Objectives:
-- Subjectives --
articles pp. 708 to 711 and 720 to 723
and either the article starting on p. 711 or on p.723
and don't forget -- one Decision scenario!
From Part V read pp 786 - 793 (Care Ethics / Feminist critique)View this Video NOTE: I only want you to watch the segment at the end. as soon as the RealPlayer loads, click on the slide-bar and move the start point up to the 1:39 mark -- that should get you to the last program on the video, on PAS. Kohlberg and Gilligan RE: Rachels on the "active v. passive" distinction Read and react to "It's Over Debbie" in Bb Discussion Board,
and Presentations as they are postedFYI only: Five Wishes (good site re: advanced directives; can view document without purchasing print-out. Good, "plain English" format) Journal / Interaction InfoTrac
This should help illustrate both Kohlberg and Gilligan's critique of Kohlberg. The following is culled from this website:
http://www.stolaf.edu/people/huff/classes/handbook/Gilligan.html
The whole article is not that long and may be of interest folks involved in gender differences and cognitive (and moral) development.
For more information on Kohlberg, try this site:
http://plato.acadiau.ca/courses/educ/piper/kohlberg.html
But I think what is written below -- esp. about "Heinze's Dilemma" -- is sufficient.
THE MASCULINE ASCENT UP THE STEPS OF JUSTICE
Gilligan believes that the field of psychology has tried to treat women as if they were men. Psychologists who study moral and intellectual development have assumed that male experience is the typical way childish views of right and wrong grow into adult ethical thinking. When women don’t follow the normative path laid out by men, "the conclusion has generally been that something is wrong with women."11
To understand the basis of Gilligan’s criticism, you need to be familiar with the work of her well-known colleague at Harvard, psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg. He measured ethical maturity by analyzing responses to hypothetical moral dilemmas. The story of a man named Heinz is typical of the case studies he used.12
In Europe, a woman was near death from a very bad disease, a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to make. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman’s husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could get together only about $1,000, which was half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said, "No, I discovered the drug and I’m going to make money from it." Heinz got desperate and broke into the man’s store to steal the drug for his wife.
Should the husband have done that? Was it right or wrong? Most people say that Heinz’s theft was morally justified, but Kohlberg was less concerned about whether they approved or disapproved than with the reasons they gave for their answers. Starting in the 1950s with a group of seventy-five boys ranging in age from ten through sixteen, he monitored the reasons they gave for their judgment over a twenty-year period. He was able to isolate six distinct stages of moral thought. Each stage built on previous thinking, but each one also represented a qualitative jump from the type of reasoning that went before. From Kohlberg’s standpoint, higher meant better. Although most of his subjects never reached the highest stages, those who did invariably went through the sequence one stage at a time without ever skipping a step or reversing the order. Figure 8-1 shows Kohlberg’s hierarchy of moral development and the type of comments people make about the Heinz case at each stage of their thinking. He regarded moving from concrete interests to general principles as a sign of moral maturity. Whereas Korzybski (see Chapter 5) was suspicious of abstract concepts like justice, truth, and freedom, Kohlberg stated unequivocally that the universal principle of justice is the highest claim of morality.
Figure 8-1 is reproduced in the Adobe Acrobat version of this file.
NOT ALL PEOPLE ARE MEN
Gilligan worked closely with Kohlberg at Harvard, and they coauthored an article which reported on the use of his theory in analyzing adolescent development.13 But the more she used Kohlberg’s criteria to judge moral sophistication, the more she became uncomfortable with the way women are categorized in his model of development. According to his method of analysis, the average young adult female scores a full stage lower than her male counterpart.
Gilligan notes that men respond decisively to Heinz-type dilemmas, using set prescriptions or formulas to line up each person’s rights. It’s like a math problem to be solved. The story contains enough information for the listener to plug in the variables and solve the equation to get the "right" answer (Stage 4).
Women, however, are uncomfortable responding to hypothetical ethical dilemmas. They ask for more information about the characters, their history, and their relationships. They seem to feel that the storyteller has asked the wrong question. The real question for them isn’t "Should Heinz steal the drug?" The issue is "Should Heinz steal the drug?" Females look for ways of resolving the dilemma where no one-Heinz, his wife, or the druggist-will experience pain. Gilligan sees this hesitation to judge as a laudable quest for nonviolence, an aversion to cruel situations where someone will get hurt. But Kohlberg considered it a sign of ethical relativism, a waffling which results from trying to please everyone (Stage 3).
Gilligan charges that Kohlberg’s downgrading of female moral sensitivity was just another case in a long history of male intellectual bias. Freud claimed that "women show less sense of justice than men.. . , that they are often more influenced in their judgments by feelings of affection or hostility."‘* He called women’s relationships the "dark continent" of psychology. Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget wrote that "the most superficial observation is sufficient to show that in the main, the legal sense is far less developed in little girls than in boys?15
Gilligan doesn’t challenge the fact that there are differences of identity and moral reasoning between the sexes. On the contrary, she develops her theory to explain these differences. But it does bother her that Kohlberg’s influential theory relegates loyalty, compassion, and care for the individual to a lower plane than individual rights and justice. It seems to her "an unfair paradox that the very traits that have traditionally defined the ‘goodness’ of women are those that mark them as deficient in moral development."i6 To those who would claim that Kohlberg was merely reporting the facts of his twenty-year study, Gilligan points out that his is a theory conceived by a man and tested on an all-male sample. She has no quarrel with its validity for those who see ethics in terms of justice, but she objects that psychology has "tried to fashion women out of a masculine cloth." Her thesis is that most women speak in a different-but not inferior-moral voice.