presentation of reflecting text -B.ed 2nd year (GGSIPU)

1. Gilligan , C (1977). IN A DIFFERENT VOICE:
Women’s Conception of Self and Morality.

2. INTRODUCTION
 The Moral Development theory of Gilligan is primarily
based on understanding the stages of moral development
and decision making as taken by women
 She became independent researcher after working as a
research assistant for Lawrence Kohlberg and went on to
criticize his studies about moral decision making
 Her point of criticism for Kohlberg’s theory was that she
felt he only considered “privileged, white men and boys”
and women were not even considered
 Both Frued and Kohlberg kind of hinted that women are
not able to take morally strong decisions and this led
 This led her to present her own work in “In a different
voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development” in
1982

3.  At level two, the main concern is that goodness is
equated with self sacrifice.
 The second transition begins with the
reconsideration of the relationship between the self
and the other, as the woman starts to scrutinize the
logic of self sacrifice in the service of a morality of
care.
 In separating the voice of the self from those of
others, the woman asks if it is possible to be
responsible to herself as well as to others and to
reconcile the disparity between hurt and care.
The second transition :from
goodness to truth

4.  A twenty –four- year-old married catholic
woman, pregnant again two months following
the birth other first child, identifies her
dilemma as one of choice: “You have to now
decide ;because it is now available, you have to
make a decision. And if it wasn’t available,
there was no choice open; you just do what you
have to do.”
 The conventional stage or goodness of self
sacrifice is where women think of themselves
as selfless and begin to care more about
others.
 This stage allows women to find solutions
where no one is hurt.

5. When we talk about a women we come across a common term that
is SACRIFICE. In a different voice by Gilligan we witnessed
the same. When a 24 year Catholic women took part in the
discussion to determine whether she was suppressing her feelings
or not regarding to her pregnancy. The whole discussion was
regarding the concern, her description of herself.
She says that in a way she is very selfish for one thing, at the same
time she is an emotional, understanding, and a real person
She believes that she handles life very fairly. She does or did many
things basing on her ability and feels that are right for her.
She then takes the discussion towards the needs of both and
others, life is all about being ‘good’ to others and ‘honest’ to
herself.

6. Attention to one’s need is what we say being SELFISH.
When we take a different perspective it is called
HONESTY AND FAIRNESS.
She thinks that Abortion is wrong as you are killing a
life before taking birth, and it will be wrong until the
situation is justified. But in her search for justification
her thinking got a little bit changed, she thinks that if
she continues her pregnancy she will not only punish
herself but she will also punish her husband towards
whom she is not having any feelings nowadays and feels
his presence irritating.
She then says that whether her decision will be forgiven
by God? because according to her she is doing the right
thing which is best for her.

7. Later, she mentioned that for her the term ABORTION
was a fancy word for MURDER. She considers two
options for herself
That is either ABORTION or ADOPTION as keeping the
child for reasons that are related too the society,
parents and family are impractical as she wanted to do
what she felt was right for her and as she mentioned
that she was not ready for a child, she was not ready to
become a mother.
She later mentions that psychologically she knew that
for adoption was also not possible, it took her 4.5 years
to get into a conclusion and she realized that the
question is not between killing the fetus or damaging
herself, the choice is more complicated as by
continuing the pregnancy she will not only hurt herself
but will also her parents.

8. Further she mentions that she was not doing this abortion for
herself but was for her parents, or else she never believed in
abortions. She was so guilty with this whole fact of abortion that
she had a word regarding this situation with her counselor Maureen
who help her to came out of this horrible feeling.
As long as we keep her perception in mind Abortion is just an act of
SACRIFICE. If we do something which is morally wrong we tend to
loose self respect. She then states that ABORTION is morally wrong
as in Catholics it is a wrong deed to kill someone before their birth,
but her since the situations demand her to do it then it is not at all
wrong.
On being asked ‘ how will you change something which is morally
wrong into morally right?
She replies that nothing is ever wrong in life, everything happens
for a reason, but the situation usually contradicts and something
right changes into something wrong.

