The Spectrum of Ethical Theories
The title of this paper, “The Spectrum of Ethical Theories,” may not
immediately convey what I want to do in it. So let me explain. When ethical
theories, ancient and modern, are classified and compared, it is usually done in
a fairly piecemeal way. These days, for example, people think that
consequentialism, virtue ethics, and deontology/Kantian ethics are the three
main approaches to normative ethics. (I will be talking here about normative
ethics rather than applied ethics or metaethics.) People think these are the three
most plausible or influential contemporary approaches. When they do
taxonomy, they really don’t do (overall or systematic) taxonomy, but, rather,
limit themselves to make pairwise comparisons: for example, they say that
utilitarianism is like Kantianism in certain respects, but is different in certain
other important aspects; that virtue ethics is a little bit like Kantianism in this
respect, but like utilitarianism in that. You get these pairwise comparisons, but
you don’t get a single taxonomy that includes all views. But it is possible to do
the systematic taxonomy or metaphilosophy of the different ethical theories
and how they relate to each other—I call this metaphilosophy because I can’t
call it metaethics, which is reserved for another issue. This is not doing
normative ethics so much as understanding what others were doing in
normative ethics. So we can call it metaphilosophy as applied to normative
ethics.
Now if you want to, you can do a taxonomy or metaphilosophy of a bimodal or bi-partite kind: for example, you can classify everything in relation
to the basic difference between rationalism and sentimentalism within
normative ethics. This gives you a bimodal scheme, and it allows us to
distinguish two normative categories and perhaps more because there may be
some normative theories that lie in between. An example of sentimentalist
views is Hume, of course, or Hutchinson; an example of rationalism would be
Kant or Rawls. And you can somewhat expand the taxonomy by saying that
some theories fall in between. For example, if you look into the work of
Anthony Ashley Cooper, the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, who is supposed to have
founded moral sentimentalism, you see that in his view there is actually an
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amalgam or mixture or blending of rationalist and sentimentalist elements. But
still he is considered the founder of sentimentalism because so many
sentimentalist ideas made their initial appearance (in British moral philosophy)
in his thinking. And you can say that something that has both rationalist and
sentimentalist elements, or combines them, lies in between rationalism and
sentimentalism. So you have three different places to taxonomize with.
One problem with this, though, is that it isn’t actually all-inclusive. There
are views which don’t anchor normative thought or normative ethics in either
reason or in sentiment or some combination of these. I am thinking here in
particular of what you might call “aesthetic” approaches to morality. Those see
morality as based in judgments about beauty. There is a long tradition in that.
It goes all the way back to Plotinus, who thought that claims about virtue are
claims about what is beautiful or ugly, on the premise that the body is ugly and
that virtue consists in rejecting certain bodily appetites. You can see how
someone might say: virtue involves choosing beauty and rejecting the ugliness
of the body. This is pretty extravagant stuff, but that’s the nature of Plotinus’s
theory. There are more recent versions up to the present day. Even nowadays
people do sometimes anchor morality or ethical thought within the aesthetic.
Now such an approach to ethics or morality is not considered as much of a
goer in contemporary terms, but not only that: once you introduce this sort of
possibility, you can’t simply divide everything in the just-mentioned bimodal
way, because there are some things left outside. So the bimodal scheme is not
as comprehensive in the light of this possibility as one might hope.
In the present paper, I am going to offer, explain, and defend a more
comprehensive kind of taxonomy or classification of normative theories. Not
every aspect of everything, but every major theory fits within or in relation to
this taxonomy as far as I can tell. It works in the following way: it identifies a
single dimension of variation between normative ethical theories and argues
that there is an axis or spectrum along which you can put all the normative
approaches, ancient and modern. (There is a diagram of the spectrum at the
end of this article that you can refer to while reading it.) When I mentioned
this idea of a spectrum at an NEH summer seminar a few years ago in
Middletown, Connecticut—a seminar devoted to Western virtue theory and
Confucianism—the issue arose: could this idea be applied to Confucian or,
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more generally, to Chinese ethical doctrines? I think it could be, but even
though I have in recent years been studying quite a lot of Chinese philosophy,
I will not try to deal with anything outside Western philosophy in this paper.
