The Need for More
than Justice
Annette Baier (1988)
Ethics Theory and Contemporary Issues: MacKinnon
Ethics and Contemporary Issues
Professor Douglas Olena
Justice
Is justice as John Rawls takes it, “The first virtue of social
institutions?”
A challenge is arising from the very groups one might think
would be appealing to justice for redress of social inequity.
Blacks and women aggrieved for generations who are now
finding their voice in the marketplace are, instead of claiming
that justice is the central social virtue, claim that justice, far from
being the paramount virtue is only one of many competing
virtues.
“In a Different Voice”
122 Carol Gilligan’s book “caused a considerable stir both in the
popular press and, more slowly, in the philosophical journals.”
Why?
There is no disagreement that justice is an important virtue, just
a denial that it is the paramount virtue.
The claim is that justice does not have a claim to priority it has
enjoyed historically.
“In a Different Voice”
123 The differences in these views are not so much a denial of
the place of justice but the inclusion of “an enlarged moral
vocabulary, which draws on what Gilligan calls the ethics of care
as well as that of justice.”
“’Care’ is the new buzzword.”
Care & Justice
123 “It is not… mercy to season justice, but a less authoritarian
humanitarian supplement, a felt concern for the good of others
and for community with them.”
The ‘cold’ virtue of justice is supplemented with the ‘warmer’
communitarian virtues and social ideals.
“Liberty and equality are being found inadequate without”
(there is no adequate word in the English language) some sense
of the mutual concern of siblings.
Care & Justice
123 Gilligan “has since modified this claim, allowing that there
are two perspectives on moral and social issues that we all tend
to alternate between, and which are not always easy to
combine,”
The Justice perspective
The Care perspective
Care & Justice
123 Though there are men who share this perspective of care,
Gilligan suggests that by default the perspective comes from the
“parental and specifically maternal role” of the mother.
We can see the birth of virtue as a response toward a deficiency
in the child.
The evil of detachment or isolation
The evil of relative powerlessness and weakness
Care & Justice
123 “Two dimensions of moral development are thereby set—”
In response to the evil of detachment or isolation:
aiming to achieve satisfying community with others.
In response to the evil of relative powerlessness and weakness:
aiming at autonomy or equality of power.
Care & Justice
123 The predominance of one strategy or the other is
determined by “the relative salience of the two evils in
childhood, and on early and later reinforcement or
discouragement in attempts made to guard against these two
evils.”
Kantian Framework
123 Women have “used the language of rights and justice to
change their own social position, but nevertheless see limitations
in that language.”
Gilligan “reports their discontent with the individualist more or
less Kantian moral framework that dominates Western moral
theory….”
Kantian Framework
123 Gilligan’s book “is of interest, as much for its attempt to
articulate an alternative to the Kantian justice perspective as for
its implicit raising of the question of male bias in Western moral
theory, especially liberal democratic theory.”
Care & Justice
124 Baier raises the interesting questions:
“Is justice blind to important social values?”
“What is it that comes into view from the ‘care perspective’
that is not seen from the ‘justice perspective?’”
Care & Justice
124 Gilligan writes D.V. as a reaction to psychologist Lawrence
Kohlberg whose ideological pedigree she traces “from Piaget
and the Kantian philosophical position as developed by John
Rawls.”
The mature person in that view would have “respect for each
person’s individual rational will, or autonomy, and conformity to
any implicit social contract such wills are deemed to have made
….”
Care & Justice
124 Gilligan found when the same tests for this moral view were
given to women and girls that they not only scored lower than
their male counterparts but “reverted” to a lower stage of
development that emphasizes fitting in and conformity to
standards and rules.
“Piaget’s finding that girls were deficient in ‘the legal sense’ was
confirmed.”
Care & Justice
124 Gilligan wondered whether there were different
developmental patterns between males and females.
Though there was agreement between Kohlberg’s male and
female subjects about the value of respect for persons and for
their rights as persons, “women tended to speak in a different
voice about morality itself and moral maturity.”
Care & Justice
124 This is the crux of the distinction.
Baier quotes Gilligan, “Since the reality of interconnexion is
experienced by women as given rather than freely contracted,
they arrive at an understanding of life that reflects the limits of
autonomy and control.”
