In a Different Voice

A work of developmental psychology, subtitled Psychological Theory and Women's Development, that became a founding text of care ethics. Gilligan argues that leading theories of moral development, especially Lawrence Kohlberg's stages, were built largely on studies of boys and men and then treated women's different responses as a failure to mature. Drawing on interviews from three studies, including one of women deciding whether to have an abortion, she identifies a "different voice" in moral reasoning: an ethic of care, which attends to relationships, responsibility and the particular situation, alongside an ethic of justice concerned with rights and impartial rules. Her best-known example contrasts two eleven-year-olds, Jake and Amy, answering Kohlberg's Heinz dilemma about stealing a drug to save a life. Jake treats it like a maths problem; Amy looks for a way to keep everyone in relationship. Critics question the size of her samples and whether the two voices really track gender.

It opened the way for the ethics of care and changed how psychologists and philosophers think about moral maturity, gender and the place of relationships in ethics.