The Need for More than Justice

Annette Baier (1988)Ethics Theory and Contemporary Issues: MacKinnon

Ethics and Contemporary IssuesProfessor Douglas Olena

JusticeIs 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 & Justice124 “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 Feature127 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.”