But I do think that if the scheme I am going to propose is promising for the
Western, it could also apply to Eastern thought.
So what is this scheme? I basically got it from Carol Gilligan: she wrote a
book, In a Different Voice, which was published by Harvard University Press
in 1982 and in which she argues that there are two ways of thinking about
normative issues that correlate, she thought initially, with gender. (She later
became less sure about that correlation, and I won’t make any further
reference to it here.) What are these two ways of thinking? One is a mode that
emphasizes our autonomy and issues of justice and rights against others. Some
people have called it “justice ethics.” The other approach, which she has called
“the ethics of care,” would be an approach that puts more emphasis on our
connections to others, our caring for or about others, our responsibility to
others, and that puts less emphasis on individual autonomy and the voluntary
choices of individuals. This way of thinking allows you, for example, to place
recent Kantianism within justice ethics and to place not only the new ethics of
care but also perhaps Humean sentimentalism, with its emphasis on
benevolence toward others, in the sphere of the ethics of care. Originally,
Gilligan discussed justice versus caring, but eventually, matters clarified a bit
for her and in the preface for readers in the 1993 edition of her book, she wrote
about the basic choice between separateness and connection. And that choice
will in extrapolated terms be the basis for the taxonomy I shall be proposing
here.
In Kant’s ethics, autonomy is absolutely important. Autonomy is the basic
notion, perhaps alongside rationality, but it is rationality based on autonomy.
And this emphasis means not focusing in any foundational way on our
connection to others, whereas this is exactly what you get in the ethics of
caring. So it is pretty clear that if we are going to do some kind of
classification, we know where to put at least these two normative theories:
Kantian/Rawlsian liberalism or rationalism and the Humean/care-ethical
sentimentalist approach. Gilligan only hinted at what care ethics can be, but in
consequent developments the ethics of care has emerged and it’s getting to be
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more and more influential and well known. There are certainly a lot of people
that don’t think well of it, but a lot of people want to work in or on it.
I am one of those. Gilligan said: the emphasis on connection in care ethics
is opposed to the emphasis on autonomy/separateness in Kantianism. But that
doesn’t immediately suggest a nomenclature or a taxonomy or classificatory
scheme for other theories. Here is how that came about. Gilligan at one
point—I was in contact with her by email—said to me: wait a second, where
does utilitarianism/consequentialism fit with respect to the separateness-andconnection distinction? The answer I gave was: consequentialism is
somewhere in between because utilitarianism resembles Kantianism in one
way, namely care ethics focuses a great deal on personal relationships as
central to the moral realm, but Utilitarianism doesn’t and Kantianism doesn’t.
In that respect, utilitarianism or consequentialism resembles Kantianism more
than it does care ethics. But of course utilitarianism resembles care ethics more
than Kantianism in other respects, for example the utilitarian focus on human
welfare or the welfare of sentient beings. This is not the underlying focus of
Kantian ethics. Kantian ethics has duties of concern for and promotion of the
welfare of others, but this is not fundamental. This is supposed to be derived
from autonomy. But the concern for welfare is basic to utilitarianism and this
is also basic to care ethics. Of course, care ethics is not impartialistic in the
way utilitarianism is. This is another respect in which utilitarianism resembles
Kantianism; they are both in some measure impartialistic. Though I think this
is not an entirely fair characterization of Kantian ethics, I think it is an entirely
fair characterization of utilitarianism. So I concluded and told Carol Gilligan
that utilitarianism is in between care ethics and Kantian justice ethics. But this,
I think, turns out to be wrong. And when I discovered how and why it is
wrong, I was off to the races with the taxonomical ideas of the present paper.
How did I discover that this was wrong? Well, at one point—and
forgetting consequentialism—I started thinking about communitarianism and
wondering where it fits with regard to the issue of separateness vs. connection.
