The Moral Superiority of (a)Men (b)Women

I went to a conference in New York recently that was called Changing Men's Roles in a Changing World. It was sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee, and on opening night the meeting hall was jammed. About two thirds of the audience were men. The keynote speaker was a sandy-haired, handsome fellow named William Caldicott, who is a pediatrician and a leader of the antiwar, antinuke movement. He admitted right away that he didn't know much about men per se, aside from being one. But that didn't stop him from making his point. Men, he said, not women, were responsible for war. Men were the bad guys when it came to violence and aggression. And the only way to stop war was for us men to get our act together and reform--to become, that is, more like women. On the subject of war and peace, he said, women were definitely "better" than men. Better people. More moral.

Since then, I've asked around among my friends, who do they think are more moral, men or women? Nobody said anything about war, but everybody had an opinion. My friend Paul, who not too long ago spent $20,000 on lawyers' fees fighting his ex-wife to get to see his son more often, said, "I've never known a woman to be magnanimous. They're constantly focused on themselves and their own interests." My friend Gael, who hates gossip, told me, "No doubt about it, women are much more moral than men. Everybody says women gossip more, but it's not true. I've known men to destroy people's reputations and not think twice about it. They can be really cruel." Another woman, Tammy, a mother, agreed that women were more moral, because, she said, "life comes through them." They have an instinct, she said. It comes from being mothers, it makes them "more responsible, more open, more honest." But then a third woman, Barbara, a clinical psychologist, told me that she had never heard any of her female patients refer to a moral principle as a reason for making a decision. Women, she said, refer everything to their own interests. Men do, too, mostly, but they also sometimes act on principle. And finally I asked my friend Joe, who said the whole thing was ridiculous.

Maybe so. But a great many people besides William Caldicott take it seriously. There is, in fact, a hot and heavy academic debate on the subject that has been gaining momentum for 15 years. Scholars have been piling up evidence on both sides. You can see why. If one side should actually win, all kinds of consequences could follow. Suppose it turned out that women were more moral. It then would be their duty to seize power and run the world according to their lights, wouldn't it? If I were a woman, I'd say so. But if men are more moral, what are we doing nominating a woman to be Vice-President of the United States--not to mention manager of the international sales division? I'm sure you get my drift. If either side wins, there will be a definite shift in the balance of power between the sexes. Caldicott will say, "See, I told you so" and lead a march on Washington to do something about it. Put a woman in charge of the joint Chiefs of Staff. Insist that the Reverend Jerry Falwell have a sex-change operation. I speak only half in jest. The issue is not entirely ridiculous. We aren't to the point yet where one side is winning, but we have reached the point where it's time to sit up and pay attention.

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For the most part, the world has generally believed that men are more moral than women. You can find this belief in the Bible--Eve, not Adam, was the first to succumb to temptation (continued on page 190)The Moral Superiority(continued from page 92) and partake of the knowledge of good and evil; Adam had to be seduced. You can find it in Aristotle and in numerous other philosophers and cynics to this day. In the West, we have had 25 or 30 centuries of what you might call moral misogyny. Only in the 19th Century, when men put women on pedestals and extolled them as the civilizing sex, whose moral purity tamed the savage male heart, was the situation reversed. And that, of course, was a canard, as plenty of feminist historians have pointed out, a clever ploy to keep women out of power. If they're really that "good," you see, they're too good to soil their hands with politics. Freud put the tradition back on course, declaring firmly that women were morally inferior. "I cannot escape the notion," he wrote, "that for women, the level of what is ethically normal is different from what it is in men. Their superego is never so inexorable, so impersonal, so independent of its emotional origins as we require it to be in men." Feminists ever since, not without reason, have regarded Freud as an enemy.

