Ethics: Approaching Moral Decisions (Contours of Christian Philosophy)

by Arthur F. Holmes

Psychologists had created tests to assess the reasoning skills traditionally used in resolving moral dilemmas, but in the 1980s Carol Gilligan noticed that women score significantly lower on such tests than men. Why, she asked, would that be so? Is it that women approach moral problems differently than men, that something other than reasoning skills is involved? What about women’s moral experience is different? They experience childbirth of course, and they nurse and nurture children; and they face demands they did not choose, the unavoidable involvements of relationships in which they find themselves, the families into which they were born, the communities in which they live, and the unpredictable circumstances of life. They define themselves in terms of these relationships, Gilligan points out,[5] and feel deeply the responsibility. When conflicting responsibilities pose moral problems, they judge themselves as moral agents by their ability to care and to remain sensitive to the concerns of others individually and to the wider context of those concerns. Based on these distinctives of a woman’s experience, feminist writers have therefore developed an ethic of responsibility and mutual caring. Men, they contend, generally think in terms of conflicting rights rather than conflicting responsibilities. They appeal to abstract principles like justice and equality, and pursue right reason regardless of situational differences.