Captain, sincere thanks for tracking down what I think is the study referred to in the OP.
Is it correct to say, then, that the General Answer to whatever of the OP was a GQ is, “No such study has been done.”?
I’m skeptical that you can really test people’s morality by asking hypothetical questions.
What kind of score do you think Bill Clinton would get on a morality test?
Kohlberg didn’t only use male subjects, but his stages were developed using only male subjects. So women were later being evaluated on a scale that had been normed using only men.
Both Kohlberg and Gilligan have received a lot of criticism. Gilligan mainly for what some see as unscientific methods,(development of her theory rested heavily on some very subjective content analysis of answers to open ended questions), and Kohlberg for the artificiality of his research, among other things.
Could there be anything less black and white than morality?
As a woman my reasoning in the example would absolutly involve “what are my chances” and “what happens to me”. It is part of the decision making and risk taking process. I would be result oriented in my reasoning. If I have a very slim chance of getting away with it, and if I will be imprisoned if caught, then that has an impact on whether I choose to attempt the robbery. If I am caught and imprisoned the result of my attempt is that my partner does not get the medicine and dies alone (or at least without me). If I do not try, partner dies anyhow, but at least with me by the bedside giving love and support.
Perhaps the “fact” that men did not ask these questions implies rather that men are more interested in the “grand gesture” than in the best result for their loved one? The findings of this are, in my opinion wildly open to interpretation.
We don’t know whether the men asked these questions or not do we?
Captain Amazing’s first post gave a list of what questions were asked, and in each case there was a follow up asking for analysis of the reasoning behind the answer given to the primary question. That seems to be a crucial part of the experiment - it’s not “would you have stolen the drugs?”, but “if you would have stolen the drugs why would you?”, and similarly if not why not.
Having asked your own question and been given additional information about how likely it was that you’d be caught, then you’d still have to give an answer. If it was very likely you’d be caught, and if you gave that as your reason for not stealing the drugs, then (if I understand correctly) your explanation would be judged differently than if you just said you wouldn’t steal them because you thought stealing was wrong period.
Carol Gilligan’s original paper “In a Different Voice” was in many ways much better than the full-length book of the same title she came out with later. In the paper, she was not arguing that women have a built-in difference in ethical structure, she was just inverting what Kohlberg had done in order to show up the holes in his unquestioned premises. I wasn’t there so I don’t know, but I suspect that her paper was widely circulated and she got a lot of feedback from people who encouraged her to develop it more fully as a genuine “women have an ethic of care” statement.
Lots of people have (with good justification) torn her book apart for the weakness of her methodology in making her own assertions, but she had a damn good point about Kohlberg, and her original paper puts nice little knives into his findings.
Therefore, to address the OP: No, women are not morally inferior to women. But if you create a hierarchy of ethical development based on your studies of men, and then, using that hierarchy, rate where women and men score on that scale, you get a completely different result than you would if you created a hierarchy of ethical development (as Gilligan did) based on studying women and then turned around and rated men and women on that scale. (A lot of male “ethical behavior” that Kohlberg rated highly as based on abstract principles looks a lot like “rule following”, a much lower rung of the alternative ethical ladder).
To supplement what everton said, there are both ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers possible for every level. For example, “Yes, because I want it” and “No, because I’ll be punished” would both be level 1, while “No, because society would condemn me for being a thief” and “Yes, because society would condemn me for letting my spouse die” would both be level 3. The test is supposed to determine your capability for moral reasoning not by what yes/no answer you give, but by how you arrive at your answer.
And thank you for not hijacking the thread with gratuitous political sniping.
Couldn’t this also be seen as morally superior? Family first, blood is thicker than water, etc?
With the breakdown of family in the West we tend to elevate society as the thing to help, or others before ourselves and our loved ones.
Over here in the East it is much more family first. What to many - including me - represents a disgusting act of nepotism or favouritism is to them love and loyalty. For many people here NOT to give their (albeit uneducated and incompetent) 18-year-old son the chairmanship of a copmany would be a shocking act of disloyalty and lack of love.
So for a woman to put herself first to protect her children, or to put her children first, or to put herself first before a man because women are more vital than men to propagate a species (you only need one man for x million women after all) strikes me as being a very naturally (in the sense of Nature) moral thing to do.
istara: "Couldn’t this also be seen as morally superior? Family first, blood is thicker than water, etc?
With the breakdown of family in the West we tend to elevate society as the thing to help, or others before ourselves and our loved ones."
As has already been pointed out, the OP was phrased unfortunately, and the scientists who developed this theory never used the language of “superior” or “inferior”, but rather “mature” and “immature”. If you disagree with those descriptors as well, that’s fine, but it does have a rationale. In general, people tend to go from the more immature stages to the more mature stages as they get older.