And it occurred to me that communitarianism is either on par with care ethics
or beyond it in terms of the emphasis on connection. Communitarianism is a
very complex doctrine; there are many famous proponents of it: for example,
Michael Sandel, Michael Walzer, Alasdair MacIntyre, and CharlesTaylor. And
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you never find an entirely pure version, an ideal type of communitarianism.
Consider, for example, Sandel’s book Liberalism and the Limits of Justice
(Cambridge University Press, 1982), which is perhaps the most representative
version of communitarianism we have. Sandel places a lot of emphasis on the
historical traditions of a society as the basis of any justification of present-day
institutions and practices. But in response to certain critics Sandel adds that
good consequences are also important to any such justification, so
consequentialist considerations come into his eventual or final account of
social justice. However, I think that if you look closely at Sandel, he is more
purely communitarian than he said he was once the critics got a hold of him.
And I want to focus on pure communitarianism here.
Why do I say that it emphasizes connection more than care ethics?
Following Gilligan, I have a particular take on care ethics that emphasizes the
way that under patriarchy, girls and woman aren’t really listened to and their
aspirations are downgraded: e. g., “You don’t really want to become a doctor,
dear; you’d be much happier being a nurse.” What I learned from that is that
you could generalize from what Gilligan was saying: there is a certain ideal of
empathic respect for others which involves not imposing your idea of what is
good for them but rather listening to what they really want to say and taking
that into your own concerns about their well-being. This listening to the other
is an aspect of caring, and it would be an antidote—and in my book The Ethics
of Care and Empathy (Routledge, 2007) I argue for this—to patriarchy and its
injustices against women because if you had listened to what women wanted
and not drowned their voices out, you might have had a much more genderegalitarian society.
Now I think there is very little of that kind of empathic respect for the
other in communitarianism. In communitarianism—and one form of
communitarianism-run society would be a patriarchical one, since
communitarianism allows for patriarchical forms—the justification for
everything is that this is the way we have always done it, that this goes deep,
etc. That was the kind of argument that was often given for patriarchal
prejudices in the 19th and 20th centuries; and if that is the justificatory coinage
in moral philosophy, then women just have to accept certain things because
they are part of the historical tradition. There is no moral imperative that you
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listen and change. So under a communitarian regime of a purist kind, if, for
example, some child questions whether God or Allah is really nice because of
all the suffering, what is going to happen? Are they going to say: “Oh, that is a
very interesting point, but we hope to be able to convince you that Allah is
much nicer than you are thinking.” No, they are not going to talk in this way to
the child. They are going to say: “It is ungrateful of you to go against your
parents’ beliefs and you don’t really want to say this kind of ungrateful thing
about Allah given everything Allah has done for you.’ They are not going to
take him (or her) seriously. That is that kind of shunting of things into certain
predestined ethical and social grooves that is characteristic of
communitarianism. So, communitarians have less respect for individual
autonomy as the source of independent ideas and thoughts that have to be
taken seriously. There is much more emphasis on the fact that we are sociohistorically connected and less on any assumption that the individual has rights
against all that. Given that care ethics emphasizes connection to a certain
extent but still offers a lot of room for the idea that we should respect the point
of view of the others, that’s a certain amount of respect for autonomy. So careethics is closer to the separateness end of the normative ethical spectrum than
communitarianism is.
That having been said, one might ask how or why care ethics puts less
emphasis on autonomy than Kantian liberalism. Care ethics has its own
version of autonomy, as we have just seen, but it is a less extensive and
thoroughgoing notion of autonomy than liberalism assumes and defends. It is
more qualified by welfaristic considerations than in Kantian liberalism. Many
care ethicists and feminists have thought that Kantian liberalism and care
ethics can be reconciled, and that justice ethics and care ethics can be
reconciled, although justice ethics puts more emphasis on separateness and
care ethics places a stronger emphasis on connection. But you should be
suspicious of that. Given the different and seemingly opposed emphases, there
ought to be cases where they disagree. And here is a possible case where they
would disagree, namely, in regard to issues concerning free speech and hate
speech.
There has been a lot of talk and writing about the Skokie case from the
1970’s. A group of neo-Nazis wanted to march and make public speeches in
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Skokie, Illinois, because it was a place where there were many Holocaust
survivors. Many liberals, including people like Ronald Dworkin, T. M.
