Explorations in Feminist Ethics: Theory and Practice / Edition 1

by Eve Browning Cole, Susan Coultrap-McQuin

Overview

"These essays advance a reinterpretation of pivotal categories such as self-knowing, moral agency, and altruism . . . A must for all students and researchers/faculty engaged in the study of ethics." —Choice

"This is an extraordinarily valuable collection of essays in feminist ethics." —Teaching Philosophy

A range of recent work in feminist ethics, exploring such issues as the ethic of care, a viable feminist ethics, Pythagoreanism, existentialism, utilitarianism, self-knowing, emotion, and moral vision. Also discussed is the process of applying feminist ethics to work situations. The concluding essays point to the future and present new visions for the field.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780253206978
Publisher:	Indiana University Press
Publication date:	04/22/1992
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

EVE BROWNING COLE is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. She is author of articles on Greek philosophy and culture, sexism in the history of philosophy, and ancient views on the intelligence and character of (nonhuman) animals. SUSAN COULTRAP-MCQUIN is Associate Professor of Women's Studies and Humanities at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. She is author of Doing Literary Business: American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century.

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Explorations in Feminist Ethics

Theory and Practice

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By Eve Browning Cole, Susan Coultrap-Mcquin

Indiana University Press

Copyright © 1992 Indiana University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-31384-3

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CHAPTER 1

The Care Debate

Do Feminist Ethics Counter Feminist Aims?

PATRICIA WARD SCALTSAS

In a preliminary phase of deconstruction, feminist theorists focused on and developed the distinction between sex (the biological determination of female and male) and gender (the socially constructed characteristics and roles of women and men). They then exposed the gender blindness and gender biases of the Western intellectual heritage by showing the confusion of sex with gender in the writings of philosophers like Aristotle, Aquinas, Rousseau, and Schopenhauer (to name a few of the worst offenders). This confusion of sex with gender still appears in contemporary philosophical writings. In his 1973 article "Because You Are a Woman," John Lucas says, "However much I, a male, Want to be a mother, a wife or a girlfriend, I am disqualified from those roles on account of my sex, and I cannot reasonably complain. Not only can I not complain if individuals refuse to regard me as suitable in those roles, but I have to acknowledge that it is reasonable for society generally to do so, and for the state to legislate accordingly. ... For exactly the same reasons, women are debarred from being regarded in a fatherly or husbandly light." In addition to the continuing deconstruction of men's thought, there is the need to build better theories. This task of feminist theoretical reconstruction has now begun.

A major part of this task is the development of feminist ethics. Carol Gilligan's book In a Different Voice documents the disparity between women's experience and the representation of human moral development throughout the psychological literature. The theoretical and observational bias of psychologists in general, and moral developmental psychologists in particular, leads to the pervasive, though often only implicit, adoption of the male life as the norm. Subsequently women's lives, development and values, insofar as they are different from men's, are judged deviant and are devalued. Hence the need for a reexamination of the moral concepts and presuppositions of current standard ethical theory and the construction of ethical theory more in tune with women's actual experience of morality and their moral concerns.

Gilligan argues that there is a misrepresented voice that expresses a valid, mature mode of ethical thought different from that currently recognized as valid and mature. She further argues that it is "characterized not by gender but by theme"; its association with women is just an "empirical observation." Annette Baier points out in "What Do Women Want in a Moral Theory?" that a few men who are moral philosophers have also recently been proclaiming discontent with the standard approach in moral philosophy, but that by and large it is women moral philosophers who are articulating this different voice uncovered by Gilligan in her studies of moral development. In Gilligan's analysis, this different voice expresses an ethic of care and responsibility which focuses on maintaining interconnections between particular personalities and on their particular welfare. Because this is often seen (especially by moral psychologists such as Lawrence Kohlberg) as in direct opposition to the standard, traditional (empirically male) voice that expresses an ethic of justice and rights focusing on universal principles and independent individuals, the different, contextual approach is either dismissed as not valid as ethics or relegated to an immature stage of moral development. Gilligan argues that the ethic of care and responsibility is at least as valid and mature as the ethic of justice and rights. The project of criticizing, analyzing, and when necessary replacing the traditional categories of moral philosophy in order to eradicate the misrepresentation, distortion, and oppression resulting from the historically male perspective is, broadly speaking, the project of feminist ethics. Jean Grimshaw identifies three main themes that have been developed in feminist ethics.

