Since 1960, western moral education has been focused on Lawrence Kohlberg's cognitive theory of moral development which was based on Libertarian ethics. It is clear that Kohlberg's understanding of morality is based on the traditional notion of justic...
Since 1960, western moral education has been focused on Lawrence Kohlberg's cognitive theory of moral development which was based on Libertarian ethics. It is clear that Kohlberg's understanding of morality is based on the traditional notion of justice. And in Kohlberg's theory, it's major concern is rational moral reasoning. So it ignores the importance of moral sentiment, feelings and caring for others.
In her influential book In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development Carol Gilligan argued that those who have suggested that women typically reason differently from men about moral issues are right: what is wrong is their assumption of the inferiority or deficiency of female moral reasoning. Her critics suggest that Kohlberg's understanding of morality will be bound to misrepresent women's moral reasoning and set up a typically male pattern of moral reasoning as a standard against which to judge women to be deficient.
Beginning with strong critiques of the nearly exclusive focus on justice, abstract rationality, rights, and individual autonomy in the dominant moral outlooks of recent decades, and recognizing the masculine bias of such a concentration, Gilligan has explored an alternative focus on care. A focus on justice has sometimes been seen as characteristic of men's ways of thinking about morality and a focus on care as characteristic of women's.
Nel Noddings, in her book Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, argue that any such morality based on rule or principle is in itself inadequate, and that it dose not capture what is distinctive or typical about female moral thinking.
Gilligan and Noddings argue that women do not tend to appeal to rules and principles in the same way as men: that they are more likely to concrete and detailed knowledge of situation, and to consider the moral dilemma in terms of the relationships involved.
Women's morality is based on notions of responsibility and loyalty to particular individuals in concrete relationships.
Attending to the experience of women, an ethics of care recognizes that caring for dependent persons is an important activity involving moral value; it sees persons as interdependent rather than as independent individuals and holds that morality should address issues of caring and empathy and relationships between people rather than only or primarily the rational decisions of solitary moral agents.
In any case, the challenge of the "different voice" to modern orthodoxy in moral education, at least, is that by making impartiality fundamental, it disengages ethical thought from any location situated within relationships to particular others, and thus alienates the moral self from the particular other. Morality, then, becomes an obstacle to genuine relationship, rather than the expression of human relationship.
In recent years the most important discussions have been concerned with how justice and care can appropriately be combined from a feminist point of view. To be sure, that's a very hard work, but we have to explore the task continuously.