But now there's a new enemy. He is a developmental psychologist named Lawrence Kohlberg, he teaches his subject at Harvard, he is a follower of the late Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget and he is the founder of the theory of moral stages--the idea that we progress, as we grow up, from stage one to stage two, and so on to stage six. These stages are arranged in a hierarchy. Higher is better. In other words, if you're at stage six, you're going to be a hell of a lot more moral than you were at stage two. Or, rather, the way you think about moral issues is going to be more advanced, more intelligent; it's going to make much more sense.

Vague? Let me give you an example. Your name is Heinz, you are dirt-poor and your wife is dying of a rare form of cancer. There's only one hope: A druggist in town has invented an experimental drug that may be just the magic bullet your wife needs. But the druggist knows he's the sole source of supply, and he wants a small fortune for the drug--$2000 per dose, about ten times as much as it cost to produce it. You don't have the money and can't scrape it up from friends and relatives. The druggist won't budge. Do you steal the drug from him? If so, why? If not, why not?

Kohlberg calls this the Heinz dilemma, and the way you answer it reveals what moral stage you have reached. What you think Heinz should do isn't as important as your reasons for thinking it. Suppose you think he should steal the drug to save his wife's life. If you're six or seven years old and thinking at stage one, you're going to say something like, yes, he should steal it, because there will be an investigation if he doesn't and he'll get punished. Or you might say that it's not that bad to steal the drug, because it's really worth only $200. But if you're 30 years old and thinking at stage six, you'll say something like, yes, of course he should steal the drug--the right to life takes priority over any right of property the druggist may have. At stage one, you're thinking about punishment and reward; your morality doesn't come from inside you, it comes from outside authority. At stage six, you think in terms of rights and principles, your morality is self-directed, and while you respect the law--including the law against theft--you can see beyond it to higher, universal laws that apply everywhere and at all times. At stage six, you are a moral philosopher.

As Kohlberg tells it, we all move through these stages, in order, from childhood through adolescence into adulthood. Once we reach a higher stage, we seldom go back to thinking according to the reasoning processes of lower stages. But not everybody reaches the higher stages. Kohlberg has a section in one of his papers in which he lists some of the statements Adolf Eichmann made when he was being interrogated in Israel after his capture. Nothing Eichmann says in his own justification gets beyond stage two. Most adult males stop developing at stage four. A happy few make it to stage five. Almost nobody progresses to stage six.

And women? In 1969, having worked on his theory and tested it on various populations for the previous nine or ten years, Kohlberg let it be known that women--with some exceptions--by and large land in stage three and stay there.

Stage three, let's face it, is not very advanced. At stage three, you are definitely not a morally mature person. You take your morality from those around you; you are anxious to please; you can't stand the idea of hurting somebody else, anybody else. You don't want people to think you're selfish. You think Heinz should save his wife because he loves her and because if he doesn't, he's never going to be able to look his family in the eye again. You don't think about the law at stage three, or universal moral principles, or the rights of others or your own, because you can't think that big. You're locked into trying to be a "good boy" or a "nice girl," doing what others expect of you. Stage three is the lowest kind of conventional morality; it's what your mother means when she warns you, as you're running out the door, "Don't do anything I wouldn't do." It's not really adult. It's a major put-down to label someone a stage-three person. To label an entire sex stage three is off the graph.

It took a while for feminists to react to Kohlberg's findings, possibly because his findings were buried as footnotes in 140-page sections of obscure scholarly handbooks or slipped into the middle of dense scholarly articles. But you can't ignore Kohlberg. He is, as they say in the ads, major motion in his field. Most other developmental psychologists have more or less accepted his account of the moral development of children and adolescents. So have educators. You don't plan a curriculum in moral education anymore without using his theory. By the mid-Seventies, feminist social scientists had begun writing articles criticizing what they saw as his bias against women. Finally, one of Kohlberg's former students, a woman who also teaches at Harvard now and whose office is practically next door to his, developed a countertheory. Her name is Carol Gilligan. To expound her theory, she has written a book, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. It appeared in 1982 and has raised a major stir in feminist circles. The cry is up. In the battle between the sexes, Gilligan vs. Kohlberg is now a major skirmish.

