carol gilligan ethics of care term paper
Excerpt by Term Newspaper:
Jean Gilligan – Ethics of Care
The central topic to Jean Gilligan’s discussion is that while women more frequently focus on treatment, men target more about justice. The “care orientation, ” relating to Gilligan, focuses on mental relationships of attachment. Gilligan suggests that “humans who think in terms of the care alignment define themselves in terms of a method of associations, connections, loyalties and circles of concern. ” (University of Reading Website)
The author likewise argues that psychology provides “persistently and systematically misunderstood women – their causes, their ethical commitments, the course of all their psychological progress, and their particular view of what is crucial in life. ” (Harvard). ) A point she challenges is the fact if man development is essentially a matter of accelerating separation coming from others to attain autonomy and independence, will that mean that ladies have failed to grow into mature adults in case their development involves a continuing and unresolved fight to balance all their responsibilities in front of large audiences with their determination to themselves? (Ibid)
Gillian’s argument is a reaction to the male-centered character psychology of Freud and Erickson, and the male-centered developmental psychology of Kohlberg. Her complaint isn’t that it is unjust and unfair to leave women out of mindset, but rather that “it is not good psychology if it leaves out half the human competition. ” (St. Olaf College)
Lawrence Kohlberg, Gilligan’s instructor at Harvard, had the subsequent three-phase stage theory that was to affect her long term findings. The pre-conventional meaning stage (up to age group nine) will be based upon the cognitive abilities of a child as a solution to guidelines and interpersonal expectations and differentiate among right and wrong, performing according to how individual been lifted, with incentive and abuse as the foundation of behavioral patterns. The conventional level (between time of 9 and 20) is based on the power of the child or young adult to “de-center” their very own moral galaxy and combine the meaningful perspective with their parents to members of society as a whole. In other words, the adolescent will behave in any given approach according to the manner in which he or she was raised – as well as what their particular friends believe and perhaps also what the regulation dictates. The third stage, the post-conventional stage (20 years and older), deals with a great adult’s capability to base values on general standards. In this instance, the person will no longer simply welcomes the beliefs and best practice rules of the groupings to which he / she belongs; rather, the person now tries to see situations by different angles, taking every interests into consideration; this is the wondering phase. As an example, if an mature at this stage is asked why something is wrong, the response will be derived from pre- determined techniques that examine aspects such as fairness or equality to all in terms of meaning justice and human rights, while recognizing that people in just about any given society hold many different conflicting views and views. Albeit, the focus should be on reaching reasonable agreement and consensus. (Velasquez, M, pp. 27-30. )
Of course , there has been much criticism of Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory; his key opposition becoming not one other that Gilligan who believes that women must not be treated as if they are males. With regards to the issue of rights, Gilligan – based on info gathered coming from sensitive selection interviews with girls – concluded that women are more in tune with being obviously helpful and caring and this people generally connected better with many other humans instead of rely only on rights for support. Gilligan claimed that Kohlberg
