Adaptive Virtue and the Aim of Care Education

Every form of moral education eventually faces the same problem: how should it respond to social change and shifting value systems? In the contemporary world, cultural conservatism often triggers two equally unhelpful reactions. Some people idealize the past without qualification. Others want to demolish everything inherited from tradition. Care ethics, as I understand it, does neither. It does not grant tradition any sacred status. Traditions are hard to change because they store accumulated experience and stabilize social relations, not because they are beyond criticism.

The real issue is where change should begin. What is the proper point of intervention in moral education? I do not think the answer is straightforward moral enhancement, understood as the strengthening of some fixed value. That can sometimes serve as a temporary expedient, but I do not think it should define our educational goal. My deeper concern is with overly aggressive programmes of value-shaping. Education should still help people develop, but development ought to mean helping them live better with themselves, form healthier relations with the world, and remain alert to changing circumstances. That is why I describe the final aim of care education as the cultivation of adaptive virtue.

Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice is especially useful here. Gilligan famously challenged Lawrence Kohlberg’s stage theory of moral development. For Kohlberg, justice is the highest aim of moral cognition. The more mature the person, the more likely that person is to reason through universal principles. Gilligan argues that this framework treats male reasoning as the norm and therefore makes women appear morally underdeveloped. My own proposal goes one step further: both male and female moral development can be reinterpreted within a broader moral framework centred on relation.[1]

Kohlberg’s famous Heinz dilemma makes the disagreement vivid. Heinz cannot afford the medicine that would save his wife. Should he steal it? In Gilligan’s interviews, the eleven-year-old boy Jake answers with confidence: yes, because life is more important than money. His reasoning is orderly and principle-driven. Amy, by contrast, seems hesitant. She says Heinz should not steal the medicine, but should instead keep looking for another way, perhaps by borrowing money or finding help elsewhere. Even when the dilemma is tightened, Amy continues to resist the direct appeal to theft. Kohlberg reads this as a lower stage of moral development. Gilligan reads it differently. Amy is not confused. She is reasoning from a different centre. She keeps returning to the relation between Heinz and his wife and to the risk that either theft or inaction may damage that relation beyond repair.[2] [3] [4]

This is why Gilligan can speak of a different moral voice. In her account, women do not simply fail to reach the male standard; rather, they often reason through a structure that is more attentive to relation, dependency, and responsibility as lived between persons. In that framework, moral development does not move simply from selfishness to universal principle. It also moves through stages in which relation first appears as something external and binding, then becomes something more balanced and reflectively inhabited.

Her interviews about abortion show the same pattern. Some women choose abortion from the standpoint of survival or immediate self-interest. Others feel trapped by the expectations of family, partner, or society. A literary example appears in Revolutionary Road, where April Wheeler is torn between her own aspirations and the pressures of marriage, pregnancy, and social life.[5] The real philosophical question is not simply whether abortion is chosen or refused. It is what kind of judgment-structure lies behind the decision. Is the person trying to balance self and relation? Or is she simply surrendering herself to the relation, or sacrificing the relation entirely to herself?

At this point my own view diverges from Gilligan’s. I do not think men and women stand on wholly different moral foundations. Even Kohlberg’s stages can be re-read through the concept of relation.[6] Boys, too, reason relationally. The difference is that the relevant relation is often more abstract. Jake is not thinking chiefly about the concrete bond between Heinz and his wife; he is thinking about the relation between competing principles, such as legality and the priority of life. What Gilligan calls a masculine standard is, in my view, an overemphasis on conceptual relation at the expense of lived interpersonal relation.[7] That is why Jake’s answer should not be described as morally higher. It is simply structured differently.

Once this is clear, a broader point follows. Because relations are mediated by concepts, people will differ in how they adapt to social life, cultural settings, and moral demands. Care ethics should respect this plurality. But respect for plurality cannot mean educational passivity. If education is to do any real work at all, it still has to say something about what is good, what is right, and why. The difference is that it should display its reasons rather than merely impose them, preserve variety in how those reasons are interpreted, and cultivate disciplined habits of inquiry rather than obedience for its own sake.

That last point also matters because moral development is always affected by many non-moral factors. Anyone who reads social psychology seriously will soon see that some social mechanisms are especially likely to damage moral judgment, while others can be positively used in education. Those findings, in my view, provide some of the most important material for what I call critical thinking education. It is to that topic that I now turn.