The Lindsay Clancy Case Shows Why Civilization Must Reject Feminine “Ethics”

The jury system cannot survive moral illogic and the refusal of objectivity

Three of the nine female jurors in the Clancy case could hardly wait for the ink to be dry on the judge’s mistrial declaration before sitting down with a reporter from NBC News to share their banal, self-satisfied opinions.

It’s difficult to assess the prevalence of the Clancy phenomenon, in which a female-dominated consensus, sentimental and vicious, formed swiftly around the alleged suffering and humanity of a woman who killed her three children in a premeditated act.

A YouGov poll from early in September showed that the difference between men’s and women’s reactions to the trial was not as stark as one might have expected from the public furor (women were more likely by about 10 points to support a verdict of not guilty).

But it’s fair to say that the thousands of women—and a few men—expressing impassioned identification with Clancy represent at least a troubling minority whose voices are dangerously amplified in our public culture. Their self-righteous emotionalism corrodes the priority of reason in public life, especially the commitment to equality before the law.

The centering of women’s suffering has a long history. Here, I focus on one relatively little known, but powerful, influence that highlights the connection between feminist rationalizations of abortion and Clancy supporters’ tacit acceptance of child-murder.

As far back as the 1970s and 80s, American feminist academics identified and lauded a feminine moral style that they declared at least equal, if not superior, to the masculine moral precepts of individual responsibility and absolute prohibitions. The feminine ethic prioritizes prevention of harm over punishment for wrongdoing.

Carol Gilligan, author of In a Different Voice (1982)

Foremost among the prophets of women’s distinctive ethic was Carol Gilligan, a PhD in social psychology who trained at Harvard and built an illustrious career at New York University and Cambridge. In 1982, Gilligan published In a Different Voice, a landmark work of psychology written to correct what Gilligan saw as masculine bias in accounts of the stages of moral development. Such accounts, particularly that by American psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, understood women’s moral thinking to be less developed than men’s because less interested in universal ethical principles.

Gilligan set out to show that women’s moral thinking was not inferior to men’s and was actually more humane. According to Gilligan, women made moral judgements differently from men, based on an “ethic of care” closely tied to empathy and compassion. Unlike men, who tend to rely on moral absolutes, women pay more attention to circumstances and power dynamics, believing that those who suffer are deserving of compassion, not judgement.

Gilligan’s book was enthusiastically embraced by feminists within and outside the academy. Thousands of articles and books have cited Gilligan respectfully, touting the revolutionary nature of her arguments.

The “ethic of care,” it was soon proclaimed, was part of “resistance to patriarchy.” One reviewer, quoted on the book’s back cover, noted that Gilligan’s thesis “reframes qualities regarded as women’s weaknesses and shows them to be human strengths.” Another called the book “feminism at its best.” Another praised her work as “profound and profoundly important.” In a Different Voice has been translated into well over a dozen languages, and Gilligan was recently honored with the prestigious 2025 Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy.

Over the years, refinements (as well as some objections) were made to Gilligan’s claims, and scholars are now generally less interested in her outline of female moral psychology than in her overall philosophy. The “ethic of care” has expanded into fields such as politics, international relations, and healthcare. For over four decades, it has remained bafflingly central.

Abortion as a Responsible Choice

In a Different Voice affirmed a morality that was based not on categories of right and wrong but on what Gilligan called “the psychological logic of relationships” (p. 100). Summing up her argument, she stressed women’s laudable concern not with abstract principles but with real-world complexities:

“[T]he reconstruction of the dilemma in its contextual particularity allows the understanding of cause and consequence which engages the compassion and tolerance repeatedly noted to distinguish the moral judgments of women. Only when substance is given to the skeletal lives of hypothetical people is it possible to consider the social injustice that their moral problems may reflect and to imagine the individual suffering their occurrence may signify or their resolution engender” (p. 100).

Gilligan was here describing a far more subjective and relativistic, ever-shifting and flexible, approach to moral judgement than the rules-based approach developed and refined by the men who crafted western law. In the feminine domain, actions are judged not in themselves but according to a framework in which guilt and innocence are inflected by power and oppression. As Gilligan explained, “Moral judgment is renounced in an awareness of the psychological and social determination of human behavior, at the same time that moral concern is reaffirmed in recognition of the reality of human pain and suffering” (p. 103).

Such statements are notably feminist and left-progressivist in their stress on injustice, victimhood, and the “social determination” of behavior (i.e., the lessening of individual agency). Hurting people hurt people, to put it simply, and it is better to prevent or at least stop hurt than to cause yet more pain through punishment. Attention is redirected from individual criminality towards an unjust social system. A much-cited 1998 study by Jon Hurwitz (“Gender differences on crime and punishment”) found women more generally interested in social caretaking than punishment: the commitment “to avoid pain in the first place.” Gilligan suggested that this was because women “see the violence inherent in inequality” (p. 100).

The framework’s special pleading becomes evident when women are the ones causing the pain. Gilligan’s book is directly relevant to the Clancy case in its analysis of women’s moral reasoning about abortion. In a remarkable chapter on “Concepts of Self and Morality,” Gilligan shows how women’s much-touted “compassion” can yet fully accommodate women’s exterminationist violence against unborn children.

The abortion chapter was based on interviews conducted with twenty-nine pregnant women who were considering abortion. Of the twenty-nine, four decided to have their babies, two miscarried, twenty-one chose abortion, and two did not disclose their choice and were unavailable for follow-up interviews.

Quoting from the women’s responses, Gilligan outlined a theory of the stages of women’s moral development that was meant to challenge Lawrence Kohlberg’s (previously-mentioned) outline. In the first stage, according to Gilligan, a woman believes she has no power and therefore no responsibility, with moral choices dictated by survival. In the second stage, the woman believes that she has responsibility to care for others; doing right means placing the needs of others before her own.

