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Women Philosophers: Carol Gilligan and Ethics
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
Marilyn Friedman |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
How do we establish what is right and wrong? Is justice universal? Should our emotions guide our reasoning? According to Marilyn Friedman, professor of philosophy at the Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, such ethical questions have traditionally had a male bias. In this extract from her essay "Feminism in Ethics: Conceptions of Autonomy," she shows how the feminist movement and Carol Gilligan's theories exploded the assumptions of centuries of moral philosophers. |
 thics, or moral philosophy, as a field of intellectual inquiry developed in the west for well over two thousand years with minimal input from women. Women's voices have been virtually absent from western ethics until this century, as they have been from every field of intellectual endeavour. The absence of female voices has meant that the moral concerns of men have preoccupied traditional western ethics, the moral perspectives of men have shaped its methods and concepts, and male biases against women have gone virtually unchallenged within it. Feminist ethics explores the substantive effect of this imbalance on moral philosophy and seeks to rectify it. |
Like other areas of feminist thought, feminist ethics is grounded in a commitment to ending the oppression, subordination, abuse and exploitation of women and girls, wherever these may arise. In the late 1960s, when feminist ethics began, it consisted mainly of applying the resources of traditional moral philosophy to the array of moral issues that were being brought to public attention by the women's movements then arising in many western societies. Those issues, such as economic discrimination against women, restrictive sex roles, domestic violence, rape, inegalitarian marriage and ideals of self-sacrificing motherhood, were of special concern to women and had been largely neglected by traditional philosophical ethics. Feminist ethics, from the start, thus sought to shift philosophical attention to topics that philosophers, almost exclusively male, had previously ignored. |
To be sure, some of the issues of special concern to women, such as prostitution and pornography, had already received attention from the predominantly male philosophical profession. In addition, abortion, though not much discussed professionally prior to 1970, became a hot topic for philosophers in general soon after 1970 as a result of the growing trend toward decriminalization of abortion in western countries. The feminist innovation has been not so much to introduce such topics to philosophical audiences as to emphasize dimensions that had otherwise been neglected, such as the perspectives of the women involved the relevant gender relationships, and the cultural context of women's subordination. On the subject of pornography, for example, the mostly male, non-feminist philosophers had debated whether the mere use of sexually explicit and arousing materials was itself immoral. Feminists, by contrast, turned their attention to the impact of pornography on women, particularly whether its production and use promoted women's subordination, objectification, or vulnerability to sexual assault. |
By the early 1980s, the concepts and strategies of feminist ethics had grown in complexity, and feminist ethics emerged as a self-consciously distinct area of feminist theory. Instead of merely applying traditional ethical tools to women's issues, as had been the trend in the 1970s, feminist ethics now turned its attention also to the tools themselves. Careful analysis exposed what seemed to be male biases in the very concepts and methods of traditional philosophical ethics. Not only had male philosophers neglected women-centred issues; they had also developed tools of articulation, interpretation, and analysis that appeared to reflect their male standpoints, despite a presumption of abstract universality. Feminist philosophers accordingly sought to introduce specifically female moral perspectives into philosophical ethics and to forge conceptual and methodological tools that reflected women's standpoints. |
Carol Gilligan and moral psychology
A major catalyst for this development came from feminist research in the field of moral psychology, particularly that of Carol Gilligan (see especially her In a Different Voice (1982), and 'Moral Orientation and Moral Development' in E. Feder Kittay and D.T. Meyers, eds., Women and Moral Theory (1987), pp. 19-33). Based on empirical studies, Gilligan reported a significant degree of correlation between gender and moral orientation. According to her early writings, males are characteristically concerned with substantive moral matters of justice, rights, autonomy and individuation. In their moral reasonings, they tend to rely on abstract principles and to seek universality of scope. Women, by contrast, are more often concerned with substantive moral matters of care, personal relationships and avoiding hurt to others. They tend to avoid abstract principles and universalist pretensions and to focus instead on contextual detail and interpersonal emotional responsiveness. |
