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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’s In 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’s A Theory of Justice [1972], is a work of
political philosophy – both apparently took aim at the same targets, namely at a certain a
Kantian conception of the moral standpoint and a related notion of the moral self.
Having these common targets enabled feminist social theorists building on Gilligan’s
work to 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 this assumption from 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 believe that the theory of justice as fairness was a
deontological 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 5 to the consternation of their
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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 therefore cognitively
and philosophically the most adequate form of moral reasoning.6 So even though Rawls
used the term ‘justice’ in a narrow, specifically distributive sense, and even though he
restricted its scope to the questions pertaining to the basic institutions of society,
Kohlberg took justice 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 that Rawls’s liberalism was founded on, and hence consanguine with,
Kant’s “deontological ethic”. He infers from this that arguments aimed at Rawls’s
deontological liberalism can do double service as argument against Kant’s moral theory and
vice versa.9
2.
According to Gilligan the empirical evidence thrown up by Kohlberg’s
experiments suggested that women were less likely to reach the higher stages of moral
development (5 and 6), which Kohlberg 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 from the data that these women had failed to develop into
fully mature moral beings (like Kohlberg), Gilligan asked whether it indicated that there
was something awry with Kohlberg’s model.11 She began to notice that women had a
recognisably 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
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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
Gilligan
Stage 6
Women
Kohlberg
Men
6. Universal Ethical Principles.
Stage 5
5. Prior Rights and Social Contract or
Utility.
Stage 4
4. Social system and conscience
Maintenance
Stage 3
3. Mutual Interpersonal Expectations,
Relationships and conformity.
Stage 2
2. Individual Intstrumental Purpose
Exchange
Stage 1
1. Punishment and Obedience
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
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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 justice that 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
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feminine activity.25 Morality and justice in the Kantian and liberal traditions, by contrast,
is usually understood to 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, can be 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 somebody means
actively looking after them and tending to their needs.27 (Women have traditionally been
assigned the role of primary carer to their children in just this sense.) In the second sense,
caring about somebody means valuing them, appreciating them and taking them into
consideration. If I care about someone, their fate matters to me.
4.2
This 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 critique of 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
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metaphysics – the doctrine of transcendental idealism and the assumption of noumenal
agency – with the device of the original position and 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 from not 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 they can calculate their own advantage and tailor their distributive principles
accordingly. According to Sandel, this device has 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”. He asserts
that Rawls’s “unencumbered self” is “wholly without character, without moral depth”.30
Sandel’s critique, as Rawls hastened to 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 to represent, which indicates 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
only that “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 recalls the ambiguity we noted in Gilligan’s critique of Kohlberg. (See
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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
Rawlsian liberal picture. At other times, he argues 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; that liberalism 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 Rawls are
congruent in important respects. First, they take aim at the same target, the RawlsianKantian 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. Conflating
Gilligan’s critique of Kohlberg together with the communitarian critique of Rawls
appeared to make it pertinent 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 alternative conception of the moral standpoint
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and of the moral self. The feminist critique of morality is the point of departure for a
much wider and more far-reaching feminist critical theory of society.
The Feminist Critique of Morality
7.
The feminist critique of morality comprises two different arguments, inspired by
Gilligan and Sandel, and levelled both at the conception of the self as the subject of rights
and duties, and at moral standpoint. The first of these is that the moral self is formal,
abstract or neutral, and thus devoid of gender and any other substantive characteristics
and qualities. (A parallel criticism is levelled at the moral standpoint.) The second
criticism is that the moral self is a male self masquerading as neutral and universal.40
(Again there is a parallel criticism of the moral standpoint.) Both arguments loom large in
the relevant feminist literature. They are also incompatible, for only one of them can be
true: the moral self and the moral standpoint cannot be in fact both male and genderneutral. It is worth examining each in turn, in order to decide which is the more telling.
7.1
The first criticism is the weaker and more defensible of the two. It is complex
and comprises several related claims. (a) The moral self is criticised as a merely formal
and abstract person who is the holder of certain rights and the subject of certain duties.
(b) The moral standpoint is criticised on the grounds that it is defined by formal criteria
of universalizability, reversibility of perspective, and hence gives rise to a narrow
conception of the moral domain. (c) The moral domain is criticised for being narrow, i.e.
restricted to questions of justice, which is constituted by the rights and duties belonging
to the abstract person, and for disregarding questions of the good. As a consequence, it is
argued, morality so conceived finds no place for the kind of moral experiences that
Gilligan argues are characteristic of women; it is blind to the importance of
considerations of care and responsibility for others. This leads to a “privatisation”,
“personalisation” and a devaluation of women’s moral experiences.41 This argument
presupposes that care, responsibility for others and their attendant emotions and
affections, etc. are in fact central moral concerns, and that their exclusion from the moral
standpoint and omission from Kohlberg’s higher stages 5 and 6 is a distortion of the
moral phenomena and a defect in the model of moral development. Prima facie, it looks
like an internal dispute within moral theory about the scope of morality, the
phenomenology of the moral, and the moral relevance of certain values that women
cherish more highly than men.42 But the two conflations identified above: the conflation
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of Kantian moral theory with Rawls’s theory of justice, and the conflation of moral and
political theory with actually existing moral and political reality, indicate that the stakes
are much higher. The real target is the moral, social and political reality of modern
liberal-democracy. This raises the question how objections (a), (b) and (c) relate to the
exclusions that matter to real people, (especially to women and to feminist social critics) e.g.,
to the whole gamut of social and historical exclusions, unfair discriminations, injustices,
and inequalities that women have suffered under the gender-system, as distinct from the
exclusions that matter mainly to moral theorists and moral psychologists e.g., the scoring
of the care ethic at Kohlberg’s Stage 3 and the restriction of the moral domain to
questions of ‘justice’. Their connection to the feminist critical theory of society, their
social and political implications for women’s emancipation is far from straightforward.
7.2
One such connection is implied by the conclusion that the criticised features of
Stage 6 moralities (a) (b) and (c) have led to the “privatization” or “personalisation” of
women’s experience.43 This might be taken to mean that the historical injustices towards
and discriminations against women that have been concealed by the gender-system
cannot be recognised as such from the standpoint of ‘justice’ or morality, because they
are considered as domestic or internal family matters. Rawls rebuts this same objection to
justice as fairness, by rejoining that gender oppression and the exclusions that matter can be
revealed by and criticised on the basis of the principles of justice. A similar counter-claim
could be entered on behalf of Kant’s ethics, for surely much of the sexism, oppression
and unfair discrimination to which women have been subject can be condemned as
immoral from the standpoint of the categorical imperative too. The failure of this
argument highlights the difficulty: there is no royal road from objections to theories of
morality inspired by Gilligan’s work to the feminist critical theory of society. It is not
obvious what the implications of this line of criticism are for feminist social criticism.
This is not to say that such connections cannot be made. Maria Markus offers a good
example of how this can be done with the help of empirical social theory. Suppose that
women’s self-identities differ from men’s in the way Gilligan’s work suggests, that
women place a higher value on care, responsibility for others, relationships and the
family, and that this affects the day to day lives of women more than men. Now
consider the familiar if depressing set of facts: that women are over-represented in the
modestly rewarded caring professions, such as nursing and teaching; that women are
underepresented in high-powered and highly rewarded professions; that women are often
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prevented or discouraged from holding high political office; and that women’s careers
often suffer by comparison with those of men of like ability in the same profession.