Scanlon and Thomas Nagel, argued as first amendment-defenders that the
right of self-expression—even if it involves hate-speech—is primary and
therefore that the march and speechifying should be allowed. In the end, it
didn’t happen, but, they thought, it should have been allowed. Other people
aren’t so sure. Catharine MacKinnon has her own reasons having to do with
the 14th amendment, but care ethicists could argue: there is one thing you
never find in the liberal and Kantian discussions, namely what the march and
speechifying at the center of town would have probably done to re-traumatize
Holocaust-survivors. This is not even mentioned. I think that care ethics would
take that into account. It would say: yes, we understand the point of view of
the neo-Nazis. But we also understand the point of view of the Holocaustsurvivors and the psychological damage that might well occur to them is much
weightier than the frustration of the neo-Nazis at not being able to do their
march. Consequently, the march should not be allowed. Care ethics would like
to point out here that Kantian ethics stresses autonomy and free speech, but not
enough the welfare of those who going to be damaged (and not merely
offended or frustrated). The rights against others not to interfere with you have
to be weighed against (re-)traumatizing people.
Let me show you one other way in which there is a greater emphasis on
separateness as opposed to connection in liberal thinking. The greater
emphasis on separateness in Kantianism and liberalism you also find in the
distinctive liberal doctrine that says: no thought or emotion or relationship
should be allowed without being subjected to serious rational scrutiny. (This is
an intensified version of the Socratic idea that the unexamined life is not worth
living.) That doctrine means that if you have children, you should seriously
consider whether to give the children away or whether to keep them. I mention
this—my strongest case—because I think that this liberal doctrine is an
extreme one. I don’t agree with it, but what I as care ethicist am expressing is
the view that not every relationship or emotion has to be questioned. In fact,
it’s better not to question some relationships. If you do start questioning them,
this is a sign that you are not deeply involved in the relationship and maybe a
sign that you are not getting very much out of the relationship that you are
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questioning.
Of course, women have gotten themselves into trouble by not questioning
some of the relationships they have been in with their husbands. But with this
doctrine of liberalism, you should question everything just as a rational person
and apart from there being any reason to think that something might be wrong.
You can see how this differentiates Kantian liberalism from care ethics which
says: you don’t in principle need to question every relationship, every
emotional or other connection you have to others. There is no imperative to
question everything. So, again, care ethics puts more emphasis on connection
and less on rational autonomy than Kantian liberalism does.
We haven’t yet spoken about how the new scheme of taxonomy relates to
(utilitarian) consequentialism. And far from agreeing with what I originally
told Gilligan, I now think that consequentialism belongs on the far side of
communitarianism from care ethics, just as communitarianism itself is on the
far side of care ethics from liberal/Kantian justice ethics, in relation to issues
of separateness vs. connection. In other words, consequentialism is closer to
the connection-emphasizing end of our taxonomy than communitarianism is,
just as communitarianism is closer to that end than care ethics and care ethics,
in turn, closer to the connection end than Kantian liberalism is. (You can
check the chart at the end of this paper, if you are having a hard time keeping
all of this clearly in mind.)
And here is why I think consequentialism is closer to the connectionemphasizing end of our taxonomy than even communitarianism is. (I shall be
borrowing heavily from what Bernard Williams said in his book with J. J. C.
Smart, Utilitarianism for & against, Cambridge University Press, 1973.) With
utilitarianism and consequentialism, you have to be devoted to and act in the
service of the greater good of everyone irrespective of anything having to do
with your relationships. So your own projects, relationships, and commitments
independently of utilitarian concern are fungible within that larger issue or
concern. As a result, you don’t have much autonomy; you don’t have your
own substantial sphere of deciding what you are going to do with your life or
your relationships. You don’t have a lot of free autonomous choices because
you are an agent of the larger “satisfaction system.” According to Williams,
and I think he is right about that, there is much less room for personal free
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choice about how and what to do.
