Moral Boundaries

A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care

Joan Tronto

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000159080
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In Moral Boundaries Joan C. Tronto provides one of the most original responses to the controversial questions surrounding women and caring. Tronto demonstrates that feminist thinkers have failed to realise the political context which has shaped their debates about care. It is her belief that care cannot be a useful moral and political concept until its traditional and ideological associations as a "women's morality" are challenged.

Moral Boundaries contests the association of care with women as empirically and historically inaccurate, as well as politically unwise. In our society, members of unprivileged groups such as the working classes and people of color also do disproportionate amounts of caring. Tronto presents care as one of the central activites of human life and illustrates the ways in which society degrades the importance of caring in order to maintain the power of those who are privileged.

PART ONE

Introduction

1

MORAL BOUNDARIES AND POLITICAL CHANGE

HOW MIGHT AN ETHIC OF CARE BECOME POSSIBLE?

THROUGHOUT THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, many advocates for women have tried to use the common notion that women are more moral than men as a political tool to improve women’s standing in the public sphere. From the suffragist claim that “if women voted there would be no more war,” to the 1992 US election slogans proclaiming “the year of the woman,” many have proclaimed that politics would be more moral if only more women were involved. “Women’s morality,” then, has not only appeared to be a fact of life, it has also appeared to be a powerful strategy for creating political change.¹

The content of this “women’s morality” is never precisely set, but the term refers loosely to a collection of ideas:² values placed on caring and nurturance, the importance of mothers’s love, a stress on the value of sustaining human relationships, the overriding value of peace.³ It is also not clear if women’s greater moral sensitivity derives from simply being female, from being a mother or a potential mother,⁴ or from women’s particular cultural role and setting, for example, that women can be more moral because they are outside of the marketplace.⁵

Yet despite its longevity and its great appeal, the strategy of women’s morality cannot be counted as very successful. Women remain almost entirely excluded from power in political, economic, and cultural institutions of importance in the United States, despite the small gains of “the year of the woman.”⁶ A century old strategy to gain a share of power that remains so small does not seem to be a very effective strategy at all.

Not only has this strategy not been so successful, but it has also incurred fairly high costs. A companion to the argument that “women are more moral than men” is an image of “women” that has historically (and, I shall argue, necessarily) excluded many “women” from its purview. In the United States, for example, the morality of women was tied to motherhood, and was tied to combatting the influence of immigrant, Black, and working class men.⁷ As a result, the image of “moral” women often excluded women of color, immigrant women, poor women, lesbians, and women who were not “fit” mothers. The strategy of women’s morality has required for all of its limited success, that some women’s realities (to say nothing of their sense of morality!) be sacrificed to achieve other women’s inclusion.

From such an indictment, it would seem that there is no point in pursuing the prospects of “women’s morality” any further. Yet this argument continues to exert a pull in popular culture, in everyday conversation, and in some scholarly circles. No doubt part of this appeal is that it seems more positive than many other arguments made by feminists, stressing women’s contribution, rather than dwelling upon the wrongs done by men and the anger these wrongs elicit. Many women, no matter how carefully they have thought about these issues, find something appealing about such claims as: “Cooperation among women is the force that sustains civilization.”⁸

Another part of the appeal of women’s morality rests within the ideas upon which it is based. The values of caring and nurturance, of stressing the importance of human relationships as key elements of the good life, remain enticing possibilities in a culture that stresses, as its bottom line, an unlimited concern with productivity and progress.

What would it mean in late twentieth century American society to take seriously, as part of our definition of a good society, the values of caring—attentiveness, responsibility, nurturance, compassion, meeting others’ needs—traditionally associated with women and traditionally excluded from public consideration? I argue that to take this question seriously requires a radical transformation in the way we conceive of the nature and boundaries of morality, and an equally radical rethinking of structures of power and privilege in this society. What I propose to do, in other words, is to offer a vision for the good society that draws upon feminist sensibilities and upon traditional “women’s morality” without falling into the strategic traps that have so far doomed this approach.

