Turning to Habermas’s account of moral development, I want to look at his effort to clarify some of the conceptual problems in Kohlberg’s theory. Drawing from Selman’s stages of perspective taking, Habermas endeavors to provide a more plausible grounding for the logic of moral development and to show how the demanding process of ideal role-taking […]

Gilligan’s claims about a different moral voice have changed over the last decade in response to critics and as a result of the further development of her own research. I want to highlight two aspects of this change: the empirical, which includes the evidence for the different voice and the issue of develop­mental stages, and […]

Jodi Dean A twofold claim underlies Habermas’s assertion that discourse ethics provides a procedural reconstruction of the moral intuitions of competent subjects; namely, that discourse ethics presents a theory of morality and that this theory is situated at the post-conventional level. First, moral intuitions are those that tell us “how best to behave in situations […]

While feminists and women’s historians like Linda Kerber criticized Carol Gilligan’s work methodologically for neglecting the historicity of her results and for ignoring the historical determinants of women’s difference which she had identified in moral theory, others argued that the kind of “difference” which Gilligan had described as being primarily, even if not exclusively, female […]

In subsequent reflections on her work, Gilligan noted that she had deliberately called her work “in a different voice” and not a “women’s voice.”28 She was not concerned to identify “sex difference” in “moral reasoning,” as some of her critics maintained. Rather, she compared women’s experience with psycho­logical theory—the subtitle of her book—in order to […]

Carol Gilligan’s work challenges universalist moral theories in the Kantian tradition to expand their definition of the moral domain, to question their ideals of the autonomous self in the light of the experiences of women and children, and to acknowledge that a universalist moral theory must also heed the voice of the “excluded others.” In […]

Undoubtedly, Gilligan’s work invoked the widespread recognition and contro­versy that it did because it reflected the coming-of-age of women’s scholarship within the paradigms of normal science. Equally significant, however, was that the kinds of questions which Gilligan was asking of the Kohlbergian para­digm were also being asked of universalist neo-Kantian moral philosophies by a growing […]

Seyla Benhabib The contemporary debate over women and moral theory, which was prompted in 1982 with the publication of Carol Gilligan’s In A Different Voice, has generated an impressive literature of a truly multidisciplinary nature. Reflecting back on the various themes and disagreements of this debate, we can isolate several reasons why Gilligan’s work, in […]

Following Durkheim and Weber, Habermas argues that social and political institutions cannot be maintained solely through force or strategic manipu­lation.34 Although the threat of sanctions or the prospect of rewards are often part of what motivates citizens to play by the rules, by themselves such inducements cannot guarantee mass loyalty and stability. Stability requires that […]

There is a price to pay for the pursuit of this dialectical forum. That price is inefficiency. Consensual will-formation takes a long time. When a decision has to be made, stamina sometimes is as important as argument. Although the ideal of consensus guided all policy-making at the Seneca Peace Camp, “in reality decisions were often […]