Markus observes that career advancement in many sectors (including higher education)
occurs nowadays to an increasing degree through external recruitment rather than
through internal promotion. To benefit from this system one has to be prepared to move
around. Women traditionally have “lower mobility” due to the higher value they place on
family attachments, on established social networks and human relations at work, and
hence have tended to fare worse than their male colleagues.44 This nicely shows how men
reap certain economic and social advantages, from not having the same moral priorities
and values as women.
8.
The second line criticism is that the moral self and the moral standpoint are only
apparently universal and gender-neutral, but are in fact reflections of an inherently male
ideal. This argument, which insofar as it goes is consistent with Gilligan’s conclusions,
can, and often is, extended with the claim that morality (as understood by Kohlberg,
Rawls and Kant) is thus patriarchal and sexist. This raises several points. To begin with, it
is a different and much stronger claim, for even if it is true that Kohlberg’s Stage 6
conception of the moral standpoint is a male ideal, it does not follow that it is patriarchal
and sexist. Secondly, it does not follow either from the fact that morality emerged
historically under conditions of patriarchy. Indeed it is not an empirical or an historical
claim at all, but rather a variant of Marx’s thesis in the German Ideology that the “ideas of
the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.”45 Finally, it goes beyond anything
Gilligan’s work can support. Gilligan not only does not make this Marxian claim that
morality is a form of patriarchal ideology; such a claim would be inconsistent with her
considered view that the ethics of care is a much needed complement to the ethic of
justice.
9.
Now, one of the well-known difficulties besetting Marx’s so-called dominant
ideology thesis is that it does not explain why the thesis itself is not just another
expression of the dominant ideology. Similar difficulties beset the feminist version of the
thesis. Why, for example, is not the ethic of care also a form of the dominant patriarchal
ideology? It is quite plausible to argue that the beliefs, attitudes and values that
characterise women’s moral self-identity reflect the material, socio-economic conditions
(and also the cultural and symbolic conditions) under which it is formed. Consider the
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case of the women whose moral development according to Kohlberg is arrested at stage
3, the stage associated with interpersonal relationships of “mutual affection, gratitude,
and concern for one another’s approval”, in short, with family values and domestic
virtues.46 It can be argued that this moral self-understanding is shaped by the actual
experiences of the women in Kohlberg’s studies. On such a view, the very traits that
traditionally define women’s goodness, and that according to Kohlberg are manifested in
approval-seeking behaviour and helpfulness to others, are themselves merely ideological
reflections of a patriarchal social organisation in which women are tied to home and
family. Catherine Mackinnon is one feminist critic who bites the bullet here and claims
that the care ethic (along with the ethic of justice, and indeed morality tout court) is an
expression of the dominant patriarchal ideology.47 This, of course, is to turn the
argument against Gilligan. For Gilligan’s view, is that the caring and nurturing values are
bona fide components of the women’s voice and genuine moral concerns that have been
devalued and excluded from the moral domain because they have been traditionally
associated with women. (This does not mean that they cannot function like ideologies to
stabilise forms of patriarchal domination and oppression. For, as Markus persuasively
shows, even bona fide virtues as helpfulness, concern for others and “appreciation of work
well done for its own sake” can under certain conditions militate against the economic
and professional interests of women who exercise them, and cement them into a life of
low paid work and domestic labour.) By Mackinnon’s lights the characteristic values of
an ethic of care are merely ideological reflections of women’s economic and social
oppression under patriarchal and sexist social and economic conditions, or at best the
residue of historically sedimented preference adaptation.
10.
There are several reasons why few feminist social critics have taken this second
stronger Marxian line of criticism. For one thing, they would then face the difficulty of
explaining why the feminist critique of morality is not just another expression of the
dominant patriarchal ideology, along with the ethic of care and the ethic of justice. For
another, the argument leads to the unpalatable conclusion that women’s emancipation
entails emancipation from morality, and this in turn means that feminist social theory
cannot criticise women’s oppression and the inherent inequalities of patriarchal society as
unjust and immoral.48 So making such an argument would paint feminist social criticism
into a corner. For women’s subordination to men, the fact that they have been subject to
unfair discrimination and that they have had to bear an unfair burden of domestic labour
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etc. are unjust and are morally wrong, and should be able to be criticised as such.
Moreover, as Meehan points out, tarring morality with the brush of patriarchy on hypersophisticated and shaky theoretical grounds will not be any help to women activists and
members of women’s emancipation movements the world over who are struggling to
make themselves heard and need all the help they can get.49
Discourse Ethics
11.
Habermas’s Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action [1983] first appeared in
English in 1990 when the communitarian-feminist critique of morality and had gained
widespread adherence. It is a slim collection of essays in which he outlines his
programme of discourse ethics. In certain respects discourse ethics falls under the broad
category of Kantian theories: it is a deontological and universalist theory of morality and
it explicitly draws on (and indeed extends) Kohlberg’s theory of moral development. The
programme of discourse ethics sets out to elucidate and to vindicate the moral
standpoint. According to discourse ethics the moral standpoint is captured by the moral
principle (U), which states that a norm is valid only if
[a]ll affected can accept the consequences and the side effects the general observance
of a controversial norm can be anticipated to have for the satisfaction of the interests
of each individual. 50
Inevitably any theory of morality (and any conception of the moral standpoint) that can
be formulated as a single principle, as Habermas does here, will have a narrow
conception of the moral domain. Though he initially denied this, Habermas later admits
that discourse ethics operates with a narrow conception of the moral centred on a core
of universally valid norms.51 However he denies that this is a flaw in the theory arising
from the fact that the moral principle (U) contains an implausibly severe condition that
very few candidate moral norms will meet. Rather, he argues that in modernity the
domain of morality has shrunk to a hard core of universally acceptable norms and
principles, and that this is an effect of actual social and cultural change that his theory
correctly models.52 Habermas maintains that this central core concerns questions of
‘justice’. This sounds like Rawls, but is not. Habermas maintains that matters of justice are
those that can be satisfactorily and appropriately settled by appeal to valid norms, or
norms that demonstrably embody “universalisable interests”. So Habermas’s use of the
term ‘justice’, which he takes to be equivalent to moral rightness, is completely different
from the term ‘justice’ as Rawls conceives it, which is not equivalent to moral rightness,
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but a distributive notion, restricted to matters pertaining to the basic structure of society.
The similarity in terminology conceal these marked differences in the two concepts.53
12.