The core argument of this book, then, can be expressed in paradoxical terms: I argue that we need to stop talking about “women’s morality” and start talking instead about a care ethic that includes the values traditionally associated with women. In this chapter I explain why the switch from “women’s morality” to a care ethic is necessary.

Here is a further paradox: In order to take morality seriously, we need to stop thinking about it as only morality. Because I hope to take moral arguments more seriously, I submit that we have to understand them in a political context. While I am mindful that we usually assume moral arguments will be corrupted by association with politics, we will return to that assumption shortly. What is much more important at the outset is that all moral arguments are made in a political context, and feminists ignore the political setting of their moral arguments at their peril.

As feminist thinkers have begun to scrutinize Western thought, they have continually discovered that the questions that have traditionally informed the lives of women, and servants, slaves, and workers, have not informed the philosophical tradition or political theory. While there are some notable exceptions,⁹ for the most part, questions of natality, mortality, and the needs of humans to be cared for as they grow up, live, and die, have not informed the central questions of philosophers. Because the questions of caring have not been central to most previous thinkers in the Western philosophical tradition and to Western political theorists, they have been peripheral issues within the vision of most political theorists. So to take these questions seriously, as I propose to do with the question of caring, requires that we rethink theories so these aspects of human life can be brought into our focus.¹⁰

Yet the process by which we make some questions central and others peripheral or marginal is not simply a benign process of thought. Theorists’ exclusions operate forcefully to set boundaries between those questions and concerns that are central and those that are peripheral. While our current concepts could be extended to include concerns of care, the boundaries that circumscribe how moral concepts might be used in our current modes of thought foreclose such thinking. Theories and frameworks exert a power over how we think; if we ignore this power then we are likely to misunderstand why our arguments seem ineffectual.

THE POWER OF CONTEXT AND THE CONTEXT OF POWER

The easiest way to account for the lack of success of “women’s morality” arguments would be to assume that they are inherently flawed as arguments; that they rest upon unproven facts or unsupportable principles. For the most part, this tactic has not been the one used to defeat “women’s morality” arguments. To attack “motherhood,” care, nurturance, and so forth would not be a very effective political tactic. The more usual tactic has been to dismiss “women’s morality” as irrelevant to genuine moral argument, or as irrelevant to given political circumstances.

Certain ways in which we think about moral life influence what kinds of moral arguments we find persuasive. In this regard, all moral theories have a context that determines the conditions for their relevance; even those moral theories that claim to be universal must establish the basis for this claim.¹¹ Since a context does not consist simply of a detailing of “facts,” we need to be clear about what we mean by a context.¹² I insist throughout this book that we need to take seriously the political context, and the inherent power relationships, within moral theories and situations.¹³ How can political context affect the acceptability of moral arguments? Two examples illuminate how some of the characteristics that we attribute to morality work to preclude us from taking seriously the arguments of women’s morality.

Jane Addams was an immensely popular woman in the United States prior to World War I. Her work at Hull House was widely known, and she seemed to embody the higher moral standards that women popularly seemed to possess. Popular magazines included Addams in their lists of the ten most important women in the United States. Yet after the United States entered World War I and Jane Addams stubbornly clung to her pacifistic view, a view that she saw as part of her notion of “women’s morality,” Addams’ popularity plummeted. She was red-baited and vilified.¹⁴ Although she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1931, her reputation and political influence never recovered their prewar levels.

One of the most moving images of women engaging in political activity in recent time is the story of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, who were instrumental in focusing international attention of the plight of their “disappeared” children. Yet having played a role in delegitimizing the corrupt military regime, the Mothers have had less influence in shaping Argentine politics than we might have expected. They appeared, it seems, as moral actors on the political stage, but then they were ushered off the stage when it came time to return to the main action of politics.¹⁵

Both of these examples stand as testament to the power that sometimes accrues to women when they make moral arguments in politics. The political importance of these moral arguments does not depend upon the constancy of the women’s moral views, the rightness of their cause, or what they do. Instead, political realities shape how seriously arguments made from women’s morality are taken by political actors and the public. If women argue from a moral perspective, they are likely to encounter opposition from political actors who insist that, while morality is an important part of human life, it has no place (or a limited place) in the nasty world of politics. While sometimes women will be admired for their stands, often they will also be dismissed because their stands grow out of sentiment or rest upon pre-political, private, associations.

