In a different voice

This book helped change the way I think about ethics and cultural backgrounds and even how one goes about research. Gilligan's book is not and should not be considered in any way supportive of an essentialist argument about what a man's man is and what the fairer sex is. While there are definitive biological and physiological differences, gender differences, those culturally based judgments are rooted not in nature but in fact they come about through nurturing; what we are taught to expect of ourselves and others. Now Gilligan's critique, although presented for women, in principle applies to any culturally defined groups and the assumptions we make about them, us and our relations.

In terms of scientific research, conclusions are often discovered because they were, perhaps unknowingly, expected from the start and the universalizing of such conclusions is suspect at best. This book, taking issue with Lawrence Kohlberg's research into the psychological development of ethics in the individual which culminates in a what he believed was a universal ethic of justice, shows how this supposedly universal ethic is in fact an artifact of a particular culture, in this case a very narrowly defined segment of American culture in the 20th century, namely straight, white, male youths from the upper-middle class socio-economic level.

Her work here shows that there is potentially a fundamental moral developmental track that isn't so based in cultural biases and nurturing, i.e. what we teach our boys to be, but is discovered in the development of girls who, being girls and coming from middle and lower socio-economic levels of society, were largely ignored and developed then in a kind of absence of expectations. This track Gilligan discovered she calls the ethics of Care.

I highly recommend this book for anyone doing any sort of research and in particular as an introduction to the pitfalls of not being aware of one's own and one's cultural expectations and presuppositions.