Discourse ethics is a universalist deontological moral theory, but of a peculiar
kind. Most of its peculiarities reflect the fact that the programme forms part of a
comprehensive theory of society. In several respects it differs significantly from the other
moral theories that Kohlberg situates at the post-conventional level. For example,
discourse ethics does not answer what one might think are the fundamental first-order
questions of normative moral theory: What ought I to do and why should I do it? Most
moral theories – think of Kant’s ethics, Scanlon’s contractualism and utilitarianism – are
designed to be put to work answering these normative questions. Discourse ethics does
not even purport to answer such questions. To see why this is so requires a little careful
elaboration of his position. Habermas follows G. H. Mead in maintaining that the first
order function of morality is to settle conflicts of interest in the lifeworld.54 Agents in
modern societies aim to resolve such conflicts in discourses which arise whenever
communication stalls and the background consensus fails to yield a viable shared basis of
action. (This might occur because, say, no relevant norm is at hand or because the
validity of a norm has come into question.) Moral discourse is the medium in which agents
conduct ongoing repairs the social fabric of the lifeworld. It is a kind of second order,
reflective activity. It does not solve action conflicts directly, but aims to establish or
renew the validity (universal acceptability) of moral norm, which is then fed back into the
lifeworld, the everyday sphere of action and speech. Discourse ethics, is the theory which
reconstructs the implicit rules of moral discourse, and attempts to offer a theoretical
justification of the moral standpoint. Discourse ethics is thus a theoretical undertaking not a
moral one, which operates on a different level to moral discourse, and moral action: it does
not tell moral agents which moral norms are valid, nor help them determine what they
ought to do and why. These tasks are entirely left up to participants in actual moral
discourse and to agents in the lifeworld.55
13.
Discourse ethics differs from other normative moral theories in another
significant respect. Moral discourse or argumentation is a procedure that requires the
participation of at least two people. In this sense it is intersubjective or dialogical.
Habermas distinguishes it from moral theories such as Kant’s and from Golden Rules,
which are monological in that they presuppose that each person reasoning alone can find
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out what morality demands. According to Kant moral agents must subject the maxim of
their will to the test of universalisation in order to see whether it can be a moral law. The
Golden Rule requires agents to ask whether or not, if they were the patient rather than
the agent, they would like the action under question to be done to them, in order to
determine whether it is permissible. Moral discourse, by contrast, aims to secure
intersubjective recognition and requires “a ‘real’ process of argumentation” to take place,
and real discourses need more than one participant.56 Thomas McCarthy distinguishes
Habermas’s dialogical conception of the moral standpoint from Kant’s monological
conception as follows. “Rather than ascribing as valid to all others any maxim that I can
will to be a universal law, I must submit my maxim to all others for the purpose of
discursively testing its claim to universality. The emphasis shifts from what each can will
without contradiction to be a general law, to what all can will in agreement to be a
universal norm.” 57
14.
Unusually for a deontological, universalist moral theory, and surprisingly perhaps
for one that draws heavily upon Kohlberg, discourse ethics has enjoyed a fairly friendly
reception from many feminist philosophers.58 There are several reasons for this.
Discourse ethics appealed to a number of feminist social critics, because it was not a
free-standing normative moral theory, but part of a comprehensive social theory with
critical (albeit mainly diagnostic) aims. Many of these feminist social critics stopped short
of rejecting universalist moral theory outright, and set out, like Gilligan herself, only to
modify and correct it. The emphasis that Habermas laid on dialogue and intersubjectivity
looked like the right kind of modification. If the basic defect of Stage 6 moralities
according to feminist critics was that they are deaf to women’s distinctive moral voice,
discourse ethics appeared to remedy this defect with its emphasis on the inclusion of
others. It also avoided a number of the communitarian objections to Rawls theory of
justice, such as the objection that the selves who choose the principles of justice are
“unencumbered”.59 By contrast participants in discourse are real people involved in the
actual everyday practice of moral argumentation.60 Another objection was that the
idealized choosers behind the veil of ignorance are not a genuine plurality, since they
lacked any generic identity or features by which they might be individuated and
distinguished from one another. Discourse ethics avoids this objection too, insofar as
moral discourse inherently involves a plurality of participants.61
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15.
That said, Habermas’s emphasis on the dialogical nature of discourse – the fact
that discourse was an actual practice rather than a hypothetical procedure, and that it was
collective not an individual practice – tended to conceal the very high degree of idealization
it involved. The discipline of moral discourse, as Habermas conceives it, namely as a
form of reasoned argument between interlocutors, involves ideal role taking. What this
involves can be seen from principle (U). Who are the people who make up the “all” and
the “each” that occur in Habermas’s various formulations of principle (U) and in
McCarthy’s description of it; in other words, what is the constituency of the moral
community? Habermas’s answer is that it comprises not just all the participants in moral
discourse, but all affected by the norm under consideration. The number of participants in an
actual discourse – and it is only in an actual discourse than one can literally speak of
“real” agents – may and usually will be relatively small. The number of people actually
affected by the general observance of a valid moral will be much larger. The number of
people potentially affected by the general implementation of a valid moral norm, together
with its consequences and side-effects, now and in the foreseeable future will be vastly
greater. This third constituency makes up the ‘moral community’ and indicates the true
scope of a norm which is universally valid in Habermas’s sense. Now, how does a small
number of actual participants tell whether a norm is universally valid, that is, how are the
actual participants in discourse to attain a rationally motivated agreement that can stretch
to the entire moral community? Habermas’s answer is surprisingly simple: by engaging in
moral discourse. According to Habermas it the idealizing presuppositions of moral
argumentation require each participant in discourse to exchange perspective with every
other member of the moral community and to see whether a candidate norm can be
welcomed from all perspectives.
The discursive procedure, in fact, reflects the very operations Kohlberg
postulates for moral judgements at the post-conventional level: complete
reversibility of the perspectives from which participants produce their arguments;
universality, understood as the inclusion of all concerned; and the reciprocity of equal
recognition of the claims of each participant by all others.62
It is relatively easy to judge from the perspective of every other actual participant in a
discourse, for there may well only be one or two. Moral discourse in conformity with
principle (U) demands much more, namely that each person exchange perspective with
every other member of the moral community, in order to determine whether or not a
norm in question is valid.63
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15.1
To the objection that this degree of idealization and demandingness makes
rationally motivated agreement in discourse virtually impossible, Habermas responds that
(U) requires only counterfactual acceptability to all. But this defence diminishes the
supposed advantage of dialogical theory, namely that it reconstructs the
agreement/understanding of actual participants rather than of hypothetical agents. Even
though Habermas purports simply to find these idealising features and the very
demanding principle (U) implicit our actual moral practices, and to correctly reconstruct
them, there is a high price to be paid: the moral community is still populated largely with
hypothetical others, on whose behalf hypothetical discourses will have to be carried out
by actual participants in discourse. If this does not blur the monological/dialogical
distinction entirely, it dramatically reduces the differences between monological and
dialogical ethical theories, and thereby opens it up to the feminist critique of morality.
15.2
There are two other points on which discourse ethics opens itself to criticism.
The first is that Habermas claims that the process of universalisation captured by (U) is
supposed to eliminate all “concrete value orientations” and “cultural value contents” as
“non-generalisable” the moral domain is narrowed down to all and only those issues that
can be regulated in the light of norms that demonstrably embody universalisable interest,
or to what Habermas calls issues of ‘justice.’64 Accordingly, Habermas draws a strict
indeed a “razor-sharp” distinction between issues of ‘justice’ and the good life; (though
once again he would argue that this distinction is imposed on participants by the practice
of moral discourse itself, and is not due to his reconstruction of it.) 65 The second point
is that Habermas has a very narrow conception of the moral domain. On these three
points then – the idealized nature of the end point of moral discourse; the strict
distinction between ‘justice’ and the good; and the narrowness of the moral domain –
discourse ethics looks vulnerable to the kind arguments that feminist social critics
directed at Kant and Rawls.