Now you might say: communitarianism doesn’t allow a lot of freedom or
autonomy either. But if you really are a consequentialist or utilitarian, to lead
an ordinary life is no longer possible. You can—assuming a Peter-Singer-view
of this—do much more good by going to help the sick and starving and you
can’t be staying around here and be a professor or an architect. You can save
more lives if you leave your family. This is a kind of moralistic version of
Gauguin: you are not going away to paint, but to help people. It seems to me
that communitarianism restricts people in horrible ways, but it leaves at least
something like ordinary life possible—at least as far as men are concerned.
Let me now talk about some other theories, and first about libertarianism.
Libertarianism—and I am going to talk about Robert Nozick’s version of it in
Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Basic Books, 1974)—is a doctrine that very much
contrasts with Kantian liberalism and yet in many ways is quite similar to it. I
say “very much contrasts” because for the libertarian like Nozick, there is no
obligation whatsoever to help anyone. So your moral connection to others is
no connection. You just can’t hurt them. So it seems to me that there is even
less connection to others than there is in Kantian liberalism. Kantian liberalism
at least tells us—Rawls’s difference principle and Kant’s doctrine of virtue
entail—that we have obligations to help people. Having said this, let me
mention a couple of other views that seem to me to go with libertarianism at
the far separateness-emphasizing end of the spectrum, on the other side of
liberalism from care ethics. Consider moral antinomianism: for example,
Dostoevsky’s idea that if there is no God, then everything is permitted. Again,
given atheistic antinomianism, there are no ethical connections to anyone else.
It seems that libertarianism and antinomianism are pretty much in or at the
same position here. And finally egoism. Egoism tells you that you have no
moral obligations to help anyone else (though as Parfit pointed out in Reasons
and Persons, Oxford University Press, 1984, it is nowadays not so much
considered a theory of morality, but is seen, rather, as a theory of rational
choice). It can sometimes be prudent to do something helpful, so you might
have a derivative moral obligation to help others. In other words, if you are
morally obligated to do the best for or well by yourself and your only way of
doing that is to help somebody else, then you have to help the other person as
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a means of helping yourself. And such a theory of morality or ethics seems to
me to belong with antinomianism and libertarianism at the far separatenessemphasizing end of our taxonomic spectrum of ethical theories.
But I want now to mention Stoicism because I think it lies in between
antinomianism, libertarianism, and (non-Stoic) egoism, on the one hand, and
Kantian liberalism, on the other. I would not say that Plato and Aristotle are
ethical egoists. There is a difference between eudaimonism and egoism,
although all ancient schools hold that the criterion of virtue is whether it helps
the individual agent. But they are not all motivationally egoistic. They don’t
necessarily think that the virtuous agent is simply seeking his or her own
welfare. I don’t, for example, believe that Aristotle or even Plato thinks this
sort of thing (remember that for Plato the philosopher king or queen has to
give up their preferred life of contemplation to serve the larger social order).
However, I have never heard anyone argue that Stoicism is non-egoistic.
So why do I distinguish ordinary egoism from Stoicism? Ordinary egoism
says: you can have an obligation to help others under the empirically given but
far from universal circumstance that this will help you. With Stoicism, on the
other hand, the obligation to help others is built into the pattern of the
universe. For Stoicism, the universe is rational and it is rational for us to live
in accordance with nature, which means rational nature, and rationality entails
extending our concern for ourselves to others, extending the circle of concern.
In order to secure our well being, we must do all this. So it is egoistic, but still
it includes the concern for others. So Stoicism builds it into the very structure
of the universe that you should be helping other people, whereas in ordinary
egoism it is an entirely contingent matter. Therefore Stoicism puts more
emphasis on connection than egoism does.
