An Ethic of Care

Feminist and Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Mary Jeanne Larrabee, Mary Jeanne Larrabee, Mary Jeanne Larrabee, Mary Jeanne Larrabee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134712533
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie de la philosophie

Published in 1982, Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice proposed a new model of moral reasoning based on care, arguing that it better described the moral life of women. An Ethic of Care is the first volume to bring together key contributions to the extensive debate engaging Gilligan's work. It provides the highlights of the often impassioned discussion of the ethic of care, drawing on the literature of the wide range of disciplines that have entered into the debate. Contributors: Annette Baier, Diana Baumrind, Lawrence A. Blum, Mary Brabeck, John Broughton, Owen Flanagan, Marilyn Friedman, Carol Gilligan, Catherine G. Greeno, Catherine Jackson, Linda K. Kerber, Mary Jeanne Larrabee, Zella Luria, Eleanor E. Maccoby, Linda Nicholson, Bill Puka, Carol B. Stack, Joan C. Tronto, Lawrence Walker, Gertrud Nunner-Winkler.

Part I

GILLIGAN’S “DIFFERENT
VOICE”: PROBINGS

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2

What Do Women Want in
a Moral Theory?

Annette C. Baier

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When I finished reading Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice, I asked myself the obvious question for a philosopher reader, namely what differences one should expect in the moral philosophy done by women, supposing Gilligan’s sample of women representative, and supposing her analysis of their moral attitudes and moral development to be correct. Should one expect them to want to produce moral theories, and if so, what sort of moral theories? How will any moral theories they produce differ from those produced by men?

Obviously one does not have to make this an entirely a priori and hypothetical question. One can look and see what sort of contributions women have made to moral philosophy. Such a look confirms, I think, Gilligan’s findings. What one finds is a bit different in tone and approach from the standard sort of moral philosophy as done by men following in the footsteps of the great moral philosophers (all men). Generalizations are extremely rash, but when I think of Philippa Foot’s work on the moral virtues, of Elizabeth Anscombe’s work on intention and on modern moral philosophy, of Iris Murdoch’s philosophical writings, of Ruth Barcan Marcus’ work on moral dilemmas, of the work of the radical feminist moral philosophers who are not content with orthodox Marxist lines of thought, of Jenny Teichman’s book on illegitimacy, of Susan Wolf’s recent articles, of Claudia Card’s essay on mercy, Sabina Lovilbond’s recent book, Gabriele Taylor’s work on pride, love and on integrity, Cora Diamond’s and Mary Midgeley’s work on our attitude to animals, Sissela Bok’s work on lying and on secrecy, Virginia Held’s work, the work of Alison Jaggar, Marilyn Frye, and many others, I seem to hear a different voice from the standard moral philosophers’ voice. I hear the voice Gilligan heard, made reflective and philosophical. What women want in moral philosophy is what they are providing. And what they are providing seems to me to confirm Gilligan’s theses about women. One has to be careful there, of course, for not all important contributions to moral philosophy by women fall easily into the Gilligan stereotype, or its philosophical extension. Nor has it been only women who recently have been proclaiming discontent with the standard approach in moral philosophy, and trying new approaches. Michael Stocker, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Ian Hacking (1984, when he assesses the game theoretic approach to morality), all should be given the status of honorary women, if we accept the hypothesis that there are some moral insights which for whatever reason women seem to attain more easily or more reliably than men do. Still, exceptions confirm the rule, so I shall proceed undaunted by these important exceptions to my generalizations.

If Hacking is right, preoccupation with prisoner’s and prisoners’ dilemma is a big boys’ game, and a pretty silly one too. It is, I think, significant that women have not rushed into the field of game-theoretic moral philosophy, and that those who have dared enter that male locker room have said distinctive things there. Edna Ullman Margalit’s book The Emergence of Norms put the prisoner’s dilemma in its limited moral place. Supposing that at least part of the explanation for the relatively few women in this field is disinclination rather than disability, one might ask it this disinclination also extends to a disinclination for the construction of moral theories. For although we find out what sort of moral philosophy women want by looking to see what they have provided, if we do that for moral theory, the answer we get seems to be “none.” For none of the contributions to moral philosophy by women really count as moral theories, nor are seen as such by their authors.

