Care vs Justice: Gilligan vs Kohlberg & Piaget

I created this critical commentary for my graduate theories of human development class at the University of Rochester. The professor asked us to read "Chapter 15: The Ethic of Care: It's a Woman Thing" from Dixon's "Twenty Studies that Revolutionized Child Psychology" (2003), which looked at Carol Gilligan's theory of feminist ethics and "Chapter 7 - Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Development" from "Theories of development: Concepts and applications (6th edition)" by Crain (2016) which looked at Piaget and Kohlberg's theories of rational ethics and provide a critical commentary, which I have provided below.

Care vs Justice: Gilligan vs Kohlberg & Piaget

I admire Piaget for the largeness of the question he sought to undertake. Piaget wanted to find the origins of knowledge in childhood development with “genetic epistemology”, to build a bridge between philosophy and science.

“He would first do scientific research in child psychology, studying the development of the mind. He then would use his findings to answer broader questions in epistemology, philosophical questions concerning the origin of knowledge. He called this new enterprise "genetic epistemology" (Ginsburg & Opper, 1988, pp. 2-3; Piaget, 1952).”

In the west, our bias may be that knowledge is something that is conscious and rational. I believe this stems all the way back to Plato, who describes the highest form of knowledge as one which uses dialectical reasoning to produce a rational account. Piaget does not directly attribute himself as a follower of Plato, although he does subscribe to many of Kant’s ideas, which follow along the lines of Plato’s in rationalism.

From this, I can understand why Piaget’s default position is to want to search for the emergence of this rational capability in children, and label it as knowledge. The fact that Piaget wants to express this in a concrete systematic and hierarchical stage based fashion I can also understand, as he probably felt this is what knowledge was, as did most of science at the time.

I also really enjoyed Crain’s chapter on Kohlberg. Understanding Kohlberg's early days serving as humanitarian during the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, it now makes sense to me why Kohlberg was moved to work in psychology the way he did.

I enjoyed learning that after becoming a fan of Piaget’s theories, Kohlberg wished to extend these theories to find the emergence and development of moral judgment in the child. Kohlberg still made reason a prominent part of his work, because the 6 levels of morality which he created classifies individuals by their methods of reasoning.

I also enjoyed Dixon’s expounding of Gilligan’s work.

After reading Gilligan, I think I agree, that it seems both Piaget and Kohlberg are using biased assumptions in their work. It seems true that many thinkers in the West are biased towards reason, and may have been for over 2000 years.

Gilligan makes a critical point, what if this bias towards reason creates just one epistemological and moral framework, namely an “ethic of justice” (which Gilligan claims men possess), and what if there could be many different frameworks, if we became biased towards something else instead? Her example is the hypothesis of an “ethic of care”, which she claims that women may possess, which is a bias towards caring for those they have personal relationships with.

“men seem to have as their ultimate moral goal the protection of certain fundamental rights.”

And

“Women, in contrast, place the value of meaningfully embedded personal relationships above such abstract, individualistic principles.

Upon reflection, I believe that an ethic could be constructed around any key concept, be it justice, care, love, wellbeing, strength, pleasure, intelligence, intuition, art etc. Maybe the answer is to be able to flex between different ethical models in each situation and collaborate to find the best one for the specific moment.

Gilligan claims that moral action is different to moral theory. I very much agree with this statement and believe that when someone is placed with a real life moral dilemma, preconceived theoretical notions of right and wrong can go out the window.

Gilligan’s format, being a qualitative narrative style, was different in the way it was presented compared to other thinkers. Many ideas can be presented in different ways in order to convey a message. In some cases we need a new medium, like narrative style, to convey a disruptive and new message and maybe this is what she did here.

Upon personal reflection, as a man in today’s society I do not see myself as having an ethic of justice, nor an ethic of care. I prefer to have an ethic of uncertainty. When I look at my male and female friends and associates today, I also do not see them strictly in Gilligan’s roles, so maybe we have had changes since Gilligan’s time. Changes that Gilligan herself called for. There is perhaps an opportunity to invest further into Gilligan’s ideas and create a more comprehensive data driven and tightly controlled study for today’s time to see where the world stands now on these issues.