How, then, do I distinguish Stoicism from Kantian liberalism? There are
two aspects to this. First of all, for Kantian liberalism, the obligation to help
others is not based in egoistic considerations; so the ethical connection to
others is deeper. It doesn’t need to work through the necessary fact that
helping helps you. Second, an issue about the emotions. Care ethics will
criticize Kantian ethics for not putting enough weight on the emotions—and
this criticism may or may not be justified. But Kantian liberalism allows for
the emotions and recent Kantians have talked about all the various ways in
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which Kant can allow the cooperation of reason and emotion. Kant thinks we
should be suspicious of emotion. And the liberal view that we have to subject
every emotion or feeling in relationships to rational scrutiny puts emotion a bit
under a question mark. But it is true nonetheless that Kantian liberalism allows
for the emotions; it just doesn’t put them at the center. But Stoicism says that
emotions are bad; they are irrational. If we are going to help others, this is not
because we empathically care about them, but because of the rational soul of
the universe. In that sense, emotional connections to others are permissible to
Kantians; they are just not considered to be of fundamental moral importance.
But with the Stoics, they are simply, in ethical/rational terms, ruled out.
Let me mention another view: totalitarianism or dictatorship. You will
think that these are not moral philosophies or ethical theories but political
phenomena of a disgraceful type. But typically, totalitarianism has its own
ethical justifications. It’s the ethics totalitarians appeal to that I mean to be
talking about here. Even the most ruthless regimes try to justify themselves.
After all, the German Democratic Republic called itself the “German
Democratic Republic.” Interestingly, both Stalin and Hitler spoke about their
regimes as the truest forms of democracy. What is this “truest form” of
democracy that Stalin and Hitler advocated and ruled over? Characteristically,
it treats a certain individual or small group as the source of all authority and
therefore, everyone has to serve or to be devoted to the Führer or the leader.
And, furthermore, ordinary human relationships are degraded so that for
example, children are supposed to spy on their parents. If the parents go
against the dictator’s rules, kids will tattle on their parents. In a way like
utilitarianism, the strictest kind of totalitarianism doesn’t allow for ordinary
life because friends betray friends and everybody is suspicious of everybody
else. Everyone is supposed to focus on the leader. Although normal
relationships are impossible, there is an enormous emphasis on connection.
But unlike consequentialism or utilitarianism, its not connection to the welfare
of all; it is connection to (the dictates or will of) the leader. So it is an
emphasis on connection but not on ordinary connections. In Nazi Germany,
whatever Hitler said was the law: “Führerworte haben Gesetzeskraft.”
Totalitarianism did not exist in the 18th and 19th century; it’s a distinctive
phenomenon. It seems that the methods of mass indoctrination were not used
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or not available yet. I am, however, not sure how to distinguish utilitarianism
from totalitarianism in terms of the issue of separateness. They both seem to
minimize the amount of autonomy and the separateness of individuals from
the influence of others. So perhaps both can be put at the extreme connectionemphasizing end of our taxonomic spectrum, and on the far side of
communitarianism from care ethics.
Let me now finally turn to virtue ethics. I want to put it between care
ethics and communitarianism, but why? Some recent defenders of Aristotle
have pointed out that though Aristotle was anti-democratic, you have to look
at his specific view of what social justice is, namely the fullest development,
for everyone, of eudaimonia conceived as living virtuously. It has been argued
by Hursthouse, for example, that Aristotle’s’ conception of the just society
requires a certain amount of freedom of assembly and speech; that you can’t
really give a child appropriate training for the virtues in a totalitarian place:
you need a certain free exchange of ideas and arguments as in the Greek
agora. (See her “After Hume’s Justice,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, 1990-91.) Hursthouse argues that if justice consists in a state that
enables virtue and flourishing among the citizens, it’s going to have moderntype rights of freedom of speech and of assembly. Interestingly and notably,
however, Hursthouse does not talk this way about democracy. She doesn’t
seem to care whether democratic institutions and values come out of Aristotle.
Is democracy necessary for or in care ethics? Possibly not. I did try in my
previously-mentioned book on care ethics to argue in favor of democracy, but
I won’t presuppose that. But let me mention something else that nicely
distinguishes Aristotelian ethics from care ethics. Jerome Schneewind in an
article called “The Misfortunes of Virtue” (reprinted in R. Crisp and M. Slote,
eds., Virtue Ethics, Oxford University Press, 1997) points out a problem in
Aristotelian virtue ethics: namely, that if someone is a virtuous Aristotelian
individual, she has no reason to be tolerant toward those who disagree with
her. Humility is not one of the virtues that Aristotle emphasizes. In the
conditions of modern life where people are disagreeing about so many
fundamental matters, this intolerant attitude is not going to be helpful.
