James Gordon Finlayson – University of Sussex Draft Only
Moral Selves and Other Women:
Discourse Ethics and Feminist Social Criticism
Que nous veulent les lois du juste et de l’injuste?[†] Baudelaire
γυμνωτέος δη πάντων πλην δικαιοσυνύνης…[‡] Plato
Gilligan and Sandel
1.1982 saw the publication of Carol Gilligan’sIn a Different Voice and Michael Sandel’s Liberalism and the Limits of Justice,each of which exploded onto the academic scene and came to exert an extraordinary hold on political and social theory.[1]Though they came out of different disciplines – Gilligan’s book, a critique of Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of moral development, is a work of developmental psychology, whilst Sandel’s, a communitarian critique of John Rawls’sATheory of Justice [1972],is a work of political philosophy –both apparently took aim at the same targets, namely ata certain a Kantian conception of the moral standpoint and a related notion of the moral self. Having these common targets enabledfeminist social theorists building on Gilligan’s workto form a formidable alliance with communitarian political philosophers.[2] The alliance was fortified by the assumption (made independently by both Gilligan and Sandel) that Kantian moral theory and liberal political philosophy are consanguine. Gilligan inherits thisassumptionfrom Kohlberg’s moral psychology. Kohlberg worked in the tradition of the genetic structuralism of Jean Piaget, whose work, The Moral Judgment of the Child[1932],was significantly influenced by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Kohlberg was a professor at Harvard and a colleague of Rawls’s.Whilst Rawls had emphasised the Kantian and constructivist credentials of his theory of justice primarily in order to distinguish it from utilitarianism and certain kinds of moral realism, many, including Kohlberg, were led to believethat the theory of justice as fairness was adeontological ethics à la Kant.[3] Kohlberg thus happily ranked Rawls’s theory of justice at Stage 6, along with Kant’s ethics and the Golden Rule.[4] He argued that these theories satisfied these certain internal formal criteria of adequacy of Kohlberg’s Stage 6, namely prescriptivity, universalizability, reversibility and primacy, better than the welfarist, contractual and utilitarian theories which he located at Stage 5to the consternation of their proponents.[5] Indeed, he maintained that Rawls’s idea of choosing principles of justice behind a veil of ignorance in the original position met the criteria of universalizability and reversibility better than the categorical imperative,and that it was thereforecognitively and philosophically the most adequate form of moral reasoning.[6] Soeven though Rawlsused the term ‘justice’ in a narrow, specificallydistributive sense, and even though he restrictedits scope to the questions pertaining to the basic institutions of society, Kohlberg tookjustice as fairness to be a general theory of right conduct.[7]Gilligan followed Kohlberg in this, and so did many feminists inspired by her work.[8] For his part,Sandel (no doubt influenced by Rawls’s keenness to play up the Kantian credentials of his theory) claimed thatRawls’s liberalism wasfounded on,and hence consanguine with,Kant’s “deontological ethic”. He infers from this that arguments aimed at Rawls’sdeontological liberalismcan do double service as argument against Kant’s moral theory and vice versa.[9]
2.According to Gilliganthe empirical evidence thrown up by Kohlberg’s experiments suggested that women were less likely to reach the higher stagesof moral development (5 and 6), whichKohlberg called the “Postconventional, Autonomous or Principled Level”,and more likely to remain at the “Conventional Level”, clustering around stage 3, where he situated approval seeking, “good boy/nice girl” behaviour.[10] However, instead of inferring fromthe data that these women had failed to develop into fully mature moral beings (likeKohlberg), Gilligan asked whether itindicated that there was something awry with Kohlberg’s model.[11]She began to notice that women had arecognisably different way of approaching moral problems to men; one that accentuated care, sensitivity to and responsibility for others rather than rights and duties; one that emphasised relationships and interconnections rather than separation and individuality.[12] She concluded that in moral matters women had a “different voice” to men and that Kohlberg’s six stage theory of moral development was skewed towards male development.[13]Kohlberg’s Stage 6 morality – the Kantian-Rawlsian conception of the moral standpoint that privileges rights and duties – may represent the highest stage of male development, but not, she claimed, the highest stage of child development. Women appear to develop along different lines and though their moral reasoning might seem less adequate judged by the formal criteria of universalisability and reversibility, in other respects, such as the awareness of the complexity of moral situations, it seemed more adequate. Gilligan concludes by suggesting that her study of women’s experience and of what she calls the “ethic of care” has helped to expand “the concept of identity” to include “the experience of interconnection” and to enlarge “the moral domain” (at the post-conventional level - GF) to include the aspects of responsibility and care in relationships.[14]
3.Gilligan’s In a Different Voice is a profound, original and suggestive study but its conclusions are not very clear.[15]What did the thesis that women have a different voice mean? It meant at least that when faced with moral dilemmas women sought different solutions to men, that they had a different order of priorities, that they were sensitive to different evidence and to features of situations – especially their complexities -often ignored by men, and that for these reasons they had “alternative conception of maturity”.[16]It also implied that they had an alternative conception of the moral standpoint, conceived not as a hierarchy of ever more general principles, but as an interconnected web of substantive reason-giving considerations, the force and relevance of which are context dependent.[17]
What follows from all this, if it is correct? Gilligan oscillates between two different conclusions. She sometimes suggests that women and men have fundamentally different and incompatible ways of moral reasoning – in a later essay she explicitly argues that what she calls an “ethic of care” is “fundamentally incompatible” with an “ethic of justice”.[18] (This conclusion, however, outruns the slender basis of empirical evidence she presents in In a Different Voice.[19]) At other times, she argues that they are complementary post-conventional moral outlooks and that the Kohlbergian model needs to be adjusted if it is to adequately account for women’s as well as men’s moral experiences.[20]There is a further ambiguity in Gilligan’s work. Is she merely arguing that Kohlberg’s model of post-conventional morality is incorrect, because not sufficiently inclusive (of women’s voices), and that his moral phenomenology is incomplete? Or is she making the deeper normative criticism that moral selves who only think in terms of rights and duties are somehow deficient?Is the upshot of her critique that there is something wrong with moral theory, or is it that there is something wrong with actually existing Stage 6 moralities?
