Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is philosophize this.

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I hope you love the episode of the podcast today.

So the story of what's come to be known today in the world of philosophy as an ethics of care

begins almost 50 years ago in the 1970s. The setting is Harvard University. The main character of

the story is Carol Gilligan, a talented student doing work in the field of developmental psychology.

And the first conflict that Gilligan faces in this chapter of the story is with her teacher,

a man by the name of Lawrence Colberg. Now, Colberg, pretty much considered to be the gold

standard of the time when it comes to gauging the levels of moral development in children.

The idea is simple. It's a mystery of the universe. How do people go from being infants,

rolling around in a pile of human excrement all day, to being upstanding members of society,

making ethical decisions about complicated situations? How would you even study something like that

if you wanted to? Well, to Colberg, you gather up a bunch of kids, you put them into a room.

You present the kids with moral dilemmas of various types. You ask them for what they think the

correct way is to navigate the moral decision, and then you follow up and ask them to explain

their moral reasoning and give them a score on a scale of 1 to 6. A score of 1 to 2 is what

Colberg called pre-conventional levels of morality. Basically, the kids act in a way where their

chief motivation in moral action is to avoid punishment. Scoring a 3 to 4 would place kids in a

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