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Kohlberg is, in fact, vulnerable to criticism on a number of counts. For one thing, he developed his theory using a group of males as his subjects. His highest moral stages are therefore, the feminists claim, very "male" in style: logical, abstract, oriented toward autonomy and independence rather than toward the more "female" interdependence within a network of close relationships. If Kohlberg had used a mixed group of males and females, the theory might have a different perspective.

For another, there are those moral dilemmas of his. The Heinz dilemma is only the best known; Kohlberg has a set of them, eight or nine in all. Each one is hypothetical. How many times in your threescore years and ten have you had to decide whether or not to steal some rare drug from a drugstore in order to save your wife from certain death? Or there's the one about the Army captain in Korea: His company is in retreat from a rapidly advancing enemy, and the only real chance they have is if somebody goes back and blows up a bridge to stop the enemy's advance. Whoever does that, however, is almost sure not to make it out alive. The captain knows that he himself is the best man to lead the retreat once the bridge is blown. So whom does he send back to blow up the bridge? Nobody volunteers; he has to make a choice. Should it be the company troublemaker, who's strong and at least has a slim chance to survive? Or the guy who's sick, who could blow the bridge but definitely couldn't make it out, but who's going to die shortly anyway? Or should he go back himself?

You can think about it, to be sure, but you probably haven't been an Army captain in Korea or anyplace like it, so you don't know what you would, in fact, do in such a situation. Mostly, you're in Denver at a conference, say, and some woman who is not your wife comes on to you and you have to decide, do I or don't I? But even then, you're not likely to spend 15 minutes analyzing the moral pros and cons of cheating on your wife. You say either, "What the hell, who's going to know?" or "I'm sorry, ma'am, you're very attractive, but I'm not that kind of guy." During my first marriage, I remember, I fell in love with another woman and we had a brief affair, but I don't recall thinking about whether or not it was wrong. I already knew it was wrong, but I did it anyway; as I say, I was in love. When it was over and everybody had gotten hurt, I decided, never again. Is that moral reasoning? Hardly. But we do live this way; we act and then justify our actions, or regret them, and rarely, if ever, do we come up against clean, well-lit moral puzzles such as the one facing poor Heinz.

Take this issue out of the classroom, put all the theories aside and how do men and women deal with real-life moral problems? Do the ways they deal with them differ?

Almost no research has been done on this question, and with good reason. In real life, people are not sitting around in classrooms answering questionnaires, pondering the rights and wrongs of hypothetical dilemmas. They are dealing with extremely complex situations whose variables cannot be controlled and whose circumstances tend to be singular and not repeatable. And they are dealing with them under pressure.

An example: two friends of mine, Sam and Ruthie (not their real names), married for ten years, two young children. Ruthie's sister lives halfway across the country, and she's sick and alone and somebody has to take care of her for a few weeks, so Ruthie volunteers, with Sam's consent. For the first time in his marriage, Sam is alone. He has an affair; it's not easy with two kids to tend, but he manages it, and it opens his eyes. Sex such as he never would have believed. His new girlfriend has no inhibitions; Sam's are rapidly falling away. He hates to betray Ruthie, whom he truly cares for and who's doing the decent thing, taking care of her sick sister, but he can't help himself. He is carried away by passion. Or so he tells himself.

Soon enough, however, Ruthie returns, exhausted and in need of comforting. She wants to be held; she wants to be made love to. Suddenly, Sam realizes how confused he is and what a mess he's in. Sex with Ruthie has never been nearly as exciting for Sam as sex with his new girlfriend, and he's not sure he can make love to her; he knows he doesn't want to. What should he do--tell Ruthie what happened? Is he in love, or is this just an infatuation? If he sleeps with Ruthie, is he then betraying his girlfriend? Should he ask for a divorce? For forgiveness?