9. Gilligan’s stages of the Ethics of
Care
Gilligan's stages of the Ethics of Care
STAGE GOAL
Preconventional Goal is individual survival
Transition is from selfishness to responsibility to others
Conventional Selfsacrifice is goodness
Transition is from goodness to truth that she is also a person
Post conventional Principle of non violence: do not hurt others or self

10. Brief on second stage of moral
development
 Gilligan describes this stage as “Conventional”. The
salient points of this stage are:
 Responsibility
 More care shown for other people
 She says this is shown in the role of mother and wife
 Situations sometime lead to ignoring needs of self
This, a transitional phase, many a times leads to strain or
tension between responsibility of taking care of others
and taking care of one’s own self

11. Example 1
 Galligan describes this through and interview with an unmarried
musician woman
 The woman was pregnant and wanted to have an abortion based on 2
premises:
 She had already given her first child for adoption and took a long
time to get over it, and she was in no strength to go through that
again
 She was not physically, financially and emotionally ready to have a
child again
 This all led her to take a stand that, “though she found abortion
morally wrong and a fancy word for ‘murder’, but she HAD to do it
because the situation demanded so
 She even questions the idea of ‘euthanasia’ and tries to explore the
‘gray’ area between right and wrong
 She questions the ‘rightness of hurting herself’ in the same line as
hurting others in the name of morality

12. Example 2
 Gilligan further explains it in an interview with a musician in her late twenties
 She considered herself as “fairly strong-willed, rational and in-control”
 She got into an intense love affair and went with the flow, got pregnant and
found out that her lover was married
 She was then ‘caught’ between 2 choices
 Ending the relationship that was making her feel “more and more
defeated”, or
 Going ahead with the baby, which would be a “connection for a really long
time”
 Conflict was between:
 Her ‘moral belief’: that once a life has begun, it shouldn’t be stopped
artificially, and
 The baby would be needing much more support than she thought earlier
 In between her choices of ‘socially acceptable moral obligation’ and her own
desires of aborting the baby, she considers the latter as “selfish”. This is
because she is putting her own self needs before anything else. She thinks
that she is not ready for this responsibility and wants to abort

13. THE THIRD LEVEL:
THE MORALITY OF NONVIOLENCE
A 25 year old women, facing disappointment, finding a way
to reconcile the initially disparate concept of selfishness and
responsibility through a transformed understanding of self
and a corresponding redefinition of morality.
Women experience first pregnancy when her lover had left
and she aborted child out of frustation.But, two year later,
She experience her second pregnancy news although
initially feels ecstatic at news of pregnancy but her elation
dissipate when her lover put condition before her. He will
leave if she chose to have the child

14.  Lady is in dilemma. She neither want to end incipient life of
child nor she want to leave relationship.
 Pros:
 Admiration
 Home life
 Good relationship
 Cons:
 End of relationship
 Solitude
 Parents rejection
 Lose of good job
 Lose of Independence
 Guilt of ending unborn child
 Lady perception about herself is her need are secondary to
other people

15. MORALITY
Morality is what is appropriate and what is
within our circumstances but it should not
negatively affect another person.
According to Gilligan, it is not possible,
decisions always affect another person. The
person is the Centre of decision making.

16. DILEMMA
FEMINITY ADULTHOOD

17. AMBITIOUS PERSON
POWER
HUNGRY
INSENSITIVE

18. Questions reader what Morality
means to them
According to her nobody in the
world knows the answer. She thinks
it is recognizing the right of
individual and others and not
interfering with those rights.

19.  INTERVIEW 1 (with a male of 25 year old)
Q 1 what does the word morality mean to you?
 Ans : it is recognizing the right of the individual, the right of the
other individual and not to interfere with those rights.
 INTERVIEW 2 (with a male collage senior)
 Ans: it is a prescription which you have to follow ,the idea of
having a concept of morality is to try to figure out what is that
people can do to make life with each other livable , make for a
kind of balance, a kind of equilibrium, a harmony in which
everybody feels he has a place and an equal share in things.

20. INTERVIEW 3( with a women in her late 20s)
 Ans : morality is to take care of someone. It is about
taking care of all the thing which is important to you.
 Interview 4 (with a women of about 30 year old)
Q. Is here any right way to make moral decision?
 Ans: The only way to do this is to be awake as possible,
to know the range of what you feel, to try to consider
all that ‘s involved, to be aware as you can be . The
principal would have something to do with
responsibility and caring about others.

21. • Based on all these interviews Gilligan has found that men
and women use different approaches towards morality.
• The male approach to morality is that individual have
certain basic rights and that you have to respect and the
right of others and thus to protect from interference the
right to life and self fulfillment.
• The female approach to morality is that people have
responsibilities towards others . So morality is an
imperative to are for others. Women’s construction of the
moral problem as a problem of care and responsibility
inrelationships rather than as one of rights and rules ties
the development of their moral thinking to changes in
their understanding of responsibility and relationships
• Male morality has a justice orientation and female morality
has a responsibility orientation.

