Carol Gilligan

Carol Gilligan (born in New York in 1936) is an American philosopher and psychologist, best known for her work in feminist theory and for developing the ethics of care. Her research sits at the intersection of moral psychology and the question of whether the standards long treated as universal actually reflected a male view of maturity.

Raised in a Jewish family in New York City, she studied English literature at Swarthmore College and went on to train in clinical and social psychology, earning a doctorate at Harvard. After becoming disillusioned with academic life for a time, she taught at the University of Chicago and then at Harvard, where she eventually became a full professor. Earlier, she had worked with Lawrence Kohlberg on his research into stages of moral development.

Her most influential book, In a Different Voice (1982), argues that Kohlberg had taken as his model of moral maturity a style of reasoning built on justice, rights and abstract principles, which tended to be found more often in men. Gilligan proposes that there is also a moral voice centred on relationships, attention to others and responsibility toward concrete situations. From this comes the ethics of care, which she presents not as a replacement for an ethics of justice but as a complement to it. For her, mature moral development means integrating both perspectives and recognising that one's own needs and those of others carry real weight.

Her work has had a wide impact on moral philosophy, psychology, education and feminism, and it has inspired discussion of applied ethics in the workplace and of nonviolent approaches to conflict. Her methods have nonetheless been questioned: the sample in her study was not statistically representative, and her approach did not always separate cultural and class factors from supposedly biological ones. Some of her followers have also been criticised for narrowing moral obligation to those with whom we have close personal ties.