The legacy of the ‘care challenge’: re‐envisioning the outcome of the justice‐care debate

Abstract

The ‘care challenge’ to moral psychology, articulated in the justice‐care debate, has been borne out in a number of ways. Empirically, claims regarding gender difference in use of justice and care reasoning, gender bias claims regarding early forms of Kohlberg's scoring manual and claims regarding the centrality of cultural conceptions of masculinity and femininity to moral psychology have all been established. Conceptually, six hallmarks of the care challenge have now become commonplace assumptions in moral psychology. It is argued that theorists in Character Education, Social‐Emotional Learning and Positive Psychology now generally accept the moral legitimacy of the ethic of care and the scientific legitimacy of the relational psychology underlying it. In retrospect, the ‘care challenge’ had an evolutionary effect on the field, helping theorists and social scientists of all kinds to create more philosophically inclusive and psychologically realistic conceptions of moral engagement in the moment and moral development over time.

Notes

1. To be fair, Gilligan's work evolved. Her later research (Gilligan & Attanucci, 1988; Gilligan & Wiggins, 1987) recognised both males' and females' abilities with justice and care ethics and her later writing avoided the over generalised language for which she had been critiqued.

2. There have been ten versions of Kohlberg's scoring manual cited in the literature. They are often referenced simply by the year in which they became available; all were unpublished except the last. The years associated with new versions include 1958, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1976, 1977 (Kohlberg et al.), 1978 (Colby), 1984 (Colby et al.), 1987 (Colby & Kohlberg).

3. Space limitations preclude citation of a large number of contributors to the justice‐care discourse—the legacy is theirs as well.