Critical Evaluation of Gilligan's View about the Ethics of Care

The ethics of care as exposed by Carol Gilligan can be regarded the mother of theories of care. In her famous book, "In a Different Voice", Gilligan introduces and fully describes this type of ethics. She believes that ethics of care is, in fact, a feminine ethics and regarded as one of the distinctive characteristics of women, which is deeply different from masculine ethics; a difference which results from different thinking and view of these two genders, traces back to their deep gender difference and causes two different kinds of ethics with two different approaches, i.e. care-based and justice-based. Despite Gilligan's certainty in defending the ethics of care, psychologists, feminists, policy-makers and followers of other theories of ethics had criticized her theory from different aspects.