend to view moral issues as issues of conflicting responsibility rather than issues of conflicting rights. As a result, while women perceive this situation as more contextual and narrative, men perceive it more formally and theoretically. Gilligan calls the different moral approaches the "Ethic of Care" and the "Ethic of Justice" and considers them essentially incompatible.