Benhabib’s Critique of Habermas’s Discourse Ethics
16.
In spite of the various significant differences between discourse ethics and other
Stage 6 moral theories, it becomes a target of the feminist critique of morality. I am
referring here to the critique of morality and discourse ethics by feminist social critics
inspired by Gilligan and communitarianism. In what follows, I focus on Benhabib’s
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criticisms, which I think are representative of this tradition of feminist thought and merit
special attention for the following reasons. First, Benhabib is not hostile to the whole
universalist, deontological moral enterprise, nor, indeed, is she hostile to discourse ethics
of which her own conversational model of interactive universalism is a variant. (In this
respect, Benhabib’s relation to Habermas’s social moral and political theory is not unlike
Gilligan’s relation to Kohlberg.) Second, her objections to discourse ethics have been
very influential and are widely endorsed; and third they have set the terms of reference
for a lot of subsequent work in this area. In the article, ‘The Generalized and the
Concrete Other: The Kohlberg-Gilligan Controversy and Feminist Theory’ now hailed as
a classic, Benhabib develops her criticism with help of the distinction in the title. 66 To be
more precise, the distinction she draws is that between the standpoint of the generalized other
and the standpoint of the concrete other. It is a distinction between two different ways of
exchanging perspectives with other participants in moral discourse. Let us leave aside the
idea of a standpoint for the moment and focus on the notions of generalized other and
of the concrete other, and on the distinction between them which is by no means simple
or straightforward. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan once warned his students
that “[to] begin with one has to know what an other means”.67 Benhabib is talking about
other people, not other ‘others’ such as animals or things.68 The distinction between the
generalised and the concrete other people is compounded of three different layers. The
first layer is the distinction between general and particular others. A concrete other is a
particular person who is not oneself, considered as a single and unique individual person
apart from everyone else. A general other is a person who is not oneself, considered only
insofar as they have certain things in common with everyone else. The second layer is the
distinction between abstract and concrete others. Philosophically speaking ‘abstract’
means disengaged, taken out of its immediate surroundings, dispersed, separate, but it
can also refer to something’s being derived by a mental process. ‘Concrete’ literally
means grown together, cohesive, compounded; figuratively it means definite and actual. A
concrete other is determinate and existing individual person. By opposing ‘generalized’ to
‘concrete’ Benhabib switches around the relata of the distinction between generalparticular and abstract-concrete, and thereby implies that generalized others are also
abstract, and concrete others also particular. Thirdly, the first term of the distinction, but
not the second, has suffix ‘ize’ which has the grammatical function of making a noun or
adjective into a verb and means something like ‘has been made general’.69 ‘A
“generalized other” refers to the conception of another person that is reached through a
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process of generalisation (and abstraction), a process that makes salient those features of
other people they have in common with all, and that abstract from those they do not.
Now, generalisation need not be understood as mental act; it can also be construed as a
real social and historical process. Following such theorists as Marx and Weber, it can be
argued that the inhabitants of modern mass-societies who have been shaped by various
processes of rationalisation and modernisation have in the process become generalized
abstract others and generalized abstract selves.70
17.
The concept of “the generalized other” was first introduced by G. H. Mead to
denote a complex socially mediated perspective whereby “the social process of
community enters as a determining factor into the individual’s thinking” such that
“adopting the attitude of the generalized other means adopting “the attitude of the whole
community.” 71 This is the standpoint adopted by a “larger self which can be identified
with the interests of others”. For Mead, understanding this self’s relation to others is the
key to grasping the social function of morality. Mead’s social theory heavily influenced
Habermas’s conception of moral discourse and the moral standpoint. Benhabib,
however, does not use the notion of “the generalized other” in Mead’s sense. She uses it
as an equivalent for the moral standpoint insofar as it exhibits the distinctive features of
Stage 6 moralities identified by Kohlberg, namely reversibility, universalizability.72 By the
standpoint of the “concrete other” she means the other person considered as a unique
“individual with a concrete history, identity and affective-emotional constitution.”73
Benhabib claims that “in contemporary moral theory these two conceptions are
incompatible, even as antagonistic.”74 She, by contrast, argues that the two standpoints
“lie along a continuum”. On these grounds draws two conclusions: first, that “the
privileging in traditional universalistic theories of the legal domain and the exclusive
focus on relations of justice must be altered”; and second “that relations of justice do not
exhaust the moral domain even if they occupy a central position within it”.75 In later
version of her article Benhabib explicitly directs both criticisms – the objection to the
narrowness of the moral standpoint (its exclusive concern with justice) and the objection
to the strict distinction between justice and the good – at Habermas’s discourse ethics.76
18.
I do not dispute that Habermas’s narrow conception of the moral domain, and
his strict distinction between morality and ethics, or what he calls ‘justice’ and the good
are open to various objections. I want to ask whether it is helpful to base such objections
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on the distinction between the “standpoint of the generalised other” and “the standpoint
of the concrete other”. In my view it is not, for the simple reason that there is no such
thing as the standpoint of the concrete other. This point becomes clearer when we consider
what is meant by a standpoint. When philosophers talk of ‘the standpoint of morality’ or
‘the standpoint of the generalized other’ they do not just mean a viewpoint. The English
word ‘standpoint’ is derived from the German ‘Standpunkt’ and it refers to a particular
place one occupies or position one adopts in order to do something, in particular to get a
good view of something. It can also mean the point from which one determines the
relations of other things or from which one measures distance.77 The moral standpoint is
a particular place one occupies in order to do see things from the moral point of view,
and in order to survey the entire moral domain.78 The idea of the moral standpoint does
not imply that the moral domain, when viewed aright, is a uniform terrain.79 As Kurt
Baier, among others, has argued, the moral standpoint might be a place from which
several different characteristically moral functions are carried out.80 Why should one
think, as Kohlberg and Habermas apparently do, that moral development is a process by
which moral agents learn to perform one operation ever more adequately, and not rather,
as Gilligan’s work suggests, a way of learning to perform several different tasks well?
However, the idea of a moral standpoint does imply that the moral is a bounded territory
that is (perhaps not sharply) distinct and distinguishable from the non-moral. This is why
defenders of the moral standpoint are committed to the further theses, that there is
philosophically defensible way of correctly distinguishing the moral from the nonmoral.81 Among the numerous philosophers who defend such a view, some, such as
Kant, Scanlon and Habermas, argue furthermore that the moral standpoint can be
captured by a single criterion or principle.82 The resulting view of the moral domain is
both narrow in scope and uniform.83 However, the mere idea of the moral standpoint
does not require this. The idea is compatible with a broad and non-uniform conception
of the moral domain. There might be several different criteria by which the moral can be
demarcated from the non-moral.84 Even if we grant for the sake of argument that
morality is not a uniform domain, that it should not be narrowly construed, and that it
cannot be demarcated or distinguished by a single criterion or principle, there can still
only be one moral standpoint from which the moral domain can be surveyed. This much
is essential to the very idea of a moral standpoint. Although different people may occupy
the moral standpoint, they will converge on a single viewpoint. The moral point of view,
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the point of view one takes up when one occupies the moral standpoint, is thus contextindependent; it is not one perspective or viewpoint among others.
