Carol Gilligan’s Ethics of Care, Explained

Two ways of reasoning about moral problems, what the research shows, and how to use both lenses

What is Carol Gilligan’s ethics of care?

Carol Gilligan’s ethics of care, set out in In a Different Voice (1982), holds that people reason about moral problems through two orientations: a morality of rights and justice, and a morality of responsibility, which involves relationships with others. A 2000 meta-analysis (a statistical pooling of results across many studies) of moral orientation, by Jaffee and Hyde, found only small gender differences, which does not strongly support the claim that care is mainly a women’s orientation and justice mainly a men’s. The theory is contested, and none of the practices below has been tested as an intervention.

Carol Gilligan’s ethics of care began as a challenge to Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of moral reasoning, which he studied with dilemmas such as the Heinz dilemma: a man weighs whether to steal an overpriced drug to save his ill wife’s life. In In a Different Voice (1982), Gilligan argued that Kohlberg’s framework wrongly prioritizes a morality of rights over a morality of responsibility and intimate relationships with others. Her central claim, as Jaffee and Hyde (2000) describe it, is that people reason about moral problems in two modes, justice and care. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives one example of how the two can differ on the same situation: in Gilligan’s account of the Heinz dilemma, Amy framed the problem as a narrative of relations over time, while Jake saw it as “a math problem with people.” How well the distinction holds up is still debated. In 2000, Jaffee and Hyde’s meta-analysis found only small gender differences in these modes. The practices below turn the distinction into questions you can ask about a real decision, and they say plainly where the evidence stops.