Kohlberg vs. Gilligan: Theories of Moral Development in Gender

When we talk about how people develop a sense of right and wrong, two names consistently dominate the conversation: Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan. Kohlberg built what became the dominant framework for understanding moral development across the lifespan. Gilligan, once his research assistant at Harvard, challenged that framework head-on – arguing it was built on a foundation that excluded half the population. The debate between them is not just academic. It asks a deeper question: does gender shape the way we reason about morality, and if so, what does that mean for how we measure moral development?

Kohlberg’s stages of moral development 🔗

Lawrence Kohlberg built his theory in the late 1950s by expanding on Jean Piaget’s earlier work on cognitive development. His central argument was that moral reasoning is not just about what a person decides is right or wrong – it is about why they decide it. Using a method of presenting participants with hypothetical moral dilemmas, most famously the “Heinz dilemma” (in which a man must decide whether to steal a drug to save his dying wife), Kohlberg categorized responses into a six-stage model organized across three broad levels.

The three levels and six stages 🔗

At the preconventional level, moral reasoning is self-centered. In Stage 1 (Obedience and Punishment Orientation), a person avoids wrong behavior to escape punishment. In Stage 2 (Self-Interest Orientation), decisions are based on personal gain – a transactional view of fairness. This level is most common in young children.

At the conventional level, the focus shifts to social expectations. Stage 3 (Good Interpersonal Relationships) involves wanting to be seen as a good person by others. Stage 4 (Maintaining Social Order) centers on following laws and rules to uphold society. Most adults reason at this level, where moral decisions are guided by what society expects rather than individual principles.

The postconventional level represents abstract, principled thinking. In Stage 5 (Social Contract and Individual Rights), laws are seen as social agreements that should serve justice and can be revised. In Stage 6 (Universal Ethical Principles), moral decisions are guided by self-chosen ethical principles – concepts like human dignity and equality – even if they conflict with existing laws. Kohlberg believed very few people consistently operate at this stage.

The gender problem built into the model 🔗

A critical flaw in Kohlberg’s research design was that his original sample consisted entirely of male participants. When the same scoring criteria were later applied to girls and women, they tended to score lower – typically plateauing around Stage 3, the “good relationships” stage. Kohlberg interpreted this as evidence that females were less morally developed than males on average. This conclusion, as Gilligan would soon argue, said more about the limitations of the model than about the moral capacities of women.

Carol Gilligan’s critique of Kohlberg 🔗

Carol Gilligan was a psychologist working alongside Kohlberg at Harvard when she began to notice a consistent pattern: the women she interviewed reasoned about moral problems differently, but that difference was being scored as a deficit. Her 1982 book, In a Different Voice, laid out her critique in full – and it reshaped the field.

Gilligan’s central argument was that Kohlberg’s theory was androcentric – male-centered. She argued that psychology had implicitly adopted the male life as the norm, and then tried to measure women against it. Because Kohlberg’s highest stages emphasized abstract principles of justice and individual rights, the more relationship-focused moral reasoning common among women was systematically undervalued. Women were not less moral – they were moral in a way the model was not designed to recognize.

Gilligan also took issue with Kohlberg’s method. The Heinz dilemma and others like it were abstract, hypothetical, and largely disconnected from lived experience. She argued that Kohlberg’s scoring method favored a principled, rule-based approach to moral problems – one more familiar to male respondents – over a relational approach more familiar to female respondents. The problem was not that women couldn’t engage with abstract principles, but that their moral thinking routinely brought in context, relationships, and responsibility in ways the framework penalized.

Care perspective vs. justice perspective 🔗

Gilligan proposed that moral reasoning is not a single track, but at minimum two distinct orientations. She called these the ethics of justice and the ethics of care.

The ethics of justice 🔗

This is the orientation Kohlberg’s model was built around. It treats morality as a matter of rights, rules, and fairness. Moral problems are resolved by identifying principles – who has which right, and which rule applies. The ethics of justice applies social contract logic to moral decisions, measuring outcomes against standards of equality and individual rights. According to Gilligan, this orientation was more commonly found in men and more heavily rewarded by Kohlberg’s scoring system.

The ethics of care 🔗

Gilligan’s ethics of care centers on relationships, responsibilities, and the prevention of harm to others. Rather than asking “what is the rule here?” it asks “how will this affect the people involved?” Gilligan formulated an ethics of care based on responsibility to self and others, following a different developmental sequence than Kohlberg’s justice-based model. Crucially, she did not argue that care reasoning was exclusively female or that justice reasoning was exclusively male – only that care reasoning was more common among women, had been dismissed as immature, and deserved to be treated as a full moral orientation in its own right.