19.
Now everything that has just been said of the moral standpoint applies to what
Benhabib calls ‘the standpoint of the generalised other’. However none of it applies to
the ‘standpoint of the concrete other’. In fact we cannot even make sense of ‘the
standpoint of the concrete other’ if the meaning of ‘standpoint’ remains the same as it is
in the concept of ‘the standpoint of morality’ or ‘the standpoint of the generalized other’.
By ‘the standpoint of the concrete other’ Benhabib can only mean the viewpoint of the
other (concrete) person, and there are as many of these as there are concrete others. Nor
are the respective viewpoints of the concrete others context-independent. The point about
a concrete other is that his or her particular viewpoint is context-relative, part of his or
her embedded, particular, determinate, unique life. Therefore, when construed as a
distinction between two standpoints Benhabib’s distinction between the generalized and
the concrete other makes no sense.
19.1
Now, the same distinction could be read as a distinction between persons and
their points of view. But when read in that way it has two unfortunate consequences.
First, it leads to a very misleading interpretation of discourse ethics. Consider Benhabib’s
claim that Habermas limits “procedures of universalizability to the standpoint of the
generalized other” thus making the concrete other vanish from discourse.85 This cannot
be true. According to Habermas, each participant in discourse, in following the rules of
argumentation, accedes to the viewpoint of every other actual participant, and beyond
that, as we have seen (in 14. above) to the viewpoint of every member of the moral
community. On one reading, this means that each person must put herself into the
position of every other person affected by the norm seriatim, in order to test whether it
can be accepted from all of them. Phenomenologically speaking, this may not a good
description of how human beings actually reason. We are not computers, and we tend to
cut corners by making imaginative leaps to cases where someone’s interest might not be
satisfied, but rather thwarted, by general compliance with the norm in question, to cases
where – to use Scanlon’s phrase – someone has good reason to reject the norm. But
when we do this, we do so concretely, filling in the relevant details and determinacies of
such cases as we proceed. So even the hypothetical others whose interest we must
determine in the course of the universalisation process are also concrete rather than
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generalized others. In either case, the universalisation process requires that each concrete
individual person switch perspectives with every concrete individual person qua member
of the moral community.86 In short, if the concrete other disappeared in the
universalisation process as Benhabib charges, ideal role taking would not be possible.
The second unfortunate consequence of reading the distinction in this way is that it
makes it look as if Benhabib is attacking the very idea of a moral standpoint, in favour of
some kind of contextualism. However, Benhabib wants to defend the idea of a moral
standpoint. She defends moral universalism, the idea morality has a “centre”, and that
moral rights and duties constraints on conceptions of the good. It is only the narrow
construal of the moral domain as a uniform terrain that she attacks. 87 .In particular
Benhabib’s critique takes aim at Habermas’s view that (U) is supposed to eliminate all
particular interests and concrete values as non-generalisable. This is indeed his position
(see 15.2 above). Still, it cannot fairly be claimed that discourse conforming to (U)
excludes concrete others, for one has to adopt the point of view of the concrete other in
order to ascertain whether their values and interests are generalisable or not. For
Habermas then, simply to participate in moral discourse is already to recognise every
member of the moral community as a concrete other, even if we do so hypothetically and
imaginatively. The generalisations moral discourse requires us to make, can only be
reached via the perspective of concrete others.88
20.
Fortunately for Benhabib her arguments do not depend on this distinction. If we
disregard the distinction between generalized and concrete others entirely, as I think we
should, we can still ask whether she is correct to claim that the universalising process as
Habermas understands it leads to the “privatization”, “personalisation” and
“devaluation” of women’s moral experiences (assuming with Gilligan that these are
characteristically distinct from men’s moral experiences. See 7 above.) But what does this
claim amount to? As I understand it, the claim can be read in different ways. It can be
read as the claim that the gender-neutral moral norms and principles of justice justified
from the moral standpoint serve the interests of men more than women, or at least that
they fail to serve the bona fide interests of women. But this claim seems much too strong
and obviously untrue. Family and domestic life are open to moral regulation and
criticism, and the moral norms that operate here do serve the interests of women as well
as men. Or it can be read as the claim that moral discourse as Habermas reconstructs it
must eliminate as non-generalisable all the various considerations which Gilligan’s work
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suggests a) matter more to women than to men, and b) are genuinely moral. Read in the
second way, Benhabib’s claim is true. Habermas’s conception of moral discourse and the
strict distinction between justice and the good, mean that discourse ethics classifies
significant and highly valued aspects of our lives – e.g. care, love friendship etc. – as
ethical rather than moral.
21.
There are several things Habermas could say in reply. Habermas could claim, like
Scanlon, that the ethical is indeed part of morality in the broad everyday sense of the
word, and that it is wrong to say that he eliminates such considerations from morality in
the broader sense. Moreover he could reply that questions of the good – what he calls
ethical questions – are not devalued by virtue of being distinct from questions of ‘justice’
or morality, as Benhabib suggests. Indeed values of friendship and love for one’s family,
or romantic love, may and often are what people value most highly in life. There is, pace
Benhabib, no contradiction here.89 She herself acknowledges that when such values
conflict with universal moral principles, other things being equal, they are trumped by the
latter. The concept of a trump is that the rules of the game dictate that sometimes – in
our moral lives as well – things of high value can be overridden by things of lower value.
This does not mean that moral agents would therefore steal or lie or kill even for their
friends and loved ones.
22.
Benhabib is surely right to think that Habermas draws the distinction between
morality and ethics too sharply, and draws the boundaries the moral domain too
narrowly.90 The important thing to note, however, is that Benhabib’s argument with
Habermas on these points falls more or less entirely within the domain of moral
philosophy. The charges that women’s experiences are being ‘privatized’ ‘personalized’
‘trivialised’ and ‘devalued’ are really so many ways of claiming that care and friendship
etc. are bona fide moral concerns, that the moral cannot be so sharply distinguished from
the ethical, and that morality should be not narrowly but broadly construed. We
encounter the same problem with the critique of discourse ethics as we did (in 7. above)
with the critique of Kant and Rawls: even if correct: it is not clear how they connect with
the social and political aims of feminist social criticism. How would an enlarged
conception of the moral domain, how would smudging the distinction between justice
and the good help the struggle for women’s emancipation or bring to light hitherto
concealed forms of oppression, tangibly improve the lives of women? Presumably a
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feminist critique of morality that is feminist in more than name needs to make such
connections. The dual conflation we began by noting, the conflation of moral with
political theory, and the conflation of these with actually existing moral practices and
political reality, makes it harder, not easier to throw light on these connections.
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1 Gilligan (1982): Sandel (1982).
2 See Benhabib and Cornell eds. (1987), Blum (1998), Benhabib (1992) and Rehg (1994). The
alliance was mainly negative. Feminists attacked the liberal conception of the self along with
communitarians like Sandel and MacIntyre, but they did not and could not adopt the
communitarian conception of the self. Sandel’s idea that the self is constituted or exhaustively
characterized by its ends and by the roles and social relations it inhabits, would seem to imply
that women are destined uncritically to accept the patriarchal identities and sexist selfunderstandings foisted upon them by present society. See Benhabib and Cornell (1987: 13).
