ABSTRACT
The contemporary debate over women and moral theory, which was prompted in 1982 with the publication of Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice, by now has generated an impressive literature of a truly multidisciplinary nature. The author isolates two broad ranges of issues from among the complex set of problems within and outside the confines of feminist theory which Gilligan's work has given rise to. While it looks at the methodological status of the category of "gender" and at the question of difference in Gilligan's research on women and moral theory, in continues to explore the implications of Gilligan's research for universalist moral philosophy. The subject of western philosophical discourse is constituted at the price of repressing difference, excluding otherness and denigrating heterogeneity. The objection that the self, viewed as a unified center of desire, is a fiction again overstates the issue.