Nor are Sam's confused feelings the only thing on his mind. He loves his two kids intensely, and the thought of becoming a divorced, part-time father destroys him. He doesn't have much money and doubts that he could afford a divorce. He knows, or thinks he knows, that without him, Ruthie might not make it: She's dependent; she has no skills and would have trouble getting a job; she tends to collapse under pressure. He has been telling her for years, however, to go back to school and get some training. He doesn't want her to be dependent, even though that makes him feel strong and in charge. If he left, he thinks, she'd have to become a more independent person. And maybe another man could release some of the passion in Ruthie that he had never been able to.

So what's the right thing to do? And according to what moral system do you decide what the right thing is? If you're a utilitarian, you believe in the greatest good for the greatest number, and that would seem to prescribe that you stay with Ruthie--for her sake, for the kids' sake, maybe even for your own sake. But is it good for the kids if you stay in an unhappy marriage and they have to live with your anger and bitterness? Is it good for Ruthie to remain dependent and unskilled? Is it good for you to shoulder your responsibilities, as they say, when you're confused emotionally and don't know who you are or what you want?

Unless you've been in that particular situation, trying to maintain your balance, be a man, do the right thing, whatever that is, and keep your life from crashing down around your ears, all at the same time, you cannot have any useful notion of this man's so-called moral maturity. And once you've got it, you can't compare it, except intuitively, with anyone else's. Reverse the situation, for instance. Have Sam go spend some time with his dying father, let Ruthie have the affair and let her be the strong one in this marriage, and still enough of the particulars will change that you cannot compare the two of them. Ruthie, for one thing, is likely to wind up with the children, even though she has the affair. If he's the dependent one and she leaves, he is not as likely to have to call on his inner resources and become independent as she would be. Why not? Because there are so many more single women than single men; one of them is going to be only too happy to take care of poor old dependent Sam. And so on. In real life, there's no way to compare the moral maturity of individuals using an objective measure, and it's in real life that morality acquires its meaning.

What did Sam actually do? He told Ruthie he was having the affair. He did so partly because he was unable to carry out the deception; he can't act, he says. And partly because he felt so guilty. And partly because he believed it was wrong to lie to someone you cared for when so much was at stake. And partly because he was hoping that if he told her, she would make things easy for him, find the strength he wanted her to have, kick him out, give him a chance to be angry at her, so that if he did leave, he could do it with some assurance he wasn't making a martyr out of her. For all these reasons and more. Which consideration weighed the most with him? He doesn't know. They were all mixed up.

Ruthie didn't make things easy for Sam. She forgave him. It was his girlfriend who made things easy. She fell in love with somebody else shortly after Ruthie returned and it was goodbye, Sam. He and Ruthie are now trying to repair the damage. When he talks about it with me, I pass no judgments. I've been through something like this myself, and I know what it feels like. It feels like no matter what you do, it's wrong. Like every choice you make costs you or somebody else or both of you something. Like you wish you were Heinz, and the choices were as simple as whether or not to steal the drug that would save somebody's life.

But life is far messier than that. You can criticize Kohlberg's theory for being--in a word--unreal.

Which Carol Gilligan does. And she goes Kohlberg one better by basing her account of women's moral development on real-life dramas: She did her research with patients at abortion clinics. Gilligan asked them why they wanted the abortion, how they felt about it, how they justified it. She also tested them on the Heinz dilemma. But what she does not do, surprisingly, is deny Kohlberg's finding that women get stuck at stage three of his moral-development scale. On the contrary, she embraces his finding. With a twist. Yes, women do respond to moral dilemmas differently from men. They do get more involved with other people. They are not as autonomous, not as independent in their judgments. They do, indeed, have trouble disentangling considerations of right from emotional considerations. But it's a mistake, says Gilligan, to think that this is an inferior form of moral thought. It's just different. There's nothing wrong with female morality; it's as valid as male morality. It's not as abstract, true, not as committed to the rules of the game, not as interested in individual rights or in overarching moral principles, but it's just as good. We are talking, in short, separate but equal. We are talking William Caldicott. Women care in a way men don't. Put a woman in the White House and the world is going to be a very different kind of place.