Is it that reflective women, when they become philosophers, want to do without moral theory, want no part in the construction of such theories? To conclude this at this early stage, when we have only a few generations of women moral philosophers to judge from, would be rash indeed. The term “theory” can be used in wider and narrower ways, and in its widest sense a moral theory is simply an internally consistent, fairly comprehensive account of what morality is and when and why it merits our acceptance and support. In that wide sense, a moral theory is something it would take a skeptic, or one who believes that our intellectual vision is necessarily blurred or distorted when we let it try to take in much, to be an antitheorist. Even if there were some truth in the latter claim, one might compatibly with it still hope to build up a coherent total account by a mosaic method, assembling a lot of smaller-scale works until one had built up a complete account—say taking the virtues or purported virtues one by one until one had a more or less complete account. But would that sort of comprehensiveness in one’s moral philosophy entitle one to call the finished work a moral theory? If it does, then many women moral philosophers today can be seen as engaged in moral theory construction. In the weakest sense of “theory,” namely a coherent near-comprehensive account, then there are plenty incomplete theories to be found in the works of women moral philosophers. And in that sense of theory, most of what are recognized as the current moral theories are also incomplete, since they do not purport to be yet really comprehensive. Wrongs to animals and wrongful destruction of our physical environment are put to one side by Rawls, and in most “liberal” theories there are only hand waves concerning our proper attitude to our children, to the ill, to our relatives, friends, and lovers.

Is comprehensiveness too much to ask of a moral theory? The paradigm examples of moral theories—those that are called by their authors “moral theories,” are distinguished not by the comprehensiveness of their internally coherent account, but by the sort of coherence which is aimed at over a fairly broad area. Their method is not the mosaic method, but the broad brushstroke method. Moral theories, as we know them, are, to change the art form, vaults rather than walls—they are not built by assembling painstakingly-made brick after brick. In this sense of theory, namely, that of a fairly tightly systematic account of a fairly large area of morality, with a key stone supporting all the rest, women moral philosophers have not yet, to my knowledge, produced moral theories, nor claimed that they have.

Leaving to one side the question of what good purpose (other than good clean intellectual fun) is served by such moral theories, and supposing for the sake of argument that women can, if they wish, systematize as well as the next man, and if need be systematize in a mathematical fashion as well as the next mathematically minded moral philosopher, then what key concept, or guiding motif, might hold together the structure of a moral theory hypothetically produced by a reflective woman, Gilligan-style, who has taken up moral theorizing as a calling? What would be a suitable central question, principle, or concept, to structure a moral theory which might accommodate those moral insights women tend to have more readily than men, and to answer those moral questions which, it seems, worry women more than men? I hypothesized that the women’s theory, expressive mainly of women’s insights and concerns, would be an ethics of love, and this hypothesis seems to be Gilligan’s too, since she has gone on from In a Different Voice to write about the limitations of Freud’s understanding of love as women know it (Gilligan 1984a). But presumably women theorists will be like enough to men to want their moral theory to be acceptable to all, so acceptable both to reflective women and to reflective men. Like any good theory, it will need not to ignore the partial truth of previous theories. So it must accommodate both the insights men have more easily than women, and those women have more easily than men. It should swallow up its predecessor theories. Women moral theorists, if any, will have this very great advantage over the men whose theories theirs supplant, that they can stand on the shoulders of men moral theorists, as no man has yet been able to stand on the shoulders of any woman moral theorist. There can be advantages, as well as handicaps, in being latecomers. So women theorists will need to connect their ethics of love with what has been the men theorists’ preoccupation, namely obligation.

The great and influential moral theorists have in the modern era taken obligation as the key and the problematic concept, and have asked what justifies treating a person as morally bound or obliged to do a particular thing. Since to be bound is to be unfree, by making obligation central one at the same time makes central the question of the justification of coercion, of forcing or trying to force someone to act in a particular way. The concept of obligation as justified limitation of freedom does just what one wants a good theoretical concept to do—to divide up the field (as one looks at different ways one’s freedom may be limited, freedom in different spheres, different sorts and versions and levels of justification) and at the same time hold the subfields together. There must in a theory be some generalization and some specification or diversification, and a good rich key concept guides one both in recognizing the diversity and in recognizing the unity in it. The concept of obligation has served this function very well for the area of morality it covers, and so we have some fine theories about that area. But as Aristotelians and Christians, as well as women, know, there is a lot of morality not covered by that concept, a lot of very great importance even for the area where there are obligations.

This is fairly easy to see if we look at what lies behind the perceived obligation to keep promises. Unless there is some good moral reason why someone should assume the responsibility of rearing a child to be capable of taking promises seriously, once she understands what a promise is, the obligation to obey promises will not effectively tie her, and any force applied to punish her when she breaks promises or makes fraudulent ones will be of questionable justice. Is there an obligation on someone to make the child into a morally competent promisor? If so, on whom? Who has failed in their obligations when, say, war orphans who grew up without parental love or any other love arrive at legal adulthood very willing to be untrue to their word? Who failed in what obligation in all those less extreme cases of attempted but unsuccessful moral education? The parents who didn’t produce promise-keeping offspring? Those who failed to educate the parents in how to educate their children (whoever it might be who might plausibly be thought to have the responsibility for training parents to fulfill their obligations)? The liberal version of our basic moral obligations tend to be fairly silent on who has what obligations to new members of the moral community, and it would throw most theories of the justification of obligations into some confusion if the obligation to lovingly rear one’s children were added to the list of obligations. Such evidence as we have about the conditions in which children do successfully “learn” the morality of the community of which they are members suggests that we cannot substitute “conscientiously” for “lovingly” in this hypothetically needed obligation. But an obligation to love, in the strong sense needed, would be an embarrassment to the theorist, given most accepted versions of “ought implies can.”

