INTRODUCTION

There has been a great deal of talk about caring in recent years, especially in the USA, where every politician says that he (or she) ‘cares’, and every hospital and medical insurance group claims to be ‘the caring people’. In recent years there has also been a great deal of talk about how different men and women are in their approaches to just about everything – the oft-repeated bromide that ‘men are from Mars; women are from Venus’ is just one illustration of this tendency. I believe (though I can’t prove it) that both these trends stem from one source: Carol Gilligan’s seminal book In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, which first appeared in 1982.1 The idea that men and women are different is as old as the hills, but the specific claim that the way women treat moral problems is, on average, different from (but not inferior or superior to) the way men do was first enunciated by Gilligan.