To be fair to Gilligan, she doesn't actually say this; she's more sensible than her followers. Let me put it in her own words: "The moral imperative that emerges repeatedly in interviews with women is an injunction to care, a responsibility to discern and alleviate the 'real recognizable trouble' of this world. For men, the moral imperative appears, rather, as an injunction to respect the rights of others and, thus, to protect from interference the rights to life and self-fulfillment." Women, in other words, at their moral best, are intent upon not hurting other people--or themselves. They want to help people; they get involved. And they have trouble with Heinz's problem because they can't imagine why Heinz and the druggist can't sit down together and somehow work the thing out so that nobody has to suffer.

But the Heinz dilemma, according to Gilligan, was made solely for men. True capitalists at heart, they can see the druggist's side, and they can see Heinz's side, too, and the whole thing becomes a kind of mathematical puzzle in which a hierarchy of rights is the dominant consideration. Gilligan talks about the "compassion and tolerance" that distinguish the moral judgment of women. Men sacrifice compassion and tolerance to rules and principles. Men would just as soon cut the baby in half when two mothers claim it as their own. Men are aggressive and have a propensity to violence, as the world well knows. Women are nonviolent by nature, and their morality is nonviolent, too. Put a woman in the White House? Gilligan doesn't suggest it; but she does suggest that even her onetime mentor, Lawrence Kohlberg, has a propensity to violence of a sort. His moral dilemmas, she says, which arise "inevitably out of a conflict of truths," are by definition sick, in that their either/or formulation leaves "no room for an outcome that does not do violence." That's why women can't handle them. Somebody has to get hurt, Heinz or the druggist or Heinz's wife, and women can't stand to see anyone get hurt.

If you detect a note of impatience in this account, it is intentional. Gilligan spends a good deal of time on this question of the nonviolence of women as opposed to the violence of men, even while she is explaining to us the reasoning process by which her interview subjects were deciding to have abortions. Of all the women interviewed, only four didn't have an abortion and had the baby instead. Some of these women were coming back for their second abortion. Now, I ask you: Is not an abortion an act of violence? Does it not forcibly remove a fetus from a woman's body and destroy it? Is the act itself not a bloody, messy one? I happen to be in favor, violent male that I am, not of abortions but of the right of women to have them. But I am not about to deny that abortion is a difficult, terribly complex moral issue. Carol Gilligan, however, in a book of 174 pages based on her interviews with women having abortions, never raises this issue as a specifically moral one. In a book devoted to the morality of women, it somehow never comes up. Nor does she once so much as mention the violence these women are doing both to the fetus and to themselves.

Women, after all, don't like to hurt anyone. If Gilligan is an example, they also don't like to face unpleasant facts.

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Are women really like this? I sat my wife down one day and posed the Heinz dilemma to her, and it didn't make her uneasy the way it made Gilligan's subjects, and she didn't think Heinz and the druggist and his wife should sit down together and talk things over. She said right away, of course Heinz should steal the drug--the right to life obviously takes priority over the druggist's right to his property. I pressed her on it: Should Heinz steal the drug even if it were for a stranger? She hesitated for a moment, then said, yes, then, too. The right to life is a principle that shouldn't depend on personal relationships--or words to that effect. That's stage-six reasoning, not stage three. My wife, apparently, thinks like a man.

So do lots of other women. About the time Gilligan's book came out, another scholar did an extensive review of the research on the subject of male-vs.-female scores on Kohlberg's moral-development scale, and it turns out that it's mostly "spouse housewives" who score lower than men. When you control for levels of education and job status, the difference between the sexes on these scores vanishes. Women who go to college and then get jobs at the same level as men, in other words, score as highly as men.

