Carol Gilligan

And if you are using a large language model more directly, like Anthropic's Claude or OpenAI's ChatGPT, then you should at least understand that you are not just using this new technology, you are intentionally feeding the machine.

So what does ethics of care actually mean? This concept came to the stage in the 1980s through the work of Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice, 1982, and Nel Noddings, Caring, 1984.

It is a moral philosophy rooted in relationship, attentiveness, and responsiveness to the needs of others.

Others can mean more than other people.

Here's, here's my comparison now.

Remember when you were nine or 10 and you were this independent little girl climbing trees and saying, "I know what I want, I know what I [laughs] think," and so on? That was before gender descended for most of us, as Carol Gilligan has, has pointed out in, in her work.

After 50, m- uh, you've s- theoretically according to society had kids raised them, so your gender role is over.

And ironically, I fo-- [laughs] found by 60 you're free again.

And so here we are.

So today, as promised, we are going to be talking about Carol Gilligan's seminal work, In a Different Voice, Psychological Theory and Women's Development.

And Carol Gilligan was a professor.

I don't know if she still is.

I assume she's retired, but I guess I could have Googled that before we started.

And the thing that she was interested in was development, more generally speaking, children's development, but one of the things that's interesting, I think, about the book is that she is looking at moral development, like the development of the moral sense, and kind of starts out talking about children, but one of the things she's looking at, which is not original to her, I don't think, because she's quoting other psychologists who've done studies as well, but she's looking at how the moral sense is continuing to develop, basically, through the human life cycle up until what she calls midlife and how the moral sense is still you know kind of a i want to say a moving target but i don't want to say developing again because i just said development

so many times uh yeah so the book came out in

1982 carol gilligan um is famed as the originator or one of the originators of feminist psychology because the main argument of the book is looking at the fact that Freud and then other psychologists who are following Freud's uh description of development in children including the development of the moral sense development of identity how you reach maturity these kinds of things all freud basically writes it about boys and then comes up with his

Next week, we are moving into the ethics of care, the feminist philosophical tradition that argues that the dominant frameworks of Western moral philosophy have been built around an individualist, autonomous model of the self that fails to account for the relational, caring dimensions of human life.

Carol Gilligan, Nell Noddings, Virginia Held, and the philosophical tradition they represent.

It connects to de Beauvoir, to Aristotle's account of friendship, and to the practical ethics of how we actually treat the people closest to us.

If this episode made you catch yourself in bad faith about something that is exactly what it was designed to do, share it with someone who needs the vocabulary.