Gender Feminism

• Interested in differences between male and female psychology.
• Not talking about sex, but instead focus on ethics.
  
  
• Ethics of Care
• The virtues and values of women focus on connectedness among people.
• Ex. caring, desires and interests of particular individuals.

• Ethics of justice
• The virtues and values of men focus on separateness/autonomy.
• Ex. justice/fairness/rights and freedoms that apply abstractly.

Kohlberg à 6 stages of moral development

1	punishment and obedience orientation	“the carrot and the stick”
2	instrumental relativist orientation	will satisfy the needs of others as a means to her own ends
3	interpersonal concordance orientation	follows moral rules for social approval
4	law and order orientation	follows moral rules out of respect for authority and the law
5	social contract legalistic orientation	freedom as long as no harm is committed; utilitarian
6	universal ethical principle orientation	ruled by self legislated moral principles (justice); Kantian

Within this theoretical framework:

• there are operational tests that are used to determine what stage a person is at.
• a child needs to pass through these stages of moral development in order.
• few people end up making it all the way through these stages.
• most girls and women don’t make it past stage 3.
• this could be used to confirm Freud’s (and other’s) hypothesis that women are less ethical than men.

The feminist worry with Kohlberg and others like him:

If we use men’s ethics as the yardstick for moral development, then we end up agreeing with the likes of Freud and concluding that women are not as morally developed as men.

Gilligan

Women are not less ethical than men are, women have a different stages of moral development and end up expressing a different sort of morality.

Developed her scale based on a study in which she interviewed 29 women who were making choices about whether or not to have an abortion.

1	Concern for self	· Powerless · Eschews connection in favor of the safety of isolation
2	Concern for others	· Maintain personal connections · Focus on interests of others · Goodness equals self sacrifice · Many ‘traditional women’ find themselves living at this stage
3	Balance concern for self and others	· Maintains good relationships with self and others · Realize that she must care for self in order to care for others · Realize that caring for others can also count as caring for self

So, is it better to hold and ethics of care or an ethics of justice (or, to be more blunt and less PC, which group is more ethical, men or women)?

• According to Gilligan:
• In a Different Voice (1982)
• Women’s morality is just different. It is not worse than, and is not better than men’s morality.
• Fully developed moral agents are likely skillful at both ethics of justice and ethics of care.

• Mapping the Moral Domain (1988)
• Ideal moral thinker holds an ethics of care.
• It is a mistake when we teach kids to “value their heads over their hearts”
• Women and children may exhibit more moral depth than men.

• Questions to ask ourselves to figure out the answer to this question ‘according to us’:
  
  
• Might there be some issues that are better addressed by an ethics of care and some that are better addressed by an ethics of justice? What are examples of both?
  
  
• Are there cases in which justice and care conflict? Can we use our intuitions about these issues to figure out whether we favor either of these ethical styles?
  
  
• Can men in female roles, such as nurses, succeed at an ethics of care? Can women in male roles, Madeline Albright, succeed at justice? Can we think of these roles without thinking of the people holding them as being gendered? (are male nurses ‘womenish? Are female politicians ‘manish’?)