Please note the new venue for the STIAS lectures
Prof. Carol Gilligan, University Professor of Applied Psychology and the Humanities at New York University
and STIAS Fellow will present a talk with the title:
Moral Injury and the Ethic of Care: Reframing the Conversation about Differences
Abstract
Across the human sciences – from developmental psychology to neurobiology and evolutionary anthropology – a paradigm shift is occurring as researchers converge in the recognition that as humans we are relational, responsive beings, born with a voice and a desire to live in relationships. What was initially heard as a “different voice” and associated with women is in fact a human voice; rather than asking how do we gain the capacity to care, we are prompted to ask instead: how do we lose it or, more painfully, how do we lose the capacity to love? A triptych of research conducted over the past three decades illuminates a crisis of connection that infects our personal and political lives. The tensions between democracy and patriarchy, between equal voice as the condition for free and open conversation or debate and an order of living based on a gender binary and hierarchy play out within the psyche, creating a site for moral injury but also a potential for resistance and transformation. A feminist ethic of care can guide us in resisting moral injury. It reframes the conversation about differences as a conversation about voices and listening, and transforms what is often experienced as a conflict between women and men into a movement to free democracy from patriarchy.
Carol Gilligan is University Professor of Applied Psychology and the Humanities at New York University, where she co-leads the Project for the Advancement of our Common Humanity.