Once we realize that moral arguments have a political context, we begin to recognize how boundaries shape moralities. Widely accepted social values constitute the context within which we interpret all moral arguments. Some ideas function as boundaries to exclude some ideas of morality from consideration. In this book I focus on three such moral boundaries.¹⁶

THREE MORAL BOUNDARIES

The first boundary that we consider is the boundary between morality and politics. It is difficult to describe this boundary, because both the notions of morality and politics are “essentially contestable” ideas.¹⁷ Roughly, morality refers, in Dorothy Emmet’s language, to “considerations as to what one thinks it important to do and in what ways; how to conduct one’s relations with other people; and being aware and prepared to be critical of one’s basic approvals or disapprovals.”¹⁸ We could also define morality in a more social context, as John Dewey did when he concluded that “interest in learning from all the contacts of life is the essential moral interest.”¹⁹

Politics, on the other hand, is usually conceived in Western thought as the realm in which resources are allocated, public order is maintained, and disputes about how these activities should occur are resolved.²⁰ On the face of it, politics and morality seem to concern quite different aspects of human life.

In fact, morality and politics are deeply intertwined in Western life. Aristotle described political association as the way in which societies created the capacities for ethical practices and modes of existence; for this reason Aristotle called the polis the highest form of association.²¹ A good polis was no guarantee that citizens would be ethical, but for Aristotle it was almost impossible that good men could exist in a bad polis. While few thinkers in a contemporary liberal society would defend the kind of close fit between politics and morality that Aristotle described, neither is the notion that political life shapes moral views and practices completely foreign to contemporary political discourse.

Instead of viewing morality and politics as a set of congruent and intertwined ideas, most contemporary political thinkers would view the relationship of politics and morality in either one of two ways. In the first case, the “morality first” view, thinkers begin by asserting the primacy of moral values. After moral views are fixed, right-thinking individuals should suggest to the state how political life should conform to these moral principles. In the second case, the “politics first” view, political thinkers assert the primacy of political values such as gaining power and preserving it through force and strength. In this view, moral values should only be introduced into politics in accordance with the requirements of these political concerns.

Most contemporary political thinkers, influenced by the liberal account of the state and with a knowledge chastened by twentieth century totalitarian systems, would probably fall into the “morality first” category. Insofar as the state becomes in liberal thought an arena where the disputes that have emerged in other realms of life are settled or otherwise resolved, the Aristotelian relationship between the primacy of political life to direct ethical practices is reversed. Instead, liberal political philosophers view their task as to fix clearly what moral principles should be, and then to press the political world to accept their view of this proper moral account.²²

The “politics first” view is perhaps best exemplified by the writings of such thinkers as Niccolo Machiavelli, but the notion of the primacy of raison d’etat has long informed writers on politics. The point of the politics first view is that, insofar as moral principles explain to us how we should treat others morally, such principles may be irrelevant, and are at least subsidiary, to the central concerns of politics, which involve a struggle for power and the control of resources, territory, etc. In current political discussion, this set of arguments is most clearly found in discussions of international politics, but it often informs discussions of domestic politics as well. In this situation, ethical questions might arise, but they will only arise when power disputes have been resolved, or when there is a strategic advantage to be gained by appearing to be moral.

From either the “morality first” or the “politics first” versions of the relationship of morality and politics, it is clear why it will be difficult for the simple assertion of the existence of a “women’s morality” to be a way to achieve political change. In the “morality first” versions, no claims are made about how to keep politics from recorrupting the moral perspective, or to require that political actors pay attention to moral arguments. In the “politics first” versions, the containment and dismissal of moral arguments is already legitimated by the starting point. In the Aristotelian framework, questions of power and questions of what is right are intricately intertwined; in both of the separated modern versions of the argument, morality becomes an aspect of life that is separate from politics. Either politics becomes a means to achieve moral ends, or morality becomes a means to achieve politic...