Care ethics is in this respect different. As I pointed out earlier, to care
fully about others is to be willing to listen to them and see things from their
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viewpoint. This involves an ideal of respect to that extent. So care ethics fits in
very well with the idea that if somebody disagrees with you, the first thing to
do is to try to see things from their point of view. This is part of what it means
to care about others. (Twentieth century psychologists tend to hold that
genuine caring requires empathy, and on that assumption empathic respect or
respectful empathy can be built into care ethics.) Just as under patriarchy,
parents didn’t respect their daughter who wanted to become a doctor and
weren’t willing to acknowledge, much less honor, her wishes, you have, in
care ethics, to try to understand other people’s views. There is nothing in
Aristotle that tells you to do so, or even in contemporary Aristotelianism.
Respect for the standpoint of others is not what you get from Aristotle. But if
you do respect them, you give the individual more room for their autonomy
and their own thinking. In that respect (excuse the pun!), there is more
emphasis on separateness and autonomy in care ethics than in Aristotelian
ethics. But on the other hand, and in contrast with communitarianism,
Aristotelian doesn’t justify his ideas about social justice by saying: this is the
way we have always done things. Rather, the Aristotelian does allow for
rational/critical self-consciousness, for virtue, and for those rights of assembly
and free speech which don’t have to be allowed in a communitarian scheme at
all. There is an independent justification for certain rights here, but there is no
such independent justification against others’ interference with a given
individual, within communitarianism.
It seems to me that this kind of taxonomic scheme or spectrum could be
quite useful in doing history of philosophy and in metaphilosophically
comparing normative theories. When we see the place of Aristotelianism or
communitarianism within the scheme, I think we get a better understanding of
what each approach involves, and it may make it clearer to us how we need to
argue in order to philosophically establish one or the other of these views.
(Interestingly, and as my colleague Nicholas Stang pointed out to me,
Schopenhauer’s ethics emphasizes separateness in its account of moral
obligation and connection in its view of moral goodness. But though this
makes it difficult to place his theory within our spectrum, that very difficulty
can be accounted for in terms of the concepts that define the spectrum, and
that then helps us in characterizing Schopenhauer’s moral philosophy as a
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whole.) In emphasizing the spectrum as a taxonomic scheme, I seem to be
implying that separateness-connectedness is the only taxonomic issue. This is
not what I have in mind, but the distinction does appear to me to be an
important one. It seems to me, therefore, that the issue that Gilligan pointed
out, the disagreement between care ethics and liberalism as to how important
connection is, has significance beyond the range of these two theories. And
rather than (as Gilligan and I originally imagined) defining two ethical
extremes, it turns out that care ethics and liberal/Kantian “justice ethics” lie
near the middle of any spectrum of ethical theories classified according to their
emphasis on separateness or connection. But that doesn’t mean that Gilligan
was wrong to think that the differences between these two ethical approaches
regarding the issue of separateness vs. connection are very, very important in
the context of (plausible) contemporary thought.
In any event, the spectrum developed here starts with Gilligan’s ideas, but
takes them much further in metaphilosophical or taxonomic terms. And it
allows for more pigeonholes, more places to put normative ethical theories,
than any bimodal scheme. As I pointed out earlier, the latter will permit at
most three places, but our spectrum (as our discussion has, in effect, indicated
and as you can see below) locates theories in seven different places, and who
knows what further distinctions and locations such an approach would allow
for if we worked it out in greater specificity?
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Diagram of the Spectrum of Ethical Theories (with choice of left and right, up
and down, being arbitrary):
More emphasis on separateness the closer to this end
Antinomianism/egoism/libertarianism<>Stoicism<> Kantian ethics/Kantian
liberalism<>care ethics<>Aristotelianism<>communitarianism<>
totalitarianism/consequentialism
More emphasis on connection the closer to this end
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Michael Slote, University of Miami
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