Gilligan described three stages in the development of care-based moral reasoning. At the first stage, the focus is self-oriented – the individual prioritizes personal needs. At the second stage, self-interest gives way to responsibility for others, sometimes at the cost of one’s own needs. At the third and most mature stage, a person recognizes that both self and others matter, and that genuine moral responsibility involves caring for both without sacrificing either. This final stage, she argued, was just as sophisticated as Kohlberg’s postconventional reasoning – just structured differently.

Jake and Amy: a concrete example 🔗

Gilligan illustrates the difference between justice and care reasoning through the responses of two 11-year-olds, Jake and Amy, to the Heinz dilemma. Jake approaches the dilemma as a logical problem, confidently weighing property rights against the right to life. Amy, by contrast, is more hesitant – not because she doesn’t understand the dilemma, but because she is thinking through the relational consequences. What happens to Heinz if he is caught? What happens to his wife if he isn’t? Under Kohlberg’s scoring, Jake’s confident, rule-based answer scores higher. Gilligan argues Amy’s response reflects a different – not inferior – moral intelligence.

Research on gender and moral reasoning 🔗

The Kohlberg-Gilligan debate has been one of the most empirically tested disputes in developmental psychology. The bulk of the evidence offers a nuanced – and somewhat surprising – conclusion: gender differences in moral reasoning exist, but they are smaller and less consistent than either theory would predict.

What the meta-analyses show 🔗

The most comprehensive quantitative review of the evidence is a meta-analysis by Jaffee and Hyde (2000), which analyzed studies comparing men’s and women’s moral orientation. The findings confirmed that women showed a small tendency toward care-based reasoning (effect size d = -.28) and men toward justice-based reasoning (d = .19). These differences are statistically meaningful but small – and they do not support the strong claim that women reason primarily through care and men primarily through justice. Both orientations appear in both groups.

Similarly, a review of Kohlberg’s moral stage scores found that gender differences in developmental stage were largely negligible. Walker’s meta-analysis of 66 studies found an effect size of just d = .046, meaning gender explained less than one-twentieth of one percent of the variability in moral reasoning stage. When educational level was controlled for, even the modest differences observed tended to disappear.

What actually predicts moral reasoning 🔗

Research consistently finds that variables other than gender are stronger predictors of moral reasoning. Education, cultural context, socioeconomic status, and individual personality all account for significantly more variance than sex does. Among college-educated participants in particular, researchers found no meaningful difference in moral judgment scores between men and women. This suggests that socialization and access to education may play a larger role in shaping moral reasoning than gender itself.

Cross-cultural research adds further complexity. Using data from 67 countries, Atari, Lai, and Dehgani (2020) found that women consistently showed greater concern for care, fairness, and purity across cultures – but loyalty and authority showed no gender differences and varied widely across cultures. This suggests that some tendencies may be more universal while others are deeply shaped by cultural norms and expectations.

A shift in the broader debate 🔗

Following the accumulation of evidence showing small effect sizes, some researchers have called for the field to move beyond debating gender differences in moral reasoning altogether. Walker (2006) argued that the focus should shift from gender differences to broader questions about moral maturity and the psychological processes that underlie moral functioning. This does not mean Gilligan’s contribution is dismissed – her critique of androcentric measurement remains valid and important. What it does mean is that morality is not usefully understood as divided along gender lines.

The more lasting value of the Gilligan-Kohlberg debate may be precisely this: it exposed the danger of building universal theories from non-representative samples, and it legitimized care-based reasoning as a genuine form of moral sophistication rather than a developmental shortcoming. Both justice and care, it turns out, are human orientations – not male and female ones.

What do you think? If both care and justice are valid moral orientations, why do you think care-based reasoning was historically treated as less developed? And do you believe that small, measurable differences in how men and women approach moral dilemmas are better explained by biology, socialization, or something else entirely?

References

1. https://www.simplypsychology.org/kohlberg.html
2. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-lifespandevelopment/chapter/kohlbergs-stages-of-moral-development/
3. https://www.vaia.com/en-us/explanations/psychology/gender/kohlberg-theory/
4. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3381683/
5. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Carol-Gilligan
6. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10108041/
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_a_Different_Voice
8. https://www.afirstlook.com/docs/diffvoice.pdf
9. https://copernicanrevolution.org/psychology-of-gender/in-a-different-voice
10. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10989620/
11. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/241727395_Gender_Differences_in_Moral_Sensitivity_A_Meta-Analysis
12. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg's_stages_of_moral_development
13. https://ijip.in/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/18.01.183.20210903.pdf