22. • The woman whose judgement of abortion dilemma concluded the developmental
sequence presented in the preceding section saw Kohlberg’s Heinz dilemma in
terms of a choice between selfishness and sacrifice.
• Heinz’s decision to steal the drug is considered not in terms of the logical priority of
life over property, but is rather seen as the actual consequences that stealing would
have for a man with little power.
• When asked about passing a judgement, she says:
“Everybody’s existence is so different that I kind of say to myself, that might be
something that I wouldn’t do, but I cannot say that it is right or wrong for that
person. I can only deal with what is appropriate for me to do when I am faced with
specific problems.”
• She sees Heinz’s decision as:
“ the result of anguish, who am I hurting, why do I have to hurt them.”
• While the morality of Heinz’s theft is not in question, what is at issue is his
willingness to substitute himself for his wife and become the victim of exploitation
by the society.

23.  Gilligan criticized Lorence kohlberg’s theory in the text.
She believes that this theory do not take into account
gender even though girls do in fact develop moral
orientations differently from the boys.
 In fact Gilligan criticized Mohandas K. Gandhi also that:
“I was a cruelly kind husband. I regarded myself as her
teacher and also so harassed her out of my blind love for her.”
“Gandhi compromised in his everyday life the ethic of
non-violence to which in principle and public he was so
steadfasly committed”.

24.  Gandhi is frequently cited as an exemplar moral
reasoning and action. Elsewhere I have chronicled the
development of Gandhi’s moral reasoning have argued
that M.K. Gandhi the sixth and highest of the stages of
moral reasoning described by the psychologist
Lowrence Kohlberg.
 Gilligan also talked about Shakespeare’s play that is
“The Merchant of Vanice” which is about the contrast
between the sexes. Where Skakespeare goes through
an extraordinary complication of sexual identity (
dressing a male actor as a female character who in turn
poses as a male judge) in order to bring into the
masculine citadel of the feminine plea for mercy.

26.  What is morality?
As we, human beings grow, we somehow develop the ability to assess what is
right or wrong, acceptable or unacceptable.
 How it develops?
Carol Gilligan found out that morality develops by looking at much more than
justice. She noted that girls are more concerned with care, relationships and
connections with other people than boys.
 Gilligan negates Kohlberg’s theory:
Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory is criticised by Gilligan at many instances in the
text. She believes that this theory do not take into account gender even though
girls do in fact develop moral orientations differently from the boys.
 According to Gilligan, the central moral problem for women is
conflict between the self and other.
 Gilligan’s theory has had both positive as well as negative implications
in the field of psychology.
 Her theory hold particular implications for adolescent girls specifically
as this is typically when they enter the transitional level of TWO to THREE.

27. Conclusion
 In the book, Gilligan criticized Kohlberg's stages of
moral development of children. Kohlberg’s data
showed that girls on average reached a lower level of
moral development than boys did.
 Gilligan hated Kohlberg's ways of collecting data. NOT
REAL LIFE!. She used qualitative data(interviews) with
real peoples for richer sense. Central focus on ‘real life’.

28. • Gilligan has found that men and women use
fundamentally different approaches and since
men have dominated the discussion of moral
theory, women’s perspective is often not taken
seriously, and is considered to be less developed
and sophisticated.

29. • So in the preconventional stage- for her you can see,
its all about me. Me is at the center. For Gilligan
people made decisions based on selfish reasons.
• For Vietnam, a decision to ‘’I don’t want to go because
i don’t wanna get killed.
• For women, she interviewed women who were
contemplating abortion at the same time and when
she asked why are you doing this? The women could
say ‘’well, I don’t want to have baby because I don’t
want to stop having fun.
• At the core- these reasons all about me.

30. • Now the next stage for her conventional-
conventional is about self sacrifice.
• Giving of something of yourself to help someone
else, that’s a good thing.
• Eg: a little boy is sharing ice-cream cone with the
little girl- he is giving up something that he likes.
• Now this is an expectation of society that you will
give something up to help others.
• Such as I am gonna go to Vietnam because I am
going to be able to save someone’s life because I am
going to be able to save someone’s life or I am not
going to have this baby because I do not have the
financial resources to take care of this baby.

31. • Now post conventional-here rule says “do not harm”
that’s what this is about.
• Make the choices where you do not inflict pain on
other but again do not harm.
• Contribute to the world and make it better don’t
make it worse. So that’s Gilligan perspective.
• Again she focused on genders having different
emphasis when making moral decisions-men
emphasize justice, women emphasize relationships
and social interactions.
• We start being all about me and at the end we end up
all about doing no harm and making the world a
better place.