3 See, Rawls (1972: 251-57) & (1980 passim).
4 Such formal criteria define judgments and reasoning as involving “a moral point of view” or as
being “principled” (where moral principles are distinguished from concrete moral rules and laws).
Kohlberg (1981: 197).
5 “Stage 5. Having Rights entails an awareness of human or natural rights or liberties that are prior
to society and that society is to protect…Obligations are what one has contracted to fulfill in
order to have one’s own rights respected and protected. These obligations are defined in terms of
a rational concern for the welfare for others.” Kohlberg (1981: 215-6).
†
‡
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“The veil of ignorance exemplifies not only the formalist idea of universalizability, but the
formalist idea of Hare and others that a moral judgement must be reversible, that we must be
willing to live with our judgment or decision when we trade placed with others in the situation
being judged. Kohlberg, (1981: 197). For Kohlberg’s criteria of adequacy see Kohlberg, (1981:
134-5.)
7 Rawls makes this more explicit in (Rawls 1977: 159-37). Apparently he did not feel he had made
himself sufficiently clear on this point. Scholars of Kant will no doubt point out that his
Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals [1784] is not itself a general theory of right conduct. Kant’s
theory of right conduct is contained in his doctrine of virtue in the Metaphysics of Morals. Note that
my claim, that Rawls theory of justice is not a general theory of right conduct, is consistent with,
but not the same as, the claim that it is not a comprehensive doctrine. Not everything Rawls
understands as a comprehensive doctrine is a general theory of right conduct. Under the term
‘comprehensive doctrine’ Rawls understands many different kinds of theory, including, religious
doctrines and world-views, and various meta-ethical and scientific theories.
8 Although I think this assumption is mistaken, as an interpretation of Rawls’s (and Kant’s)
theories, I am not claiming that vitiates the conclusions of the theorists who make it – Kohlberg,
Gilligan and numerous others. These authors are not and need not be primarily concerned with
the correct interpretation of Kant and Rawls. Assumptions can be discharged, and even mistaken
assumptions can be fruitful.
9 Sandel (1982: 1-15, 54, 64, 175-83).
10 Gilligan (1982: 18). Kohlberg (1981: 150): “In sum, Stage 3 notions fit best the institutions of
family and friendship that can be grounded on concrete, positive interpersonal relationships.” See
also Kohlberg (1981: 118, 148-50, 215 & 410).
11 For example Gilligan (1982: 6-18 & 31).
12 Gilligan (1982: 18-19).
13 Gilligan (1982: 18-23 & 31).
14 Gilligan (1982: 173-4).
15 One should not forget that her Gilligan’s study is loosely based on empirical evidence that is
itself not very determinate.
16 Gilligan (1982: 22)
17 Gilligan (1982) p.62-3.
18 Gilligan (1986: 238).
19 Thompson (1998: 53).
20 Gilligan (1982: 105, 173). ‘Somehow integrated’ might mean that they can be synthesised or
combined into a single principle or standpoint, so long as this does not mean that one is reduced
to or subordinated to the other. However, it might mean something much les dramatic and
Hegelian, namely that neither ‘care’ nor ‘justice’ can be omitted from any adequate account of the
moral domain.
21 Lawrence Blum may be right to state that Gilligan’s work is “of the first importance for moral
philosophy”. Blum (1988: 472). But if it is obvious that it has implications for normative ethics, it
is not so obvious what these implications are.
22 I take it that impartiality comprises both universalizability and agent-neutrality, such that a
reason that is impartial is both universalisable (not particular) and agent-neutral (not agentrelative). See Finlayson (2000a). Blum has a less rich notion of impartiality. He thinks that the
principle “nurture one’s children” is an impartial principle of care. Blum (1988) p. 484ff. On my
view such a principle is not impartial because agent-relative (and not agent-neutral), since the full
statement of the principle refers back pronominally to the agent. It is universalisable, though its
scope is restricted to the domain of all parents.
23 Most interpreters agree that the best way to interpret Gilligan’s work is as offering support to
the view that that care is a genuine moral concern, on a par with considerations of ‘justice’ and
complementary to it. Blum (1988: 473-4); Benhabib (1992: 180): Flanagan, O. and Jackson, K.
(1987).
24 ‘Much might be said about this.’ (i.e. about Christ’s death, GF). Hölderlin, ‘Patmos’ in
Hölderlin (1991: 56).
6
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“Cura dabit faciem; facies neglecta peribit Idaliae similis sit licet illa deae.” [A careful toilet will
make you attractive, but without such attention, the loveliest faces lose their charm, even were
they comparable to those of the Idalian goddess herself.] Ovid, Ars Amatoria, III, 105-6. On the
ethical implications of care for the self see Foucault (1990).
26 I say this notwithstanding that Kant, in the Doctrine of Virtue, in the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant
has an extensive discussion of duties to oneself. Kant (1996: 543-567).
27 A detailed and useful discussion of care can be found in Tronto (1993: 105ff.).
28 In itself this does not entail that care (for) is not universalisable in any sense. It is possible that
each person should care for some others, and thus that everyone should. This raises the question:
For whom? The obvious answer to this question is that people generally care for those nearest to
them, for their children or parents, or friends. So even if it could be argued that this notion of
care is universalisable, or universal, it certainly is not agent-neutral and hence not impartial either.
29 See notes 22 & 26.
30 Sandel (1982: 179).
31 Rawls (2005: 27). “The veil of ignorance…has no specific metaphysical implications
concerning the nature of the self”.
32 What is odd about Sandel’s phrase is that, in contrast to normal usage, he gives the term
‘encumbered’ a positive sense and the term ‘unencumbered’ a pejorative one. In English as
normally spoken it is a bad thing to be ‘encumbered’ i.e. burdened, loaded down, hampered,
hindered, and made to suffer. Thus most people like to see their relations to their nearest and
dearest, to their parents and children for example and to their community and culture as more
than just ‘encumbrances’ even if they are not the ones we ideally would have chosen. Conversely,
in usual parlance, it is a good thing not to be encumbered, and therefore to be ‘unencumbered’.
33 Rawls (1973: 560). See Kymlicka, (1989: 55)
34 See for example Sandel (1982: 180): “While the contours of my identity will in some ways be
open and subject to revision, they are not wholly without shape.” There is nothing here that
Rawls would want to deny.
35 They can, for example, both agree that at any one time some of a person’s ends are revisable
and others not, whilst allowing that there is no fixity about which ends are fixed and which
revisable.
36 Sandel (1982) passim; and (1984).
37 “It is as though the ‘unencumbered self’ presupposed by the liberal ethic had begun to come
true.” Sandel (1984: 90-96) Of course Rawls denies that the citizens in a liberal and just society
do (or would) have no orientation to the common good, once this is reinterpreted as an
orientation to political values. Rawls (2005: 201-7)
38 The question of the relation of Kant’s moral philosophy to Rawls’s theory of justice is tricky
and multifaceted. Rawls’ concept of justice bears some relation to what Kant calls Recht, in his
political theory, but little relation to his conception of morality, moral worth and moral value.