Interdependence and taking care are mature positions adopted
by women.
Care & Justice
124 “There is evidence that ‘women perceive and construe social
reality differently from men, and that these differences center
around experiences of attachment and separation.’”
The problem with the Kantian values of equal rights, freely
entered contracts, autonomy, liberty and free association “is that
none of these goods do much to ensure that the people who
have and mutually respect such rights will have any other
relationships to one another than the minimal relationship
needed to keep such a ‘civil society.’”
Care & Justice
125 “Their rights, and respect for rights, are quite compatible
with very great misery, and misery whose causes are not just
individual misfortunes and psychic sickness, but social and moral
impoverishment….”
Baier’s Comments
125 Baier challenges first the individualism of the Western
tradition.
She says that “noninterference can, especially for the relatively
powerless… amount to neglect, and even between equals can be
isolating and alienating.”
Baier’s Comments
125 An ethics of care cannot be nurtured or cultivated, one,
“without closer cooperation from others than respect for rights
and justice will ensure.”
Two, “the encouragement of some to cultivate it [the ethics of
care] while others do not could easily lead to exploitation of
those who do.”
Baier’s Comments
125 “For the moral tradition which developed the concept of
rights, autonomy and justice is the same tradition that provided
‘justifications’ of the oppression of those whom the primary
right-holders depended on to do the sort of work they
themselves preferred not to do.”
Baier’s Comments
125 “As long as women could be got to assume responsibility for
the care of home and children, and to train their children to
continue the sexist system, the liberal morality could continue to
be the official morality.”
Essentially as long as the liberal morality could avoid seeing the
contribution of those it excluded, it could continue to grant rights
to the select group it was addressed to.
Baier’s Comments
125, 126 “The ‘justice perspective,’ and the legal sense that goes
with it, are shadowed by their patriarchal past.”
126 “What did Kant… say in his moral theory about women? He
said they were incapable of legislation, not fit to vote, that they
needed the guidance of more ‘rational’ males.”
Baier’s Comments
126 These moral theories are undoubtedly objectionable, yet
“they also contained the seeds of the challenge, or antidote, to
this patriarchal poison.”
Baier’s Comments
126 Quizzically the language of rights which had been used to
exclude women in the past, was successfully used to procure
rights for women.
This is true of much of this moral tradition.
ex. Movement of the U.S. in its ordinary beliefs away from
slavery, and restrictions on women’s rights.
Baier’s Comments
126 These prejudices have been maintained by the Christian
church, codified by Aquinas, insisting on the maleness of God.
However even in the church there is recognition of this mistake
and redress is being made.
ex. the A/G in their last General Council, removed all
restrictions and special clauses restricting women from
ministry and holding office in the denomination.
Three Reasons…
127 Baier lists “three reasons women have not to be content to
pursue their own values within the framework of liberal
morality.
1. Liberal morality’s dubious record.
2. Inattention to relations of inequality or its pretense of equality.
3. Exaggeration of the scope of choice, or its inattention to
unchosen relations.
Three Reasons…
127 Liberal morality has made a pretense to treating people
equally when it is not the case.
This exposes “the companion myth that moral obligations arise
from freely chosen associations between such individuals.”
ex. Children do not choose their parents. Nor do they choose to
care for their elderly parents.
These relationships and attendant responsibilities are unchosen
yet as much of an obligation as they would be if they were.
Gilligan’s Fourth Feature
127 Gilligan challenges ”its typical rationalism, or
intellectualism” and “its assumption that we need not worry
what passions persons have, as long as their rational wills can
control them.”
128 A father figure must have self control to avoid the
temptation to beat a child to death for his incessant screaming.
But is that enough for a parent?
No, “they need to love their children, not just control their
irritation.”
Gilligan’s Conclusion
128 “The emphasis in Kantian theories on rational control of
emotions, rather than on cultivating desirable forms of emotion,
is challenged by Gilligan, along with the challenge to the
assumption of the centrality of autonomy, or relations between
equals, and of freely chosen relations….”
Baier’s Conclusion
128 “Once there is this union of male and female moral wisdom,
we maybe can teach each other the moral skills each gender
currently lacks, so that the gender difference in moral outlook
that Gilligan found will slowly become less marked.”