Gilligan is not very popular among other feminist scholars. An academic journal called Social Research devoted an entire issue to her book a couple of years ago, and most of the contributors, including the women, were highly critical. One scholar accused Gilligan of "social-scientific sexism." Another pointed out that you can't draw ostensibly universal conclusions about the moral maturity of women, compared with that of men, from abortion experiences. Men, by definition, can't have abortions; you don't know how they would think about it because you cannot. Logically, in other words, you have to come up with a different morality for women if you base that morality on an experience that only women can have. Still another scholar--these are all women and, evidently, all feminists--charged that Gilligan had done some highly selective editing of her subjects' interviews, making it appear that they were both more mature in their reasoning and in better control of their lives than they actually were.

Yet the popular feminist press has seized upon Gilligan as a kind of savior. She is in constant demand for interviews and lectures. Ms. interviewed her shortly before her book appeared; the interview came out under the title "Are Women More Moral than Men?" You can guess the answer to that. In January 1984, Ms. made Gilligan its woman of the year. Vogue has profiled her adoringly. According to Glamour, businessmen have only to follow Gilligan's example and learn to "think like women" and offices will become more humane. And Benjamin Barber, writing in The New Republic, has claimed that Gilligan represents a third stage of feminism eager to "expose the conceptual biases built into the literature of moral development" and portray male ideals of moral autonomy as an "illusory and dangerous quest." Barber approves of all this and sees nothing wrong with the idea of a separate but equal morality for women. Let men have their morality of individual rights; females prefer one based on tender, loving care.

It is enough to make you believe that women really are the illogical creatures some people think they are. Feminists are rushing to embrace a theory about female morality that claims that women don't, can't and shouldn't think like men--that they don't, can't and shouldn't live by moral standards that give priority to the rights of individuals, to their independence, to their liberties, to all that "male" concern with autonomy--when it was in the name of those very rights that women won all that they have won in the past 20 years. What has feminism been about if not the right to be paid the same as a man for equivalent work, the right to have an abortion, the right not to be denied one's rights by virtue of one's sex? Who, for that matter, still would deny women their rights on the grounds that women really are fundamentally different, that they're much less violent, much more tenderhearted than men, that they don't want to hurt anyone, that they aren't equipped, therefore, to deal with large and difficult issues over which people inevitably must get hurt, that they belong in the home, where they can exercise their special talent for caring and nurturing and alleviating the suffering of others--that they are, in short, as Carol Gilligan describes them? Jerry Falwell. Phyllis Schlafly. Jesse Helms.

In my experience and in my opinion, for what it's worth, women are as capable of high levels of moral reasoning as any man. Although they may be less often moved to it, they are as capable of violence, as, say, Catherine de Médicis. They are as likely to be tough and ruthless enough to start a war, like Margaret Thatcher, as they are to be caring and nurturing, like Eleanor Roosevelt. Tolerant and compassionate, as Gilligan says women particularly are? Sometimes--like Martin Luther King, Jr., or Albert Schweitzer. And frequently cruel and intolerant, like Bloody Mary of England, who toasted so many Protestant martyrs at the stake. These are human capacities, as anyone with some experience of the world knows. If women want to be accounted fully human, they must own up to them. To think that women, if only they were in charge, would abolish war, turn business away from competition and toward cooperation, make prisons obsolete and transform us all into nurturers and protomothers is not only Utopian, smug and absurd, it is dangerous. It plays into the hands of people like Helms and Schlafly. It makes women "better" than men, which remains a sure-fire way to keep them on their pedestals and out of power. It makes women "different." Men and women are different, but the point of morality is to treat others, no matter how different, as if they were yourself and to respect their rights as if they were your own. Separate but equal? Ask any black man whether separate is equal.

"Kohlberg calls this the Heinz dilemma; the way you answer it reveals what moral stage you have reached."

© Barbara Nessim '85