Rawls however, whenever he refers to the Kantian credentials of his theory, refers to Kant’s
ethics, in particular to the Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals. Kohlberg, Gilligan and Sandel all
assume that Rawls is following Kant when he prioritises questions of justice and of the right over
the good. There is a certain truth to this claim, but any similarities that obtain are between the
theory of justice as fairness and Kant’s theory of right. Otfried Höffe offers a very
comprehensive discussion of these points in Höffe (1984). To suggest that the salient point of
comparison lies with Kant’s ethics is very misleading. For example, Rawls endorses the priority
of the right since he has a theory of the right and a theory of the good that are independent of
one another. He holds that principles of right are prior, since they regulate and coordinate each
persons subject’s pursuit of their conception of the good: “the right draws the limit; the good
shows the point.” ???. In the Groundwork Kant famously claims that there is only one thing that is
unconditionally good, namely the good will. Moral goodness, the moral worth of an action is
constituted by its being willed for the sake of and in conformity with the moral law. Talk of the
priority of right, or justice (in the narrow sense) over the good, in the context of Kant’s ethics is at
worst nonsensical and at best or horribly misleading. Unlike justice and goodness for Rawls, for
Kant moral rightness and moral goodness are not such as can be ordered or ranked.
39 Benhabib (1992: 180 and 71-5). See also Benhabib and Cornell (1987).
25
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See Benhabib and Cornell (1987: 13). “Feminists argue that the vision of the atomic,
“unencumbered self,” criticized by communitarians, is a male one, since the degree of
separateness and independence it postulates among individuals has never been the case for
women.” This criticism is also implicit in Nancy Fraser’s claim that the “new social meanings”
arising as content of women’s struggle for autonomy cannot be dismissed as “particularistic
lapses from universalism – for “these are no more particular than the sexist and androcentric
meanings and norms they are meant to replace”. Nancy Fraser (1995: 45). See also Jodi Dean,
(1995: 216). Seyla Benhabib (1992: 152). “Universalistic theories in the Western tradition...are
substitutionalist in the sense that the universalism they defend is defined surreptitiously by
identifying the experiences of a specific group of subjects as the paradigmatic case of the human
as such. These subjects are invariably, white, male adults who are propertied or at least
professional.”
41 See for example, Benhabib (1992: 152 & 184): Benhabib & Cornell (1987: 7-9). Benhabib
remarks that “the restriction of the moral domain to questions of justice” results in “the
privatization of women’s experience and leads to epistemological blindness towards the concrete
other.” Benhabib (1992: 164). Iris Marion Young argues that Kantian attempt to ground ethics
and politics on ideals of impartiality and universality gives rise to a whole series of related
exclusions of “particularity” “difference” “desire” “affectivity and the body”. Young, in
Benhabib and Cornell (1987: 60-69)
42 See Benhabib (1992: 75). “…I concur with critics of deontology like Williams, Taylor and
Sandel that a strong deontological theory which views justice as the center of morality
unnecessarily restricts the domain of moral theory, and distorts the nature of our moral
experience.”
43 See note 41. above.
44 Markus in Benhabib and Cornell (1987: 105-7).
45 The passage continues: “i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same
time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material reproduction at its
disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby,
generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the mans of mental production are subject to it.”
Marx (1970: 64). See Benhabib’s insightful critical discussion of MacKinnon in Benhabib (1993:
195).
46 Kohlberg (1981: 149). Gilligan (1982: 18).
47 MacKinnon in Gilligan, Dubois, Dunlop, MacKinnon, Menkel-Neadow (1985) p. 39ff. See
also Benhabib (1992: 195).
48 Kohlberg, for his part, accepts that stage 3 moral beliefs and values are “functional in the lives
of women insofar as their lives take place in the home” which is compatible with the claim that
they are expressions of patriarchal ideology (Gilligan 1982: 18). But Kohlberg thinks that such
views can and will be transcended as women develop towards the higher stages, and come to
regard such views as inadequate. He does not accept that stage 6 moralities are patriarchal and
sexist.
49 Meehan (2000: 46).
50 Habermas (1992: 65) translation amended. A more recent formulation of (U) states that: “a
norm is valid if and only if the foreseeable consequences and side effects of its general
observance for the interests and value-orientations of each individual could be freely accepted jointly
by all concerned.” (Habermas 1996b: 60) This is a significant reformulation, since it makes
explicit that (U) is a biconditonal, not a simple conditional.
51 See his response to Stephen Lukes in Thompson and Held (1982: 257). For his later view, see
Habermas (1991: 202) & (1993: 91).
52 He adds that the existence of universal human rights shows that there are at least some extant
valid moral norms. Habermas (1991: 202) & (1993: 91). I’m not sure how persuasive this example
is. Human rights are not themselves moral norms, though they may presuppose moral norms, if
the duties they impose on others can be described as moral norms. Incidentally, Habermas’s very
narrow conception of morality conflicts with the very wide social and pragmatic function he
assigns to it. How can morality still have remained the default mechanism for resolving conflicts
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of interest in modern societies, if there are so few valid moral norms available to moral agents?
See Finlayson (2000a).
53 This is not to say that there is no fundamental agreement between Habermas’s discourse ethics
and Rawls theory of justice. They both agree that in modern societies an orientation toward the
common good (under some descriptions of that term) is among the most important social
virtues, because agents need to cooperate and to coordinate their actions.
54 It is somewhat unusual and controversial to claim that the primary function of morality is to
settle conflicts of interest. One might think that the central function of morality is to tell us what
we ought to do and why, for example, when we do not know. Habermas allows that this is the
function of moral norms, when correctly applied to situations. But, as a social theorist, he is
much more interested in the general question of why we rely on justified or valid moral norms to
tell us what to do. His rough answer to this question is that it is one of the chief ways in which
communicative agents in modern societies avoid conflict and social friction.
55 That said, it is not as if discourse ethics is (or can be) completely silent on all normative
questions. For, if true, if principle (U) is the correct formulation of the moral principle, it tells us
that all moral norms embody generalisable interests. This has implications for what can be agreed
upon by participants in discourse to be a valid moral norm. It implies that Habermas cannot
draw the very strict distinction between the task of the theorist, which is to reconstruct the
procedure of discourse, and the task of agent, which is to use that procedure, as he would like.
Discourse ethics has some implications on the normative practical level. This is a point that Rawls
levels at Habermas, who claims that unlike A Theory of Justice discourse theory “limits itself to the
clarification of the moral point of view” and “leaves substantial questions that must be answered
in the here and now to the more or less enlightened participation of citizens.” Habermas (1995:
131). For Rawls’s objection see Rawls (2005 [1995]: 421-32).
56 Habermas (1992: 67 & 122).
57 Habermas (1992: 67). This formulation is still ambiguous between what McMahon calls strong
dialogicality which involves a collective act of judgement about the validity of a norm, and weak
dialogicality whereby agreement can be achieved piecemeal as a by product of people’s individual
judgements.
58 The friendly reception of Habermas’s discourse ethics within feminist social theory can be
gauged from the contributions to three important volumes Benhabib and Cornell eds. (1987),
Benhabib (1992) and Meehan ed. (1995). For a useful survey of the feminist reception of
discourse ethics see Meehan (2000).
59 Sandel (1984: 81-96). Benhabib objects to Stage 6 conceptions of morality on the grounds that
they presuppose “disembodied and disembedded” selves (Benhabib 1992: 152).