(1) A critique of "abstraction," and the belief that women's thinking is (and moral thinking in general should be) more contextualized, less bound to abstract rules, more "concrete."

(2) A stress on the values of empathy, nurturance or caring* which are seen as qualities that women both value more and tend more commonly to display.

(3) A critique of the idea that the notions of choice and will are central to morality, and of a sharp distinction between fact and value; a stress, instead, on the idea of the demands of a situation, which are discovered through a process of attention to it and require an appropriate response.

Given the laudable aims of feminist ethics, do feminist ethics in fact endorse a restrictive rather than an emancipatory view of women's place? Let us examine to what extent the development of these three main themes in feminist ethics does or does not endorse a restrictive view.

I

Theme (1) is a critique of abstraction and the promotion of more contextual, more "concrete" moral thinking, believed to be more pervasive among women than men. Feminists must develop this theme very carefully because maintaining a sharp distinction between "abstract" and "concrete" thinking has a tendency to replicate sexist dichotomies. If women's moral thinking, insofar as it is seen to differ from men's, is seen as context-bound or situational in the sense of being directly opposed to abstract thinking, there is a real danger that the representation of women's moral reasoning may degenerate into the belief that women perceive and act intuitively, pragmatically, emotionally, and that women's processes of reasoning, if they exist at all, are "nebulous" or "unfathomable" because unprincipled. Being more concrete in one's thinking may indicate greater concern for the particular persons and circumstances but may also be seen to indicate inability to conduct abstract thinking. Such characterizations have been used to try to justify women's exclusion from participation in public and professional life, to say nothing of education. Hence, feminists should be ever so vigilant to challenge rather than assume those characterizations. Grimshaw argues, for the reasons just mentioned, that it is much better to see these gender differences as differences in ethical concerns and priorities than as differences in mode or style of reasoning. She suggests that sometimes it is "not [that] women do not act on principles, but that the principles on which they act are not recognized (especially by men) as valid or important ones." Sometimes there is not even recognition of any implicit principle, valid or invalid. However, two principles are commonly given priority in women's moral thinking: (i) it is wrong to hurt anyone and (ii) it is right to sustain human relationships. The concrete, contextual aspect of women's moral thinking can be seen to result from this perceived responsibility to appropriately respond to actual people in actual situations, to ensure that this particular person is not hurt and that this particular relationship is sustained. The moral dilemmas faced by women in Gilligan's studies reveal just how difficult it is, given the complexities of real life, to determine precisely what action will satisfy those two principles in any actual situation (especially situations in which someone will inevitably be hurt or a relationship inevitably be broken). Women's moral thinking, then, differs from men's mainly in the different priority of principles acted on. The concrete, contextual aspect of moral thinking is a necessary stage in applying any principle, whether by women or men. Feminist ethics can redirect attention to the importance and difficulty of this aspect of moral thinking without presenting women as unprincipled.

In his paper "Gilligan and Kohlberg: Implications for Moral Theory," Lawrence Blum points out that, in an important sense, a morality of care is based on universal principles (that everyone should be kind and caring, responsible to those to whom they are connected), but the notion of moral action is enlarged. This enlarged notion, he argues,

encompasses emotional response [and] acknowledges that moral action — acting to that principle — requires a care for particular persons which can not be exhaustively codified into universal principles. ... It acknowledges that other moral capacities, involving perception and sensitivity to particulars, care and concern for individual persons, which cannot be accounted for by that in the moral agents which generates principles, are equally central to moral agency. ... [But, of course,] if "moral" is defined in terms of impartiality, then anything outside impartiality — even what is a necessary condition of it — is excluded.

It is this narrow definition of "moral" that effectively excludes what the different voice identified by Gilligan expresses.

