Two Ethical Styles: The Debate About Gender (page 1)

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TWO ETHICAL STYLES: THE DEBATE ABOUT GENDER

[Adapted from Thomas I. White, Discovering Philosophy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1991]

Outline ETHICS: "MASCULINE" JUSTICE VERSUS "FEMININE" CARE Kohlberg's "masculine" ethics of justice Stages of ethical development How valid is Kohlberg's scheme? Carol Gilligan's "feminine" ethic of care Stages of development The ethics of justice and the ethics of care compared Justice, care, and the case of Roger and Hal Similarities and differences WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS OF THIS RESEARCH? Care, justice and traditional philosophical ethics Care and justice: the philosophical significance A FINAL NOTE SUGGESTED READINGS

At one time hardly anyone considered the differences in the way men and women think an issue for serious discussion. It was simply assumed for many years in our male-dominated society that the way that men thought and acted was clearly superior. The women's movement rightly challenged this assumption. It also led to a new exploration of "feminine" and "masculine," to a recognition of both the similarities and differences between the two genders, and to an appreciation of the unique value of each.

Since the early 1980s, a growing body of research in psychology suggests that there are some important differences between the ways that men think and the ways women think, and that these differences may have origins that are more complex than the mere differences in childhood training. Pioneered by the Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan, this research focused on differences in how men and women perceive and resolve ethical dilemmas.

The following case will prepare you for the next stage of our discussion. Read it and think about it for a few minutes.

Consider a small company whose policy about sick days reads like this: "Employees are allowed a maximum of 12 sick days each year. After the 8th day, employees receive a verbal warning. After the 10th day, employees receive a written warning. Any employee exceeding the 12 days will be terminated."

Lots of companies have similar policies, and everyone is usually pretty well satisfied with them. One year, however, the company faced a difficult problem. Two employees, Hal and Roger, had used all 12 of their allotted sick days. Hal had been with the company for 2 years. He was a so-so worker--not great, not terrible--but his boss suspected that most of Hal's "sick" days were not legitimate and that he was just taking additional time off when he felt like it. Roger was a very good worker who had been with the company 10 years. His child has become seriously ill during the past year, however, and Roger frequently needed to take him to the hospital for treatments. He used up his vacation and personal days in this way and now he was using his sick time for the same reason. Both men were called in and warned about their misuse of sick days. The following week, both took another day off.

Imagine that you are the executive who has to decide what happens to the two workers and think about the situation you face. How would you describe the problem? What facts and issues in the case are most important, and how do they bear on what you do? Do you see this as an "ethical" problem? Is it "right" or "wrong" to fire the two men? What about keeping Roger and firing Hal? What implications does your action have for all the other employees of the company? What decision would you make?

Jot down your answers to these questions, ask other people what they think, and compare your answers to theirs. Pay special attention not so much to their final decision about whether or not to fire anyone but how they arrive at their answers. Does everybody see the problem the same way? Do they all grapple with the same issues? Does everybody agree about what the most important facts are? Do most of the men you speak with see the problem one way and most of the women another way?

ETHICS: "MASCULINE" JUSTICE VERSUS "FEMININE" CARE

There are almost as many systems of "personal ethics" as there are people. Where do such differences come from?

Beyond the impact on our ethical outlook of family, religion, and personal choice, some people claim that gender plays an important role. Some researchers claim that men and women differ in how they decide on what is "right" and what is "wrong." The landmark book published in 1982 by the moral development psychologist Carol Gilligan stimulated the latest round of research into whether there might not actually be some basic differences in how men and women think about these and other matters.

We all evaluate our own and other people's actions many times a day. If you compare and contrast how you decide what to do and how you appraise what other people do with the ethical styles of same-sex and opposite-sex friends and associates, you may not see a hard and fast linkage with gender. You will probably be able to distinguish two fundamentally different approaches that people use in evaluating their own and others' actions. One approach, which prizes reason and objectivity, applies the same rules impartially across the board. The ideas of rights, justice, and fairness are paramount here. The other approach, which combines reason with emotions, holds that we should do what is most appropriate within the particular circumstances of the case. This approach stresses responsibility to people in need; its central moral principle is care, rather than justice.

The questionnaire you completed helps you identify your ethical style. The higher your J score, the more your ethics are based on the need for justice . Some would call these ethics typically masculine. The higher your C score, the more care underlies your ethics. Such ethics have been identified as typically feminine. Actually, it is unclear just closely much these different styles can be correlated with gender. In practice, many men and women cross from one to the other. Furthermore, some people are very strongly J or C, while others are more balanced. Nonetheless, the odds are high that within any typical group, more men will have higher J scores than C scores while women's scores will be in the reverse.

