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society · 1982 – 1993

The Care Perspective

Gilligan argues from Kohlberg's own research data that what his sample heard as a lower stage of moral reasoning is a different orientation, organised around responsibility and relationship rather than rules and rights. Held develops the position into a full ethics: obligations arise inside particular relationships, are partial, and cannot be derived from a general principle. Both are attacks on the thinness of the justice frame that no system designed around aggregate criteria can hear.

“The care perspective takes as its starting point the relationships in which we live rather than the abstract principles we are supposed to abide by. (paraphrase of In a Different Voice, 1982)”
— Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (1982)

Advances

  • Moral reasoning as plural rather than a single hierarchy
  • Responsibility to particular others as the ground of obligation, not an addition to it
  • The falsifiability concern: a framework blind to care will recommend unspeakable resolutions

Landmarks

  1. 1982 CE

    In a Different Voice published

    A critique of Kohlberg read for decades as an attack on the male sample of his subjects.

  2. 1989 CE

    ALVINN

    Inside this window: end-to-end imitation learning learns lane-following from a human driver.

  3. 1993 CE

    Moral Orientation in the Professional

    Gilligan's map of orientations gives ethics a vocabulary for partiality.

Who was arguing

Alignment stack at 1993 CE (2 of 20 techniques)

  • Hard Constraints

    training

    Encode prohibitions as rules the optimiser cannot trade away, rather than as terms it can outbid. Runs from Asimov's Three Laws (1942) to rule engines, shielded formal verification, hard token constraints and refusal scaffolding. Weakness: a system that can route around a rule it can represent can route around it, so the constraint has to be enforced somewhere the policy cannot rewrite.

  • Imitation Learning

    training

    Learn by copying demonstrations instead of by optimising a proxy. Behaviour cloning and DAgger move the burden from reward design to demonstration coverage: the system inherits the trainer's competence and the trainer's blind spots. It remains the substrate under every current imitation-of-humans approach, including the pretraining-plus-finetuning of large language models.

    Dean A. Pomerleau and Dean L. Thorlabs · ALVINN: An Autonomous Land Vehicle in a Neural Network · NeurIPS 1989

Techniques introduced in this era: Hard Constraints, Imitation Learning