The restrictiveness of the argument from impartiality can be seen from its effects in the deontological moral tradition. Iris Young argues that the deontological tradition assumes that normative reason is impartial and universal (abstract). She shows that this generates artificial polarities by expelling desire and feeling from moral reason. As a result, all feelings, inclinations, needs, and desires are deemed equally irrational, hence equally inferior. In his book Friendship, Altruism and Morality, Blum argues that because deontological reason opposes duty to feeling, it fails to recognize that altruistic emotions (sympathy, compassion, and concern) can and do provide reasons for, and motivate, moral action. Consequently, a whole sector of reasons and motives for moral action are defined out of court. Hence, moral decisions grounded in considerations of compassion, caring, and a recognition of differences in need (as those documented by Gilligan) are defined as not rational and are dismissed as merely sentimental. But premodem philosophy, in particular virtue-based moral theories, did recognize these factors as legitimate in moral thinking and tried to develop standards for distinguishing good from bad interests and noble from base sentiments. For example, consider Aristotle's discussion of the virtue of friendship. As Terence Irwin points out, Aristotle argues that friendship "includes the favourable attitudes of business partners and associates and of fellow-citizens for each other," (my italics) and "it also requires some FEELING, actual FONDNESS for the other, not mere goodwill and benevolence." In an Aristotelian conception of ethics, the situations that call for concern and caring, as well as many moral situations, defy universalizing. The stress in such a system is not for the exercise of codified courses of action that are dictated by the identification of the equally codifiable moral predicaments of the agent; rather, what is required is the development of moral sensitivity and dispositions that will enable the individual to respond to each situation according to the demand it makes. Aristotle argues, "All law is universal, but in some areas no universal rule can be correct. ... And this is the nature of what is decent — rectification of law in so far as the universality of law makes it deficient. ... For the standard applied to what is indefinite is itself indefinite, as the lead standard is in Lesbian building, where it is not fixed, but adapts itself to the shape of the stone."

Iris Young further argues that the dichotomy between deontological reason and feeling is expressed in the distinction between the public realm of the state and the private realm of the family that dominates modern political theory. The consequence of this division is that women have been so effectively confined to the private. Hence, feminist ethics, which retain a sharp opposition between moral reason and feeling, and universal and particular, also retain the basis for generating gendered dichotomies that have been used to try to justify a restrictive view of women's place. But feminist ethics like Iris Young's, which aim to develop a conception of normative reason that does not oppose moral reason to feeling, challenge rather than endorse this restrictive view.

Annette Baier is pursuing an alternative strategy in developing a more adequate moral theory that will bring together men's theories of obligation and justice and women's theories of love and care. She advances the concept of appropriate trust as the implicit theoretical foundation of both moralities. Her concept of trust mediates well between reason and feeling by being both "belief-informed and action-influencing." Her strategy also avoids endorsing a restrictive view of women's place. Baier observes that women's responsibility for the care of others is imposed on them by asymmetrical power relations in society; however, although the received contractarian–Kantian moral theory implicitly presupposes this imposition, it does not acknowledge or attempt to justify it. If voluntary agreement is the paradigm source of moral obligation in liberal morality, Baier argues, women are either excluded from the class of moral subjects or the theory must admit internal contradiction.

II

Theme (2) emphasizes the values of empathy, nurturance, or caring as particularly female virtues. These virtues are seen to develop from women's experience and activities as the carers for others' welfare. It is argued by some feminists that these virtues enable women to perceive, more easily than men perceive, the dangerous and inhuman nature of ideologies and actions that have led to so much corruption and destruction. The recognition and application of these values are deemed vital for the improvement of social and political life. In praising the value of care, feminists must be extremely cautious to avoid endorsing notions of care that can be used oppressively. Gilligan documents cases where women submerge their own identities, interests, and needs as they struggle to fulfill their prescribed roles as nurturers of others and to avoid accusations of selfishness. So, although the traditional role of women in society might have led to the development of certain virtues, the confinement of women to that role has had destructive results in their development as individuals in society. Indeed, the view of women solely as the nurturers of other people at the expense of what was seen as their own personal development and self-realization was the focus of feminist criticism in the 1960s and early 1970s. This could be a serious problem for feminist ethics, especially when women's ethical values are seen as arising principally out of the practice and traditions of mothering, as Sara Ruddick argues. To isolate mothering from fathering or, in general, parenting, is to isolate women as a sex as the sex best suited to the role of nurturer. From here it is but a short step to asserting that mothering is the only role for which women are suitable.