4. Gilligan’s dispute with Kohlberg is in the first instance a dispute within the theory of moral development, and is best understood as a correction of the latter’s model of moral development. Gilligan’s hypothesis is that there exists a complementary path of moral development for women (see 3. above). If true, this view raises some tricky questions for deontological normative ethical theory.[21] 1. Is care a genuinely moral concept? 2. Is the ethic of care a rival to an ethic of justice, i.e., are they competing and incompatible conceptions of what morality is? Or is the ethic of care complementary to the ethic of justice?3. Is care particularistic and personal (unlike justice) or impartial and universalisable (like justice)? 4. How do considerations of care relate to the kind of impartial and universalisable concerns that,on Kohlberg’s schema,characterise Stage 6 morality.[22] Which is prior, if any, justice or care?[23]
4.1“Vieles wäre/Zu sagen davon”as Hölderlin once wrote.[24] One thing that may be said is this: the idea that the relation between care and justice is a salient question, makes sense only if, like Kohlberg, Gilligan and Sandel, one assumes that ‘justice’ is roughly equivalent with the general notion of moral right and wrong. It cannot be Rawls’ narrow sense of distributive justicethat is at issue here. Another pertinent point is that even if we grant this (mistaken)assumption, answering such questions is difficult in the absence of any further specification of the concept of care. For example, it is nearly always assumed that caring is an exclusively other–regarding activity, but the activity of caring can be,and often is, self-regarding. There is nothing essentially altruistic about care. Care of the self as much as care of others has since ancient times been considered as a peculiarly feminine activity.[25]Moralityand justice in the Kantian and liberaltraditions, by contrast, isusually understoodto be concerned mainly with other-regarding actions and judgements.[26] So the question of whether care is directed to oneself or to another person is central to the issue of whether it is a genuinely moral concept, and of how it relates to impartial notions such as ‘justice’ and ‘right and wrong’. Second, the verb ‘to care’, in English, canbe used with two different prepositions which nowadays have two quite distinct senses: to care for and to care about. In the first sense,caring for somebodymeans actively looking after them and tending to their needs.[27](Women have traditionally been assigned the role of primary carerto their children in just this sense.)In the second sense, caring about somebodymeans valuing them, appreciating them and taking them into consideration. If I care about someone, their fate matters to me.
4.2This analysis (which is not meant to be exhaustive) opens up four different notions of caring: a) caring for oneself; b) caring for others; c) caring about oneself; d) caring about others. The answers to the above four sets questions will obviously differ greatly depending on which of the four notions are in play.Consider for example the question of whether care is a universal or indeed an impartial notion. And let us only consider the other-regarding notions. It is impossible that one person care for every other, and hence that everyone care for everyone else.[28] It is not impossible, though it would be by no means easy, for a person to care about everyone else, and hence for everyone to care about everyone else. Nor is it impossible that each person care equally about everyone else, as impartialist moralities such as Kantianism and the saner versions of utilitarianism demand,on the grounds that all persons have equal moral worth. Now, the first notion of care is not universalisable, at least, not without further modification, while the second is. If we assume that morality requires impartiality and that impartiality comprises both universalisability and agent-neutrality, then we can say that while the former is not a genuinely moral notion the latter is.[29] So the question of which notion of care is in play turns out to be of the highest importance.
