‘The song remains the same’: rebuttal to Sherblom's re‐envisioning of the legacy of the care challenge

Abstract In the Journal of Moral Education, Sherblom (Citation2008) examined several empirical and conceptual claims related to gender and morality and re‐envisioned the legacy of Gilligan's ‘care challenge’. He concluded that the moral and scientific legitimacy of the ethic of care has been established. However, his apologetic is flawed in major ways and scholarly integrity demands a rebuttal. This article exposes how Sherblom's analysis misconstrues some of the empirical claims, fails to present relevant data, entails an incomplete reading of Kohlberg's theory, imputes an impact on moral/character education that is unwarranted, disregards some significant problems in the conceptualisation of the ethic of care and draws conclusions that are indefensible. The primary claims of the care perspective have generally been discredited and Sherblom's attempt to advance its legacy fails. The time has come to move beyond these notions of a gendered moral psychology. Notes 1. The evidence suggests that the nature of the moral problem is somewhat predictive of the type of moral reasoning that people will bring to bear on it. Sherblom construes this to mean ‘that context alone determines the moral reasoning used’ (p. 87, italics added) which is, of course, a fallacious argument that no one has posited. He proceeds to argue and present anecdotal evidence (pp. 87–89) that people can, on occasion, reason about the same hypothetical dilemmas and similar real‐life dilemmas in different ways. That has never been in contention and is irrelevant to the issue at hand. 2. In fact, Gilligan has authored only a single empirical study of moral orientations that has been published in a refereed psychology journal (viz. Gilligan & Attanucci, Citation1988). Gilligan's failure to present data to support her empirical claims has been roundly criticised (Sommers, Citation2000). 3. At this point in his article, Sherblom asserts that Jaffee and Hyde's ‘meta‐analysis definitively replaces Walker's earlier (Citation1984) analysis…’ (p. 86). This is an egregious mis‐statement given that Walker's meta‐analysis was of gender differences in moral stage and Jaffee and Hyde's meta‐analysis was of gender differences in moral orientation. The respective meta‐analyses address different claims advanced by Gilligan and examine entirely disparate bodies of research. 4. In these studies, moral orientation was assessed using Gilligan's construct in the context of real‐life dilemmas (in other words, using precisely the methodology endorsed by Sherblom's narrow ‘interpretive claim’). 5. The issue of the relationship between moral orientation and moral stage has also been addressed by Skoe in two studies (Skoe & Diessner, Citation1994; Skoe et al., Citation1996). In these studies, the care orientation was assessed by Skoe's Ethic of Care Interview, which typically involves both hypothetical and real‐life dilemmas and which yields an index of care reasoning in terms of developmental levels, so it is unclear whether Gilligan would endorse this measure. A meta‐analysis of the findings across these two studies (total N = 167) revealed a significant effect, Z = −4.61, p<.0001; indicating that, overall, higher levels of care reasoning are again associated with higher moral stage reasoning as assessed by Kohlberg's model; a finding again clearly divergent from the claims of Gilligan and Sherblom.

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