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A Voice with the Ring of Truth The section of Kohlberg's course on moral and political choice that Gilligan taught in 1970 proved unsettling to her—and ultimately life-changing.
"The young men refused," says Gilligan, "to talk about their own draft dilemmas, aware that there was no room in Larry's theory for them to talk freely about their concerns without sounding morally undeveloped, like women, in their thinking about relationships and other people's feelings. "Uneasy about taking a stand in public that was at odds with what they were feeling in private, finding no room for uncertainty and indecision, they chose silence over hypocrisy." With the publication of In a Different Voice, Gilligan directly challenged Kohlberg's theory. Amy, an 11-year-old girl in the book who says "it depends" when asked whether Heinz should steal the drug for his wife, has become well-known in academic circles and in popular culture. Nationally syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman—and Gilligan herself on National Public Radio—invoked Amy's answer in analyzing the reasoning of "traditional moralists" in Washington pursuing the impeachment of President Clinton, for instance. They both argued that Amy's emphasis on relationships would be helpful in analyzing not only Clinton's own explanations and defenses but also how the country should respond. In Gilligan's view, Kohlberg's theory of moral development became "fossilized" and out of touch with a reality that includes the voices of women and people of color. Her questioning of Kohlberg's work, she says, has been nothing more and nothing less than one aspect of "a major cultural shift" taking place in society. Like many of Kohlberg's contemporaries, however, Gilligan acknowledges that she has been deeply influenced by the late moral educator. Gilligan says that what drew her back into psychology when she had all but abandoned the field in the mid-sixties were "two men whose voices had the ring of truth"—the psychologist Erik Erikson, and Kohlberg. She admired Kohlberg's conviction that, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, for psychologists to assume a stance of moral relativism was untenable. "I remember his courage, his determination to talk about moral values in psychology, his bravery in countering the claim that psychology was a value-neutral social science," she says. Several days after meeting Kohlberg at a party in 1968, Gilligan received a phone call from him in which he asked if she would run a study about adolescents' reasoning about sexual decision-making. The two coauthored a paper and developed a friendship. "We often went to the Sheraton to have a glass of wine at the end of the day....We talked about Dostoyevsky and King Lear, our marriages, our lives." But Gilligan became increasingly frustrated by the tenor of the public conversation "where I was talked about but not listened to or heard." So she left the "Kohlberg-Gilligan debate," which to Gilligan "sounded increasingly like one of those wars I had studied in history, the Franco-Prussian War." She says that Kohlberg had helped create characters in the public debate—"Kohlberg" and "Gilligan"—who were different from the real people whose names they shared. Years later, however, accepting the invitation to speak at the 23rd annual conference of the Association for Moral Education seemed right to Gilligan. "I wanted to bring closure to that period of my work and my life," she says. Bob Selman, a colleague in the Human Development and Psychology area, praises Gilligan's "courage" in pursuing her work and offers a theory of his own regarding her relationship with Kohlberg. "Whose impact has been the largest in the department? Without a doubt, it's Carol's," says Selman. "But without 'Kohlberg,' there is no 'Gilligan.' She had the courage to go up against the leaders of human development in the seventies; with Kohlberg, she really had someone to go up against, and at very close range." Selman also points out that Gilligan, unlike Kohlberg, has stayed focused on research. "Some would argue that Larry's attempt to go to practice weakened his academic work," Selman says. But Bob Kegan disagrees. "I don't think it's true that Larry's work became less productive in his later years," he says. "The time he spent building connections to high school faculties and students while implementing his ideas of 'just communities,' for instance, was a quite productive phase. "The fact that poor black kids from the Bronx came and spoke at Larry's memorial service shows that he had made powerful connections during his 'practice' phase," Kegan continues. "And the ideas Larry had been developing about 'moral atmosphere'—the social context that supports moral development—came directly from practice and were very promising." Next page: The Kohlberg Legacy HGSE News, Harvard Graduate School of Education
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