It is hard to make fair generalizations here, so I shall content myself with indicating how this charge I am making against the current men’s moral theories, that their version of the justified list of obligations does not ensure the proper care of the young, so does nothing to ensure the stability of the morality in question over several generations, can be made against what I regard as the best of the men’s recent theories, namely John Rawls’ theory of justice. One of the great strengths of Rawls’ theory is the careful attention given to the question of how just institutions produce the conditions for their continued support, across generations, and in particular of how the sense of justice will arise in children, once there are minimally just institutions structuring the social world into which they are born. Rawls, more than most moral theorists, has attended to the question of the stability of his just society, given what we know about child development. But Rawls’ sensitive account of the conditions for the development of that sense of justice needed for the maintenance of his version of a just society takes it for granted that there will be loving parents rearing the children in whom the sense of justice is to develop. “The parents, we may suppose, love the child, and in time the child comes to love and trust the parents” (Rawls 1971, 463). Why may we suppose this? Not because compliance with Rawls’ version of our obligations and duties will ensure it. Rawls’ theory, like so many other theories of obligation, in the end must take out a loan not only on the natural duty of parents to care for children (which he will have no trouble including), but on the natural virtue of parental love (or even a loan on the maternal instinct?). The virtue of being a loving parent must supplement the natural duties and the obligations of justice, if the just society is to last beyond the first generation. And as Nancy Chodorow’s work indicates, the loving parents must also accept a certain division of childcare responsibility if their version of the obligations and virtues of men and of women is, along with their version of the division of labor accompanying that allocation of virtues, to be passed on.

Reliance on a recognized obligation to turn oneself into a good parent, or else avoid becoming a parent, would be a problematic solution. Good parents tend to be the children of good parents, so this obligation would collapse into the obligation to avoid parenthood unless one expected to be a good parent. That, given available methods of contraception, may itself convert into the obligation, should one expect not to be a good parent, to sexual abstinence, or sterilization, or resolute resort to abortion when contraception fails. The conditional obligation to abort, and in effect also the conditional obligation to sterilization, falls on the women. There may be conditions in which the rational moral choice is between obligatory sexual abstinence or obligatory sterilization, but obligatory abortion, such as women in China now face, seems to me a moral monster. I do not believe that liberal moral theorists will be able to persuade reflective women that a morality that in any conditions makes abortion obligatory, as distinct from permitted, or advisable, or, on occasion, best, is in their own as well as their men fellows’ long-term self-interest. It would be tragic if such moral questions in the end come to the question of whose best interests to sacrifice, men’s or women’s (and I do not believe they do come to this) but, should they come to this, then justice would require that, given the long history of the subordination of women’s to men’s interests, men’s interests be sacrificed. Justice, of course, never decides these issues unless power reinforces justice, so I am not predicting any victory for women, should it ever come to a fight over obligatory abortion, or over who is to face obligatory sterilization.

No liberal moral theorist, as far as I know, is advocating obligatory abortion or obligatory sterilization when necessary to prevent the conception of children whose parents do not expect to love them. My point rather is that they escape this conclusion only by avoiding the issue of what is to ensure that new members of the moral community do get the loving care they need to become morally competent persons. Liberal moral theories assume that women will either provide loving maternal care, or will persuade their mates to provide loving paternal care, or when pregnant will decide for abortion, encouraged by their freedom-loving men. In other words, they exploit the culturally encouraged maternal instinct, and/or the culturally encouraged docility of women. The liberal system would receive a nasty spanner in its works should women use their freedom of choice as regards abortion to choose not to abort, and then leave their newborn children on their fathers’ doorsteps. That would test liberal morality’s ability to provide for its own survival.

At this point it may be objected that every moral theory must make some assumptions about the natural psychology of those on whom obligations are imposed. Why shouldn’t the liberal theorist count on a continuing sufficient supply of good loving mothers, as it counts on continuing self-interest, and perhaps on a continuing supply of pugnacious men who are able and willing to become good soldiers, without turning any of these into moral obligations? Why waste moral resources recognizing as obligatory or as virtuous what one can count on getting without moral pressure? If one can get enough good mothers and good warriors “for free,” in the moral economy, why not gladly exploit what nature and cultural history offer? I cannot answer this question fully here, but my argument does depend upon the assumption that a decent morality will not depend for its stability on forces to which it gives no moral recognition. Its account books should be open to scrutiny, and there should be no unpaid debts, no loans with no pr...