In the third stage (the stage of maturity), the woman balances her needs against others’, and comes to the stage of honest responsibility in which she “asks if it is possible to be responsible to herself as well as to others and thus to reconcile the disparity between hurt and care” (pp. 82-83).

The outline sounds reasonable until one realizes how it dispenses with moral logic. Once the ethic of care is expanded to include the self, and when morality is no longer absolute but based on social and psychological contexts, it is possible to justify abortion as an ethical choice that balances competing needs. Gilligan quotes, without any evident qualms, various female study subjects who rationalize their decision. One woman presented abortion in the following simplistic manner:

“I would not be doing myself or the child or the world any kind of favor having this child. I don’t need to pay off my imaginary debts to the world through this child, and I don’t think that it is right to bring a child into the world and use it for that purpose” (p. 92).

Remarkable, here, is the crude inversion that allows for the child to be thought of merely as an instrument for the woman’s self-punishment or refusal of self-punishment. The child as a separate human being with its own right to life is not considered at all: killing a child becomes merely one in a number of potential harms bearing no moral significance except in relation to the woman’s self-perception.

As another of the interviewees phrased it, abortion comes to be seen as a way for a woman to express responsibility for herself: “I have this responsibility to myself, and […] for once I am beginning to realize that that really matters to me” (p. 94).

Gilligan provides a gloss of justification: “Once obligation extends to include the self as well as others, the disparity between selfishness and responsibility dissolves” (p. 94). That’s one way of putting it. One might also say that actual selfishness is recast as responsibility; and actual harm to another recast as caring for the self.

Compassion for a Child-Killer

One can see the effects of similar reasoning among the Clancy jury members, who in their post-trial interviews prioritized compassion towards Clancy over judgement for her admitted murders. The jurors determined that “not guilty” was the right verdict, not because Clancy could not distinguish right from wrong or stop herself from killing—in fact, they seemed to have been quite uninterested in determining her state of mind—but because she had suffered. She had been “failed” by everyone; she had been “lost in the system,” as one juror said in interview. Having sought relief in vain, she was now owed care.

Yes, she had done wrong, but in a moral universe in which there is no absolute wrong, only competing needs and degrees of suffering in an inequitable society, the jurors found it easier to imagine the wrong to Clancy as a woman denied care than the absolute wrong done to her children. The best way to obtain “justice” for them all, they decided, was to declare that no mother, including Clancy, should suffer again. In caring for Clancy, the jurors could think of themselves as caring also for her dead children and all children and “every person with a beating heart,” as one juror declared.

This is why the jurors were so annoyed with the holdout. For the women (and at least one male enabler), the killings were rightly understood as an expression of Clancy’s pain rather than as an attempt to cause harm; so the holdout juror was wrong to keep his focus on the children. As Gilligan phrased it in relation to the question of abortion:

“The criterion for judgement thus shifts from goodness to truth when the morality of action is assessed not on the basis of its appearance in the eyes of others, but in terms of the realities of its intention and consequences” (p. 83).

For Clancy’s supporters, the children’s deaths should not be evaluated as they appeared “in the eyes of others [society]” but only as they appeared to Clancy, who did not intend harm. Just as the murders absolve Clancy of responsibility because a sane mother would not murder her children, so the murders absolve the jury of the need to punish Clancy because Clancy has already been punished. She lives every day with the knowledge of what her illness made her do.

If much of this sounds like rationalization and evasion, that’s because it is rationalization and evasion, with refusal to judge a woman dressed up as compassion. (It need hardly be said that most men would not receive similar compassion because most men, with some exceptions, would not be understood to have suffered to the same extent.)

Gilligan’s chapter on abortion reads like an attempt to use feminist academic language to validate women’s flimsy self-justifications in the absence of any consistent moral standards or logical assessment. Gilligan approves the reframing of abortion as “a choice between the two evils of hurting herself or ending the incipient [sic] life of the child” (p. 21), in which a woman’s “hurt,” temporary as it might be, is morally equivalent to a child’s death.

This is what occurs when women discard masculine values and give sympathetic “inner judgement” (p. 82) precedence over man-made laws.

In the last quotation in the abortion chapter, Gilligan cites the following statement by a woman about the many grey areas of morality:

“I don’t even think I use the words right and wrong anymore, and I know I don’t use the word moral, because I am not sure I know what it means. We are talking about an unjust society, we are talking about a whole lot of things that are not right, that are truly wrong—to use the word that I don’t use very often—and I have no control to change that. If I could change it, I certainly would, but I can only make my small contribution from day to day, and if I don’t intentionally hurt somebody, that is my contribution to a better society. And so a chunk of that contribution is also not to pass judgment on other people, particularly when I don’t know the circumstances of why they are doing certain things” (p. 102).

According to Gilligan and her followers, the above expresses a subtle ethical stance that does not become “principled at the expense of care” (p. 105). It draws back from particular moral judgements in the name of a generalized empathy. It declares that “not to pass judgement” contributes to a better society. It does not “intentionally” hurt. It is not certain of the morality of actions, only that there are “a whole lot of things that are not right, that are truly wrong” in the world. Thinking along these lines, many women have refused to judge Clancy because of all that is “very wrong” for women.

Gilligan’s reflections show how when feeling becomes unmoored from reason and truth—and when emotional grievance overtakes the pursuit of impartial justice—caring can easily become selfish and compassion can become homicidal.

Gilligan and her followers were not incorrect, it seems, in finding the “ethic of care” a particular form of women’s judgement. They were incorrect, however, in calling it ethical and in not recognizing its peril.

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