Gilligan's different voice: a perspective for nursing.

This article proposes that Carol Gilligan's ethic of care provides for nursing a paradigm for moral deliberation that demonstrates compatibility with nursing's historical and philosophical traditions of relational caring and furnishes empirical support for the value of caring as a moral activity. The appropriateness of Gilligan's theory for nursing is further illustrated by an elucidation of the similarities between Gilligan's theory and nurse theorist Jean Watson's claims that caring constitutes both a necessary and a fundamental component of nursing. It is argued that Gilligan's theory of moral deliberation more faithfully reflects the nursing experience than Kohlberg's contractual, Kantian theory, which currently dominates the nursing literature.