5.While Gilligan published her critiqueof Kohlberg, Sandel launched his attack on Rawls’ liberalism. Two Rawlsian liberal doctrines in particular, each of which, Sandel alleged, originated in Kant, came under heavy fire: first, the priority of the right over the good, or the primacy of justice; and second, the priority of the self over its ends. According to Sandel, although Rawls had replaced Kant’s untenable two worlds metaphysics – the doctrine of transcendental idealism and the assumption of noumenal agency – with the device of the original positionand the veil of ignorance (plus some assumptions from rational choice theory) he ended up with a conception of the self not dissimilar to Kant’s that suffered fromnot dissimilar defects. Rawls’s stipulation that principles of justice be chosen under a veil of ignorance is supposed to model conditions of fairness and equality by eliminating any individual or group-specific information by which theycan calculate their own advantage and tailor their distributive principles accordingly. According to Sandel,this devicehas three deleterious effects: first, it deprives the choosers of any individuating features and generic differences. Second, it reduces all participants to one and the same abstract rational person, hence it cannot tell us anything interesting about how a plurality of human beings can found a political association. Third, and worst of all, the single self behind the veil of ignorance is “incapable of constitutive attachments” and devoid of “constitutive ends”. Heasserts that Rawls’s “unencumbered self” is “wholly without character, without moral depth”.[30] Sandel’scritique, as Rawls hastenedto point out, assigns ontological significance to the selves or choosers in the original position, rather than to the real citizens in the political community whom they are supposed torepresent, whichindicates that Sandel has mistaken the status of the original position as a device of representation.[31]This error notwithstanding,Sandel’s criticism was enormously influential, as can be seen by how swiftly his quirky phrase“the unencumbered self” was absorbed into the lingua franca of political philosophy,even though its critical point was entirely unclear.[32]Once the polemical fog had lifted there seemed to be at best a difference of emphasis between the position Sandel endorsed and the position he criticised. The target of his criticism,Rawls’ claim that “the self is prior to the ends which are affirmed by it” can be interpreted either as the relatively innocuous empirical observation that in a liberal society no life-project or attachment or end, however deep, is beyond re-examination and revision, or as a normative claim that each person should be free to interpret and re-interprets his or her own life as he or she sees fit compatibly with everyone else’s similar freedom.[33]When push came to shove Sandel was reluctant to deny either the empirical or the normative claim.[34]If what he meant by the rejoinder that selves are,pace Rawls,“encumbered” was onlythat “some relative fixity of character appears essential to prevent the lapse into arbitrariness”, Rawls could perfectly well agree.[35] Too many hours have already been lost poring over the details of this debate. Here I only want draw attention to a tension in Sandel’s study that recallsthe ambiguity we noted in Gilligan’s critique of Kohlberg. (See 3. above.) On the one hand, his main claim seems to be that the picture of the ‘unencumbered self’ presupposed by the original position is false, and that the concomitant picture of society as a “procedural republic”, i.e.as an aggregate of lone, rational, unencumbered selves who value choice above all things, is also untrue.[36] Sandel’s contention here is that in reality neither self nor society is like the one in the Rawlsianliberal picture. At other times, heargues that the (Rawlsian) liberal picture of both self and society is true, more is the pity. Here he is making the normative claim that,due in part to the nefarious influence of liberal ideas and political theories, self and society have become what (Rawlsian) liberalism says they are;thatliberalism has led to the emergence of an atomised society of self-interested rational choosers with no orientation to the common good, and is to this extent responsible for the atrophy of political association and for the increase in feelings of alienation and disempowerment among citizens.[37]
6.We have seen Gilligan’s critique of Kohlberg and Sandel’s critique of Rawlsare congruent in important respects. First, they take aim at the same target, the Rawlsian-Kantian conception of the moral standpoint and its attendant doctrines: the privileging of questions of right and justice over questions of the good, the overemphasis on autonomy and separation, the occlusion of the self’s relations to others etc.Second, they make the same questionable assumption, namely that Rawls conception of justice as fairness is a kind of deontological normative ethical theory.[38]Finally, their criticisms contain the same ambiguity. Are they aimed only at the theories of Kohlberg and Rawls, or are they also aimed at the practical and institutional embodiments of those theories? Are they arguing that the moral and political theories of Kant and Rawls are incorrect, or that actually existing moral and political reality is in some way flawed?[39]One effect of this congruity is that it lends Gilligan’s critique of Kohlberg a political significance and relevance (for a critique of liberal-democracy) which it otherwise lacks. ConflatingGilligan’s critique of Kohlberg together with the communitarian critique of Rawls appeared to make itpertinent not just to the theory of moral development and normative ethics, but to social and political theory, and furthermore to the embodiments of these theories in actually existing moral practices and social and political institutions. So there is a lot more at stake in Gilligan inspired feminist criticisms of morality than there is in her work: there is more at stake than an alternativeconception ofthe moral standpoint and of the moral self. The feminist critique of morality is the point of departure for amuch wider and more far-reachingfeminist critical theory of society.