FEMINIST THOUGHT

The Roots of Care-Focused Feminism 165
any conventional morality. The adult is no longer ruled by self-interest, the
opinion of others, or the force of legal convention but by self-legislated and
self-imposed universal principles such as justice, reciprocity, and respect for the
dignity of human persons. 5
Gilligan took exception to Kohlberg’s sixfold scale not because she regarded it
as entirely without merit but because girls and women tested on it rarely got
past Stage Three, the good-boy/nice-girl stage. Fearing that people would interpret
this test result as confirming Freud’s view that women are less moral than
men, Gilligan set out to prove that women’s low scores on Kohlberg’s test were
undeserved. She hypothesized that women did poorly on Kohlberg’s scale
because of its flawed design. It was, in her estimation, a test constructed to measure
men’s method of moral reasoning, as if men’s way of moral reasoning was
the standard of human moral reasoning. As a result of the scale’s faulty construction,
women who did not morally reason like men did poorly on it. Gilligan
claimed the solution to this state of affairs was not to construct a test to measure
women’s method of moral reasoning, as if women’s way of moral reasoning was
the standard of human moral reasoning. Rather, the solution was to develop a
test that could accurately measure both men’s and women’s moral development.
Neither men nor women should be viewed as the morally inferior sex.
Eager to understand more about how women reason toward a moral decision,
Gilligan conducted an empirical study of twenty-nine pregnant women.
Each of these women was deciding whether to abort her fetus. Gilligan interviewed
these women as they were working through their decision and sometimes
after they had done so. She eventually concluded that no matter their
age, social class, marital status, or ethnic background, each of these women
manifested a way of thinking about moral matters that differed markedly
from that of the men tested on Kohlberg’s moral development scale. Rather
than approaching the abortion decision analytically as if they were scientists
trying to determine whose rights weigh more—the fetus’s or the woman’s—
the women in Gilligan’s study approached the abortion decision as a human
relations problem. They worried about how their decision would affect not
only the fetus but also themselves in connection to their partners, parents,
friends, and so on, and they moved back and forth between three levels of
moral reasoning as they sought to make moral sense of their abortion decision.
Gilligan noted that the women who failed to come fully to terms with
their abortion decision remained stuck either in Level One moral reasoning,
in which the moral agent overemphasizes her own interests, or in Level Two
moral reasoning, in which the moral agent overemphasizes others’ interests.
In contrast, the women who engaged in Level Three moral reasoning, in
which the moral agents strike a balance between their own interests and those
of others, appeared most at peace with their abortion decision. 6