60 A slightly more sophisticated version of this same objection is that the unencumbered choosers
in the original position are in no way like the encumbered selves in the actual world they are
supposed to represent, who have to live by the principles of justice once the veil of ignorance is
lifted, hence Rawls’s model of justice as fairness has no purchase on real life. Habermas’s
discourse ethics is not vulnerable to this version of the objection either. It assumes only the
existence of real persons, who are at once agents in the lifeworld and participants in moral
discourse, and for whom the agreements and understanding reached in successful discourses
carry through into their everyday lives.
61 Christopher McMahon, who argues that by Habermas’s own lights, moral discourse is not
inherently a collective practice. On the contrary, dialogue is only a means of providing full
information about the relevant moral reasons are (which are given by facts about what people’s
universalisable interests are) to the person who must deliberate and decide on the validity of a
norm by considering such reasons. In principle, given adequate information, such matters can be
correctly decided by persons reasoning alone. McMahon (2000)
62 Habermas (1992: 122). Note that Habermas jumps to and fro here between the smaller
constituency of actual participants in discourse and much larger constituency of the entire moral
community.
63 This may be where Habermas’s Kantian rationalism gets the better of his pragmatism. See
Baynes (2004: 194-219); and also McCarthy (2004: 4).
64 Habermas (1992: 123).
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Principle (U), Habermas claims, “acts like a knife that makes razor-sharp cuts between
evaluative statements and strictly normative ones, between the good and the just.” Habermas
(1992: 104). Habermas’s view is that the strict distinction between questions of justice and the
good is made by participants in discourse; it is a requirement of the practice of moral argument
that Habermas, the moral theorist, simply reconstructs. Habermas attempts to shows that the
distinction is real, warranted by the phenomenon, by providing both a genealogical and historical
account of the emergence of modern morality, and a rational reconstruction of the moral
standpoint that dovetail together. Habermas, (1992: 57-109), and (1996b: 11-65).
66 Benhabib (1985) and (1992: 148-78). Andrea Maihofer expresses the widespread view in the
literature that Benhabib’s critique is “a classic” and “ground-breaking.” Maihofer (1998: 386).
67 “The other – don’t use this term as a mouthwash.” Lacan (1988: 7).
68 German and French, unlike English, helpfully have different words for other people and other
things: der Andere rather than das Andere, and autrui rather than l’autre.
69 Here the term is used adjectivally. The adjective is formed from the past participle of the finite
verb e.g. ‘has been generalized’.
70 Marx’s notion of ‘real abstraction’ and Weber’s notion of value generalisation are two examples
of real social processes of generalisation.
71 Mead (1967: 154 & 155).
72 Benhabib (1992: 158-9 esp. notes 22 & 23).
73 Benhabib (1992: 159). See also page 10.
74 Benhabib (1992: 158). By “contemporary moral theory” Benhabib certainly means the theories
ranked by Kohlberg at Stage 6, Kant’s ethics and Rawls theory of justice and also discourse
ethics. In her earlier version of this paper Benhabib only levels this objection against Kohlberg
and Rawls. Benhabib (1985: 415-18).
75 Benhabib (1992: 10-11).
76 In earlier versions of this essay Benhabib appears to argue with Habermas against Kohlberg
and Rawls, later she levels much the same criticism at Habermas. Compare Benhabib (1985) and
(1987) with Benhabib (1992: 10, 170 & 183-5).
77 Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm. 16 Bde. [in 32 Teilbänden].
Leipzig: S. Hirzel 1854-1960. -- Quellenverzeichnis 1971.
78 Strictly speaking morality bridges standpoint of the noumenal agent in the kingdom of ends,
and the standpoint of the empirical agent in the realm of appearances and sensible inclinations.
This, for example, is how Kant uses the term, in the following passage: “The concept of a world
of understanding is thus only a standpoint that reason sees itself constrained to take outside
appearances in order to think of itself as practical,… Kant (1996: 104). “Der Begriff einer
Verstandeswelt ist also nur ein Standpunkt, den die Vernunft sich genöthigt sieht, außer den
Erscheinungen zu nehmen, um sich selbst als praktisch zu denken...” (AA 4: 458).
79 Baier (1954): Wiggins (2006: 10).
80 Baier (1954: 135). “How simple minded it is to look for one feature that marks off the moral
judgement from other sorts.”
81 See Joseph Raz, ‘On the Moral Point of View’ in Reason Ethics and Society: Themes from Kurt Baier
with his Responses. J. B. Schneewind (ed.), Chicago, Open Court, 1996, p. 58.
82 Kant famously thinks that the categorical imperative, which is supposed to be a single
principle, in spite of its several different formulations, captures the moral standpoint. Scanlon,
likewise thinks that the central core of morality, what we owe to each other, can be captured by
the thought that “judgements of right and wrong…are judgements about what would be
permitted by principles that could not reasonably be rejected, by people who were moved to find
principles for the regulation of behaviour that others, similarly motivated, could not reasonably
reject.” Scanlon (1998: 4). Habermas, thinks that the moral standpoint can be captured by
principle (U). Habermas (1992: 65).
83 This might not imply that what can be seen from the moral standpoint exhausts the domain
morality in all senses of the term. For example, Scanlon argues that ‘morality’ has a broader
sense, encompassing a variety of values and good, as well as a central core that he calls “what we
owe to each other”, in other words morality as captured by his contractualist principle. Scanlon
(1998: 171-8). Habermas, in 1991, began to distinguish between ethics and morality. Habermas,
65
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(1993: vii, 1-19). One could might argue that morality in the broader sense includes what he calls
ethics, but excludes all value considerations that are neither moral nor ethical.
84 See Baier, (1965) [1958]. Kohlberg argues that there are several criteria that demarcate Stage 6
moralities. Kohlberg (1981: 190-227).
85 (Benhabib 1992: 10) This is linked to the charge of “epistemological blindness to the concrete
other.” (Benhabib 1992: 164-5). See note 41 above.
86 According to Rawls and more recently Okin this is close to what the veil of ignorance requires
the occupants of the original position to do. Since they do not know whose shoes they will
occupy, they have to find principles of justice that can be welcomed from the point of view of
every other flesh and blood, concrete citizen after the veil is lifted. Okin (1989a: 248: 1989: 101).
Even if Benhabib’s criticism applies to Rawls, it does not apply to Habermas discourse ethics.
87 Benhabib (1992: 186-7)
88 Benhabib argues that the generalized other and the concrete other ought not to be thought of
as “incompatible and even antagonistic” but as parts of “a continuum” (Benhabib 1992: 158 &
10).
89 Benhabib (1992: 185).
McCarthy (1993) and (Putnam (2000). My own view is that these points could be partly addressed if
Habermas recognised that agent-relative reasons and interests are universalisable, and that the universalparticular distinction does not line up with the agent-neutral agent-relative distinction. This would allow
him to grant moral status for example to the duty that every parent has to love his or her own children, and
to the duty that children have to honour their own parents, duties which are based on universal, but not
agent-neutral principles. This would lead to a broadening out of Habermas’s conception of the moral
domain, and would mean that considerations such as care might, even if they are not agent-neutral and
impartial, be accorded moral status, so long as they are universalisable. Finlayson (2000a).
90
30