Although Ruddick wants to remain neutral on the question of a biological basis of maternal thinking, she does believe that "the 'biological body' (in part a cultural artifact) may foster certain features of maternal practice, sensibility, and thought." She argues that although "some men express maternal thinking in various kinds of working and caring with others," all women's maternal thought "exists in a radically different way" from men's because the mother-daughter relationship is radically different from the mother-son relationship. (She bases this claim mainly on Nancy Chodorow's (1978) The Reproduction of Mothering.) But what does Ruddick mean? If some men manage to escape patriarchal genderization and acquire maternal thinking, why does it differ from women's maternal thinking? If those men are still to some degree genderized males, then perhaps they do not really acquire maternal thinking. But if Ruddick means that some men really do acquire maternal thinking, the only difference between women's maternal thinking and men's maternal thinking must be biological. Despite her declaration of neutrality on the issue of biological determinism, her argument seems to imply it. If the virtues of empathy and care are considered to be, or are in any way implied to be, sex-determined, then women are trapped biologically in a restrictive, feminine stereotype and men are biologically excluded. If these virtues are considered to be linked to gender, then men as well as women could develop these virtues with the right social conditioning. Given the phenomenon of postnatal depression, the virtues of mothering seem to be learned rather than innate. Some might want to argue that postnatal depression is a phenomenon of oppressive patriarchal societies that suppress a woman's natural virtues of empathy and care. One could likewise argue that patriarchal societies also suppress a man's natural virtues of empathy and care. In both cases, encouragement, support, and training could lead to the cultivation of these natural capacities. Apparently chimpanzees also must learn to care appropriately for their young. A special place in Texas is set up for chimps to be in their typical social organization so the females can learn "mothering" and then be used as breeders in captivity. Females taken from their mothers early on do not know how to care for their own newborns. The biological fact that women are the ones who give birth to babies does not guarantee that mothers develop naturally the virtues of empathy and care expected of them. If parental care is recognized as a social rather than a natural virtue, it becomes very important, as Grimshaw points out, "that men should participate more fully in, and take more responsibility for, the tasks of physical and emotional maintenance."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Explorations in Feminist Ethics by Eve Browning Cole, Susan Coultrap-Mcquin. Copyright © 1992 Indiana University Press. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents

PREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Toward a Feminist Conception of Moral Life
Eve Browning Cole and Susan Coultrap-McQuin

I. The Care Debate

Do Feminist Ethics Counter Feminist Aims?
Patricia Ward Scaltsas

Care and Confusion
Dianne Romain

Warning: The Surgeon Moralist Has Determined That Claims of Rights Can Be Detrimental to Everyone's Interests
Roger J. Rigterink

Just Caring
Rita Manning

II. Comparisons Across Theories

Harmonia and Koinonia: Moral Values for Pythagorean Women
Julie K. Ward

Care and Respect
Robin S. Dillon

Beyond Either/Or: Justice and Care in the Ethics of Albert Camus
Elizabeth Ann Bartlett

Feminism and Modern Friendship: Dislocating the Community
Marilyn Friedman

III. Constructing an Ethical Life

Ethics and Self-Knowing: The Satisfaction of Desire
Winnie Tomm

Seeing through Women's Eyes: The Role of Vision in Women's Moral Theory
Ellen L. Fox

Emotional Work
Cheshire Calhoun

IV. Working Within a Feminsit Ethic

Feminist Ethics and Workplace Values
Mary C. Raugust

Some Issues in the Ethics of Collaborative Work
Canadian Feminist Ethics Theroy Group: Lorraine Code, Maureen Ford, Kathleen Martindale, Susan Sherwin, Debra Shogan

V. New Directions in Theory

From Maternal Thinking to Peace Politics
Sara Ruddick

Lesbian Ethics and Female Agency

Moral Understandings: Alternative Epistemology for a Feminist Ethics
Margaret Urban Walker

A Global Perspective on Feminist Ethics and Diversity
Charlotte Bunch

A BIBLIOGRAPHY IN FEMINIST ETHICS
CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX