SEMI FINAL COVERAGE IN SW 102

MODULE 10

Developmental Stages of Intellectual Development of Jean Piaget

How Piaget Developed the Theory

Piaget was born in Switzerland in the late 1800s and was a precocious student, publishing his first scientific paper when he was just 11
years old. His early exposure to the intellectual development of children came when he worked as an assistant to Alfred Binet and
Theodore Simon as they worked to standardize their famous IQ test.

Much of Piaget's interest in the cognitive development of children was inspired by his observations of his own nephew and daughter.
These observations reinforced his budding hypothesis that children's minds were not merely smaller versions of adult minds.

Up until this point in history, children were largely treated simply as smaller versions of adults. Piaget was one of the first to identify
that the way that children think is different from the way adults think.

Instead, he proposed, intelligence is something that grows and develops through a series of stages. Older children do not just think
more quickly than younger children, he suggested. Instead, there are both qualitative and quantitative differences between the
thinking of young children versus older children.

Based on his observations, he concluded that children were not less intelligent than adults, they simply think differently. Albert Einstein
called Piaget's discovery "so simple only a genius could have thought of it."

Piaget's stage theory describes the cognitive development of children. Cognitive development involves changes in cognitive process and
abilities.2 In Piaget's view, early cognitive development involves processes based upon actions and later progresses to changes in
mental operations.

The 4 Stages of Cognitive Development

Background and Key Concepts of Piaget's Theory

Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development suggests that children move through four different stages of mental development. His
theory focuses not only on understanding how children acquire knowledge, but also on understanding the nature of intelligence.1
Piaget's stages are:

Sensorimotor stage: birth to 2 years

Preoperational stage: ages 2 to 7
Concrete operational stage: ages 7 to 11
Formal operational stage: ages 12 and up

Piaget believed that children take an active role in the learning process, acting much like little scientists as they perform experiments,
make observations, and learn about the world. As kids interact with the world around them, they continually add new knowledge, build
upon existing knowledge, and adapt previously held ideas to accommodate new information.

The Sensorimotor Stage

Ages: Birth to 2 Years

Major Characteristics and Developmental Changes:

  The infant knows the world through their movements and sensations

 Children learn about the world through basic actions such as sucking, grasping, looking, and listening

 Infants learn that things continue to exist even though they cannot be seen (object permanence)

 They are separate beings from the people and objects around them

 They realize that their actions can cause things to happen in the world around them

During this earliest stage of cognitive development, infants and toddlers acquire knowledge through sensory experiences and
manipulating objects. A child's entire experience at the earliest period of this stage occurs through basic reflexes, senses, and motor
responses.

It is during the sensorimotor stage that children go through a period of dramatic growth and learning. As kids interact with their
environment, they are continually making new discoveries about how the world works.

The cognitive development that occurs during this period takes place over a relatively short period of time and involves a great deal of
growth. Children not only learn how to perform physical actions such as crawling and walking; they also learn a great deal about
language from the people with whom they interact. Piaget also broke this stage down into a number of different sub stages. It is
during the final part of the sensorimotor stage that early representational thought emerges.

Piaget believed that developing object permanence or object constancy, the understanding that objects continue to exist even when
they cannot be seen, was an important element at this point of development.

By learning that objects are separate and distinct entities and that they have an existence of their own outside of individual perception,
children are then able to begin to attach names and words to objects.

The Preoperational Stage

Ages: 2 to 7 Years

Major Characteristics and Developmental Changes:

 Children begin to think symbolically and learn to use words and pictures to represent objects.

 Children at this stage tend to be egocentric and struggle to see things from the perspective of others.

 While they are getting better with language and thinking, they still tend to think about things in very concrete terms.

The foundations of language development may have been laid during the previous stage, but it is the emergence of language that is
one of the major hallmarks of the preoperational stage of development.

Children become much more skilled at pretend play during this stage of development, yet continue to think very concretely about the
world around them.

At this stage, kids learn through pretend play but still struggle with logic and taking the point of view of other people. They also often
struggle with understanding the idea of constancy.

For example, a researcher might take a lump of clay, divide it into two equal pieces, and then give a child the choice between two
pieces of clay to play with. One piece of clay is rolled into a compact ball while the other is smashed into a flat pancake shape. Since
the flat shape looks larger, the preoperational child will likely choose that piece even though the two pieces are exactly the same size.

The Concrete Operational Stage

Ages: 7 to 11 Years

Major Characteristics and Developmental Changes

 During this stage, children begin to thinking logically about concrete events

 They begin to understand the concept of conservation; that the amount of liquid in a short, wide cup is equal to that in a tall,
skinny glass, for example

 Their thinking becomes more logical and organized, but still very concrete

 Children begin using inductive logic, or reasoning from specific information to a general principle

While children are still very concrete and literal in their thinking at this point in development, they become much more adept at using
logic.2 The egocentrism of the previous stage begins to disappear as kids become better at thinking about how other people might view
a situation.
While thinking becomes much more logical during the concrete operational state, it can also be very rigid. Kids at this point in
development tend to struggle with abstract and hypothetical concepts.

During this stage, children also become less egocentric and begin to think about how other people might think and feel. Kids in the
concrete operational stage also begin to understand that their thoughts are unique to them and that not everyone else necessarily
shares their thoughts, feelings, and opinions.

The Formal Operational Stage

Ages: 12 and Up

Major Characteristics and Developmental Changes:

 At this stage, the adolescent or young adult begins to think abstractly and reason about hypothetical problems

 Abstract thought emerges

 Teens begin to think more about moral, philosophical, ethical, social, and political issues that require theoretical and abstract
reasoning

 Begin to use deductive logic, or reasoning from a general principle to specific information

The final stage of Piaget's theory involves an increase in logic, the ability to use deductive reasoning, and an understanding of abstract
ideas.

At this point, people become capable of seeing multiple potential solutions to problems and think more scientifically about the world
around them.

The ability to thinking about abstract ideas and situations is the key hallmark of the formal operational stage of cognitive development.
The ability to systematically plan for the future and reason about hypothetical situations are also critical abilities that emerge during
this stage.

It is important to note that Piaget did not view children's intellectual development as a quantitative process; that is, kids do not just
add more information and knowledge to their existing knowledge as they get older. Instead, Piaget suggested that there is a qualitative
change in how children think as they gradually process through these four stages.4 A child at age 7 doesn't just have more information
about the world than he did at age 2; there is a fundamental change in how he thinks about the world.

Important Concepts

To better understand some of the things that happen during cognitive development, it is important first to examine a few of the
important ideas and concepts introduced by Piaget.

The following are some of the factors that influence how children learn and grow:

Schemas

A schema describes both the mental and physical actions involved in understanding and knowing. Schemas are categories of
knowledge that help us to interpret and understand the world.

In Piaget's view, a schema includes both a category of knowledge and the process of obtaining that knowledge.3

As experiences happen, this new information is used to modify, add to, or change previously existing schemas.

For example, a child may have a schema about a type of animal, such as a dog. If the child's sole experience has been with small dogs,
a child might believe that all dogs are small, furry, and have four legs. Suppose then that the child encounters an enormous dog. The
child will take in this new information, modifying the previously existing schema to include these new observations.

Assimilation

The process of taking in new information into our already existing schemas is known as assimilation. The process is somewhat
subjective because we tend to modify experiences and information slightly to fit in with our preexisting beliefs. In the example above,
seeing a dog and labeling it "dog" is a case of assimilating the animal into the child's dog schema.

Accommodation

Another part of adaptation involves changing or altering our existing schemas in light of new information, a process known as
accommodation. Accommodation involves modifying existing schemas, or ideas, as a result of new information or new experiences. 5
New schemas may also be developed during this process.

Equilibration

Piaget believed that all children try to strike a balance between assimilation and accommodation, which is achieved through a
mechanism Piaget called equilibration. As children progress through the stages of cognitive development, it is important to maintain a
balance between applying previous knowledge (assimilation) and changing behavior to account for new knowledge (accommodation).
Equilibration helps explain how children can move from one stage of thought to the next.

Albert Bandura's Social Learning Theory

Social learning theory, proposed by Albert Bandura, emphasizes the importance of observing, modelling, and imitating the behaviors,
attitudes, and emotional reactions of others. Social learning theory considers how both environmental and cognitive factors interact to
influence human learning and behavior.

In social learning theory, Albert Bandura (1977) agrees with the behaviorist learning theories of classical conditioning and operant
conditioning. However, he adds two important ideas:
 1. Mediating processes occur between stimuli & responses.

2. Behavior is learned from the environment through the process of observational learning.

Observational Learning

Children observe the people around them behaving in various ways. This is illustrated during the famous Bobo doll
experiment (Bandura, 1961).

Individuals that are observed are called models. In society, children are surrounded by many influential models, such as parents within
the family, characters on children’s TV, friends within their peer group and teachers at school. These models provide examples of
behavior to observe and imitate, e.g., masculine and feminine, pro and anti-social, etc.

Children pay attention to some of these people (models) and encode their behavior. At a later time they may imitate (i.e., copy) the
behavior they have observed.

They may do this regardless of whether the behavior is ‘gender appropriate’ or not, but there are a number of processes that make it
more likely that a child will reproduce the behavior that its society deems appropriate for its gender.

First, the child is more likely to attend to and imitate those people it perceives as similar to itself. Consequently, it is more likely to
imitate behavior modeled by people of the same gender.

Second, the people around the child will respond to the behavior it imitates with either reinforcement or punishment. If a child imitates
a model’s behavior and the consequences are rewarding, the child is likely to continue performing the behavior.

If a parent sees a little girl consoling her teddy bear and says “what a kind girl you are,” this is rewarding for the child and makes it
more likely that she will repeat the behavior. Her behavior has been reinforced (i.e., strengthened).

Reinforcement can be external or internal and can be positive or negative. If a child wants approval from parents or peers, this
approval is an external reinforcement, but feeling happy about being approved of is an internal reinforcement. A child will behave in a
way which it believes will earn approval because it desires approval.

Positive (or negative) reinforcement will have little impact if the reinforcement offered externally does not match with an individual's
needs. Reinforcement can be positive or negative, but the important factor is that it will usually lead to a change in a person's
behavior.

Third, the child will also take into account of what happens to other people when deciding whether or not to copy someone’s actions.
A person learns by observing the consequences of another person’s (i.e., models) behavior, e.g., a younger sister observing an older
sister being rewarded for a particular behavior is more likely to repeat that behavior herself. This is known as vicarious reinforcement.

This relates to an attachment to specific models that possess qualities seen as rewarding. Children will have a number of models with
whom they identify. These may be people in their immediate world, such as parents or older siblings, or could be fantasy characters or
people in the media. The motivation to identify with a particular model is that they have a quality which the individual would like to
possess.

Identification occurs with another person (the model) and involves taking on (or adopting) observed behaviors, values, beliefs and
attitudes of the person with whom you are identifying.

The term identification as used by Social Learning Theory is similar to the Freudian term related to the Oedipus complex. For example,
they both involve internalizing or adopting another person’s behavior. However, during the Oedipus complex, the child can only
identify with the same sex parent, whereas with Social Learning Theory the person (child or adult) can potentially identify with any
other person.

Identification is different to imitation as it may involve a number of behaviors being adopted, whereas imitation usually involves
copying a single behavior.

Mediational Processes

SLT is often described as the ‘bridge’ between traditional learning theory (i.e., behaviorism) and the cognitive approach. This is
because it focuses on how mental (cognitive) factors are involved in learning.

Unlike Skinner, Bandura (1977) believes that humans are active information processors and think about the relationship between their
behavior and its consequences.

Observational learning could not occur unless cognitive processes were at work. These mental factors mediate (i.e., intervene) in the
learning process to determine whether a new response is acquired.

Therefore, individuals do not automatically observe the behavior of a model and imitate it. There is some thought prior to imitation,
and this consideration is called mediational processes. This occurs between observing the behavior (stimulus) and imitating it or not
(response)
There are four mediational processes proposed by Bandura:

1. Attention: The individual needs to pay attention to the behavior and its consequences and form a mental representation of
the behavior. For a behavior to be imitated, it has to grab our attention. We observe many behaviors on a daily basis, and
many of these are not noteworthy. Attention is therefore extremely important in whether a behavior influences others
imitating it.

2. Retention: How well the behavior is remembered. The behavior may be noticed but is it not always remembered which
obviously prevents imitation. It is important therefore that a memory of the behavior is formed to be performed later by the
observer. Much of social learning is not immediate, so this process is especially vital in those cases. Even if the behavior is
reproduced shortly after seeing it, there needs to be a memory to refer to.

3. Reproduction: This is the ability to perform the behavior that the model has just demonstrated. We see much behavior on a
daily basis that we would like to be able to imitate but that this not always possible. We are limited by our physical ability and
for that reason, even if we wish to reproduce the behavior, we cannot. This influences our decisions whether to try and
imitate it or not. Imagine the scenario of a 90-year-old-lady who struggles to walk watching Dancing on Ice. She may
appreciate that the skill is a desirable one, but she will not attempt to imitate it because she physically cannot do it.

4. Motivation: The will to perform the behavior. The rewards and punishment that follow a behavior will be considered by the
observer. If the perceived rewards outweigh the perceived costs (if there are any), then the behavior will be more likely to be
imitated by the observer. If the vicarious reinforcement is not seen to be important enough to the observer, then they will not
imitate the behavior.

Kohlberg's Theory of Moral Development

 How do people develop morality? This question has fascinated parents, religious leaders, and philosophers for ages, but
moral development has also become a hot-button issue in psychology and education. 1 Do parental or societal influences play a greater
role in moral development? Do all kids develop morality in similar ways?

One of the best-known theories exploring some of these basic questions was developed by psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg.2 His work
modified and expanded upon Jean Piaget's previous work to form a theory that explained how children develop moral reasoning.

Piaget described a two-stage process of moral development.3 Kohlberg extended Piaget's theory, proposing that moral development is
a continual process that occurs throughout the lifespan. His theory outlines six stages of moral development within three different
levels.

The Heinz Dilemma

Kohlberg based his theory on a series of moral dilemmas presented to his study subjects. Participants were also interviewed to
determine the reasoning behind their judgments of each scenario.4

One example was "Heinz Steals the Drug." In this scenario, a woman has cancer and her doctors believe only one drug might save her.
This drug had been discovered by a local pharmacist and he was able to make it for $200 per dose and sell it for $2,000 per dose. The
woman's husband, Heinz, could only raise $1,000 to buy the drug.

He tried to negotiate with the pharmacist for a lower price or to be extended credit to pay for it over time. But the pharmacist refused
to sell it for any less or to accept partial payments. Rebuffed, Heinz

instead broke into the pharmacy and stole the drug to save his wife. Kohlberg asked, "Should the husband have done that?"

Kohlberg was not interested so much in the answer to whether Heinz was wrong or right but in the reasoning for each participant's
decision. He then classified their reasoning into the levels of his theory of moral development.

Level 1. Preconventional Morality

The earliest stages of moral development, obedience and punishment, are especially common in young children, but adults are also
capable of expressing this type of reasoning. At this stage, Kohlberg says, people see rules as fixed and absolute.6 Obeying the rules is
important because it is a means to avoid punishment.

At the individualism and exchange stage of moral development, children account for individual points of view and judge actions based
on how they serve individual needs. In the Heinz dilemma, children argued that the best course of action was the choice that best
served Heinz’s needs. Reciprocity is possible at this point in moral development, but only if it serves one's own interests.

Level 2. Conventional Morality

Often referred to as the "good boy-good girl" orientation, the stage of the interpersonal relationship of moral development is focused
on living up to social expectations and roles.6 There is an emphasis on conformity, being "nice," and consideration of how choices
influence relationships.

This stage is focused on maintaining social order. At this stage of moral development, people begin to consider society as a whole
when making judgments. The focus is on maintaining law and order by following the rules, doing one’s duty, and respecting authority.

Level 3. Postconventional Morality

The ideas of a social contract and individual rights cause people in the next stage to begin to account for the differing values, opinions,
and beliefs of other people.6 Rules of law are important for maintaining a society, but members of the society should agree upon these
standards.

Kohlberg’s final level of moral reasoning is based on universal ethical principles and abstract reasoning. At this stage, people follow
these internalized principles of justice, even if they conflict with laws and rules.

Criticisms

Kohlberg's theory is concerned with moral thinking, but there is a big difference between knowing what we ought to do versus our
actual actions. Moral reasoning, therefore, may not lead to moral behavior. This is just one of the many criticisms of Kohlberg's theory.

Critics have pointed out that Kohlberg's theory of moral development overemphasizes the concept of justice when making moral
choices. Factors such as compassion, caring, and other interpersonal feelings may play an important part in moral reasoning

Does Kohlberg's theory overemphasize Western philosophy? Individualist cultures emphasize personal rights, while collectivist
cultures stress the importance of society and community. Eastern, collectivist cultures may have different moral outlooks that
Kohlberg's theory does not take into account.

Were Kohlberg's dilemma's applicable? Most of his subjects were children under the age of 16 who obviously had no experience with
marriage. The Heinz dilemma may have been too abstract for these children to understand, and a scenario more applicable to their
everyday concerns might have led to different results.

Kohlberg's critics, including Carol Gilligan, have suggested that Kohlberg's theory was gender-biased since all of the subjects in his
sample were male.8 Kohlberg believed that women tended to remain at the third level of moral development because they place a
stronger emphasis on things such as social relationships and the welfare of others.
Gilligan instead suggested that Kohlberg's theory overemphasizes concepts such as justice and does not adequately address moral
reasoning founded on the principles and ethics of caring and concern

MODULE 11

Feminist Ethics

Feminist Ethics aims “to understand, criticize, and correct” how gender operates within our moral beliefs and practices (Lindemann
2005, 11) and our methodological approaches to ethical theory. More specifically, feminist ethicists aim to understand, criticize, and
correct: (1) the binary view of gender, (2) the privilege historically available to men, and/or (3) the ways that views about gender
maintain oppressive social orders or practices that harm others, especially girls and women who historically have been subordinated,
along gendered dimensions including sexuality and gender-identity. Since oppression often involves ignoring the perspectives of the
marginalized, different approaches to feminist ethics have in common a commitment to better understand the experiences of persons
oppressed in gendered ways. That commitment results in a tendency, in feminist ethics, to take into account empirical information and
material actualities.

Not all feminist ethicists correct all of (1) through (3). Some have assumed or upheld the gender binary (Wollstonecraft 1792; Firestone
1970). They criticize and aim to correct the privileging of men as the more morally worthy half of the binary, or argue against the
maintenance of a social order that oppresses others in gendered ways. More recently, feminist ethicists have commonly criticized the
gender binary itself, arguing that upholding a fixed conception of the world as constituted only by “biological” men and women
contributes to the maintenance of oppressive and gendered social orders, especially when doing so marginalizes those who do not
conform to gender binaries (Butler 1990; Bettcher 2014; Dea 2016a). Feminist ethicists who are attentive to the intersections of
multiple aspects of identity including race, class, and disability, in addition to gender, criticize and correct assumptions that
men simpliciter are historically privileged, as if privilege distributes equally among all men regardless of how they are socially situated.
They instead focus more on criticizing and correcting oppressive practices that harm and marginalize others who live at these
intersections in order to account for the distinctive experiences of women whose experiences are not those of members of culturally
dominant groups (Crenshaw 1991; Khader 2013). Whatever the focus of feminist ethicists, a widely shared characteristic of their works
is at least some overt attention to power, privilege, or limited access to social goods. In a broad sense, then, feminist ethics is
fundamentally political (Tong 1993, 160). This is not necessarily a feature of feminist ethics that distinguishes it from “mainstream”
ethics, however, since feminist analyses of ethical theory as arising from material and nonideal contexts suggest that all ethics is
political whether its being so is recognized by the theorist or not.

Since feminist ethics is not merely a branch of ethics, but is instead “a way of doing ethics” (Lindemann 2005, 4), philosophers
engaged in the above tasks can be concerned with any branch of ethics, including meta-ethics, normative theory, and practical or
applied ethics. The point of feminist ethics is, ideally, to change ethics for the better by improving ethical theorizing and offering better
approaches to issues including those involving gender. Feminist ethics is not limited to gendered issues because the insights of feminist
ethics are often applicable to analyses of moral experiences that share features with gendered issues or that reflect the intersection of
gender with other bases of oppression. Feminist philosophical endeavors include bringing investigations motivated by feminist ethics to
bear on ethical issues, broadly conceived.

Feminist Ethics: Historical Background

Feminist ethics as an academic area of study in the field of philosophy dates to the 1970s, when philosophical journals started more
frequently publishing articles specifically concerned with feminism and sexism (Korsmeyer 1973; Rosenthal 1973; Jaggar 1974), and
after curricular programs of Women’s Studies began to be established in some universities (Young 1977; Tuana 2011). Readers
interested in themes evident in the fifty years of feminist ethics in philosophy will find this discussion in section (2) below, “Themes in
Feminist Ethics.”

Prior to 1970, “there was no recognized body of feminist philosophy” (Card 2008, 90). Of course, throughout history, philosophers have
attempted to understand the roles that gender may play in moral life. Yet such philosophers presumably were addressing male readers,
and their accounts of women’s moral capacities did not usually aim to disrupt the subordination of women. Rarely in the history of
philosophy will one find philosophical works that notice gender in order to criticize and correct men’s historical privileges or to disrupt
the social orders and practices that subordinate groups on gendered dimensions. An understanding that sex matters to one’s ethical
theorizing in some way is necessary to, but not sufficient for, feminist ethics.

Some philosophers and writers in almost every century, however, constitute forerunners to feminist ethics. Representative authors
writing in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries discussed below explicitly address what they perceive to be moral
wrongs resulting from either oppression on the basis of sex, or metaethical errors on the part of public intellectuals in believing ideal
forms of moral reasoning to be within the capacities of men and not women. In the early-to-mid-twentieth century, at the same time
that feminism became a more popularly used term in Europe and the Americas, more theorists argued influentially for ending unjust
discrimination on the basis of sex. Some authors concertedly argued that philosophers and theorists erred in their understanding of
what seemed to be gendered differences in ethical and moral reasoning.

Gilligan's Ethics of Care

Psychologist Carol Gilligan is best known for her innovative but controversial ideas on the moral development of women. Gilligan
emphasized what she called an “ethics of care” in women's moral reasoning. She placed her approach in direct opposition to
Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of moral development, which she claimed was biased against females and emphasized an “ethics of
justice.”

Key Takeaways: Gilligan's Ethics of Care

  Carol Gilligan believed women’s morality arose from real-life dilemmas, not hypothetical ones. She came up with three stages
of moral development that emphasize an ethics of care.

 Pre-conventional stage: women are focused on the self.

 Conventional stage: women have come to focus on their responsibilities towards others.

 Post-conventional stage: a woman has learned to see herself and others as interdependent.

 Gilligan developed her thinking in response to the stages of moral development outlined by Lawrence Kohlberg, which Gilligan
claimed were gender-biased and emphasized an ethics of justice. However, research by other scholars has shown that two
moral orientations exist—one towards care and one towards justice.

Origin of Gilligan’s Ethics of Care

In 1967, a few years after receiving her Ph.D. from Harvard, Gilligan started a teaching position there. She also became a research
assistant for Lawrence Kohlberg, who developed a popular theory of moral development. Gilligan’s work was a response to the gender
bias she saw in Kohlberg’s approach.

Kohlberg’s theory of moral development included six stages. At its highest stage, an individual develops a deeply held, self-defined set
of moral principles that one wishes to apply equally to all people. Kohlberg cautioned that not everyone would reach this sixth stage of
moral development. In subsequent studies, he found that women tended to score at lower stages of moral development than men.

However, Gilligan pointed out that the research Kohlberg did to develop his stage theory only included young white male participants.
As a result, Gilligan argued that men weren't morally superior to women. Instead, the reason women scored lower in Kohlberg’s stages
than men was that Kohlberg’s work discounted the voices of women and girls. She outlined this position in detail in her seminal
book In a Different Voice, which she published in 1982.

Gilligan decided to study the development of moral reasoning in women herself and found that women thought about morality
differently than men. Men, as exemplified by Kohlberg’s theory, tend to look at morality through a lens of rights, laws, and universally
applied principles. This “ethics of justice” has traditionally been viewed as an ideal in patriarchal Western cultures because it is
championed by men. However, women tend to look at morality through a lens of relationships, compassion, and responsibility to
others. This “ethics of care” has often been overlooked because of the limited power women have typically held in Western societies.

Gilligan illustrated this difference in the moral reasoning of males and females by articulating the thinking of a boy and a girl
participant's responses to the “Heinz dilemma” from Kohlberg’s studies. In this dilemma, a man named Heinz must choose whether or
not to steal medicine he can’t afford to save the life of his dying wife. The boy participant believes Heinz should take the medicine
because the right to life is more important than the right to property. On the other hand, the girl participant doesn’t believe Heinz
should take the medicine because it could land him in jail for stealing, leaving his wife alone when she needs him.

As this example demonstrates, the ethics of justice is impartial. Principles must always be applied in the same way, even if that means
it negatively impacts the individual or someone they’re close to. On the other hand, the ethics of care is contextual. Morality isn’t based
on abstract principles but on real relationships. Given these gender differences, Gilligan proposed that women don’t stop developing
morally at lower levels than men, but that women’s moral development simply continues along a different trajectory than the ethics of
justice measured by Kohlberg’s scale.

Gilligan’s Stages of Moral Development

Gilligan outlined her own stages of moral development based on an ethics of care. She used the same levels Kohlberg did but based
her stages on interviews with women. Specifically, because Gilligan believed women’s morality arose from real-life dilemmas, not
hypothetical ones, she interviewed women trying to decide whether or not to terminate a pregnancy. Her work yielded the following
stages:

Stage 1: Pre-Conventional

At the pre-conventional stage, women are focused on the self and emphasize their own self-interests over other considerations.

Stage 2: Conventional

At the conventional stage, women have come to focus on their responsibilities towards others. They are concerned with care for others
and being selfless, but this position is defined by society or other people in the woman’s orbit.

Stage 3: Post-Conventional

At the highest stage of moral development, the post-conventional stage, a woman has learned to see herself and others as
interdependent. These women have control of their lives and take responsibility for their decisions, a big part of which is the choice to
care for others.

Gilligan said that some women may not reach the highest stage of moral development. In addition, she didn't attach specific ages to
her stages. However, she did claim that it wasn't experience that drove a woman through the stages, but cognitive ability and the
woman’s evolving sense of self.

Can the Ethics of Care Extend to Men?

While the ethics of care was developed based on research with women, Gilligan has insisted that the ethics of care and the ethics of
justice aren’t mutually exclusive. Instead of focusing on gender, Gilligan preferred to focus on the different themes brought up by these
two perspectives on morality. Although this meant that men could develop an ethics of care, Gilligan indicated it was likely more
common in women.

Research by other scholars has backed up some of Gilligan’s assertions. On the one hand, studies have indicated that the gender
differences on Kohlberg’s stages aren’t especially pronounced, suggesting that there may not be a strong gender-bias in Kohlberg’s
work. On the other, studies have shown that people have two moral orientations that line up with Gilligan’s ethics of justice and ethics
of care. And studies have found that the moral orientation towards care is stronger in females. Thus, while both men and women can
and will develop both orientations, one may be more influential in men than in women and vice versa. Furthermore, research suggests
that as people age and reach the highest stages of moral development, the two orientations may be more equally represented in the
individual, regardless of gender.