Moral Reasoning and Gender
At one time psychologists believed that men and women have different moral values and reasoning. This was based on the idea that men and women often think differently and would react to moral dilemmas in different ways. Some researchers hypothesized that women would favor care reasoning, meaning that they would consider issues of need and sacrifice, while men would be more inclined to favor fairness and rights, which is known as justice reasoning. However, some also knew that men and women simply face different moral dilemmas on a day-to-day basis and that might be the reason for the perceived difference in their moral reasoning. With these two ideas in mind, researchers decided to do their experiments based on moral dilemmas that both men and women face regularly. To reduce situational differences and discern how both genders use reason in their moral judgments, they therefore ran the tests on parenting situations, since both genders can be involved in child rearing. The research showed that women and men use the same form of moral reasoning as one another and the only difference is the moral dilemmas they find themselves in on a day-to-day basis. When it came to moral decisions both men and women would be faced with, they often chose the same solution as being the moral choice. This shows that gender division in terms of morality does not actually exist. Reasoning between genders is the same in moral decisions.
Read more about this topic: Moral Reasoning
Famous quotes containing the words moral, reasoning and/or gender:
“Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“If your little savage were left to himself and be allowed to retain all his ignorance, he would in time join the infant’s reasoning to the grown man’s passion, he would strangle his father and sleep with his mother.”
—Denis Diderot (1713–1784)
“Anthropologists have found that around the world whatever is considered “men’s work” is almost universally given higher status than “women’s work.” If in one culture it is men who build houses and women who make baskets, then that culture will see house-building as more important. In another culture, perhaps right next door, the reverse may be true, and basket- weaving will have higher social status than house-building.”
—Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen. Excerpted from, Gender Grace: Love, Work, and Parenting in a Changing World (1990)