The debate over whether on not there are two ethical styles that can be related to gender arose as an unintended result of research done by the late Harvard psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg (1927-1987). Kohlberg sought to discover the process by which we develop our sense of morality. His research convinced him that to go from an undeveloped to a mature sense of ethics, we pass through a series of distinct stages. When Carol Gilligan, also at Harvard, discovered that Kohlberg's system placed women lower than men on his ethical ladder and that all of Kohlberg's subjects were male, she looked to see if a female sample would yield different results. She thinks they do.

Taking first things first, we will start with Kohlberg's research because that is what led to Gilligan's work.

Kohlberg's "masculine" ethics of justice

Kohlberg's research was inspired by the work the great Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget who had tried to connect the development of a child's moral judgment to its overall cognitive development. Kohlberg believed that as the whole human personality matures, our thinking about right and wrong starts at a preconventional level, then progresses to a conventional level, then finally arrives at postconventional thinking. Each of these three levels has two specific stages. Kohlberg's research included subjects from many cultures, and therefore he believed that he was uncovering a universal innate developmental structure of the human personality.

Stages of ethical development

At the preconventional level, we understand "good" and "bad" in a very primitive way. This stage runs from about age 4 to 10. (Kohlberg does not see anything of consequence taking place in ethical development before age 4.) In Stage 1, all that counts is power. "Good" is what the person with the most power says is good. We do what is right only to avoid punishment, and we regulate our dealings with others so as not to provoke anyone who is stronger than we are. In Stage 2 we advance only a little. Now something is "good" because it will satisfy some need we have. We come to value reciprocity, a notion well put in the proposition "You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours." This notion, of course, is still totally self-oriented. "Right" and "wrong" are just labels that indicate whether something brings us pleasure or pain.

Conventional morality, the next level, marks a major advance over in that we shift our focus from ourselves to others. The expectations of our family, or the rules of our society, now become our moral standard. At Stage 3 of this level, an action is "good" if it pleases other people, helps them, or at least tries to. Generally, we adopt traditional and stereotyped ways of behaving without questioning them. Our purpose is to act in ways that will make other people like and accept us. Next, in Stage 4, authority and law and order become more important. Now we think that respecting authority, obeying rules, doing our duty, and maintaining the status quo are morally right for their own sake--no matter what the circumstances. Conforming to the traditions of our group is a major virtue. So many people are so comfortable at this level that only one in four advances to Kohlberg's final level.

When and if we move into the third, postconventional level as adults, we develop an appreciation for moral principles that do not depend on what anyone thinks but are valid in and of themselves. This level of is the stage of autonomous, individual ethical thinking, like the earlier levels, also has two stages. Stage 5 thinking utilizes the ideas of utilitarianism and the "social contract" which promote free agreement, individual rights, and democratic processes and institutions. As Kohlberg notes, "this is the `official' morality of American government, and finds its ground in the thought of the writers of the Constitution." At this stage, we decide whether an action is right or wrong by an impartial assessment of how fair it is, how well it respects the rights of others, and how far it advances the common good. Stage 6 goes beyond this to individually realized ethical principles that are abstract and universal, the Golden Rule, for example, or Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative. These, says Kohlberg, "are universal principles of justice, of the reciprocity and equality of human rights, and of respect for the dignity of human beings as individual persons." Now we assess the ethical character of actions in terms of the principles we have chosen to apply and to which we have a deep personal allegiance. Something is right or wrong depending on how it measures up to these principles.

Kohlberg's scheme is often called an ethics of justice. Like the representation of Justice wearing a blindfold, the person at Stage 6 refuses to see anything that could sway his or her decision. There are no extenuating circumstances, no special cases, no emotions. Everything must be rational, objective, and impartial.

How valid is Kohlberg's scheme?

Kohlberg's analysis makes a good deal of sense. The process of moral development, he says, means moving toward a progressively less self-centered and ever more complex and abstract ethical outlook. We start with a selfish way of determining right and wrong, give that up for other people's judgments, then grow beyond that to a view of morality as an expression of ultimate principles--justice, fairness, and respect for individual rights and human dignity. Kohlberg's stages also test out empirically. His evidence shows that everyone can be placed at one of his six stages as they pass through what turns out to be the same sequence.

Some researchers raised questions about Kohlberg's theory, however, when they saw that most women do not go past Stage 3--that is, they determine right and wrong according to whether or not an act helps or pleases others. If women achieve no higher levels than this, either they are morally inferior to men or something is wrong with the theory.

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