Gilligan's ideas were not entirely new to feminist thought. By the early 1980s, some feminist theorists had already begun to theorize that caring relationships entered significantly into women's conceptions of selfhood and personal identity. Gilligan gave this trend great impetus, by articulating those concerns in the form of a detailed moral perspective, one that contrasted starkly with male-generated traditions of thought in moral psychology and philosophy. She also provided empirical evidence for regarding the care perspective as a distinctively female moral orientation. |
Perhaps most importantly, Gilligan honoured what she presented as women's moral reasoning; she presented care ethics as a moral equal to traditional justice-oriented moral theories. Her work thus epitomized a feminist approach already emerging at the time that some would later call 'cultural feminism'. According to this approach, women have distinctive traits as women, but these traits are not necessarily inferior to those of men; they are sometimes as valuable as, or even superior to, those of men. The real social problem for women is not so much that they have been denied opportunities to attain the experiences or character traits of men, but rather that society has failed to appreciate or reward what is distinctively valuable in women's character traits. 'Man' had indeed been 'the measure of all things', and women had been mismeasured and unfairly found wanting by that standard. Instead of seeking opportunities for women to emulate men's traditional lives or viewpoints, cultural feminists wanted to elevate social esteem for the equal, and sometimes superior, merits of women's distinctive perspectives and concerns. |
The care/justice dichotomy
While there is certainly more to feminist ethics than Gilligan's account of care ethics, the influence of this account on moral philosophy is significant in a number of ways. First, it stimulated many philosophers to consider whether moral concepts and methodologies are, in some substantive sense, gender-based or gender-biased. The idea that different genders tend to adopt different moral perspectives resonated then, and still does today, with the experiences of many people. Indeed, it has widespread nonacademic appeal, as shown, for example, by popular bestsellers that tell us that women are 'from Venus' while men are 'from Mars' (J. Gray, Men Are From Mars; Women Are From Venus, 1993). Gilligan grounded those gender stereotypes in specific moral traits and attitudes. She thereby provided resources for feminists to use in arguing that certain moral concepts and methods were not universal after all but were instead mere reflections of a characteristically male moral standpoint. |
Second, Gilligan's care/justice dichotomy contributed to a movement that was already under way in the field of ethics generally--the search for alternative moral orientations to the utilitarian and Kantian frameworks which had dominated ethical theory through the 1970s and which still loom large over the field. On Gilligan's interpretation, the two competing mainstays of modern ethical theory, utilitarianism and Kantian ethics, appear rather more like allies than opponents. Defenders of both of those traditions tend to regard the moral point of view as impartial, impersonal, universal and principle-based, and to give great importance to matters of justice. The recent revival of Aristotelian ethics, with its emphasis on virtue and community, has been a product of the mainstream search for alternatives to utilitarianism and Kantian ethics. Gilligan's care ethic offers yet another seeming alternative to those ethical traditions. |
To be sure, Gilligan wavers in her treatment of the relationship between care and justice orientations. Sometimes Gilligan suggests that care and justice perspectives are distinct and mutually exclusive moral outlooks which, like the alternative aspects under which different patterns are found in ambiguous gestalt images, cannot be utilized simultaneously. At other times, however, she suggests that care and justice perspectives are each incomplete, and that they can and should be integrated to form a truly adequate, more 'mature' moral orientation. On this latter approach, care could be reinterpreted as a part of justice toward loved ones, or justice could be reinterpreted as a special mode of caring for others. There is as yet no general agreement on the relationship between care ethics and moral theories that emphasize justice. A wise working strategy for the present time is to regard care ethics as at the very least an account of a distinctive style or approach to ethical problems and concerns. |
Personal ethics
Thus, third, Gilligan's conception of a moral perspective centred specifically on caring and personal relationships moves those concerns to moral centre stage. In addition to promoting the search for alternative moral theories, a care ethic highlights the moral importance of caring practices, moral attentiveness to other persons in their unique particularity, and the sheer maintenance of the social fabric of close personal relationships. As they had developed by the early 1980s, neither utilitarianism nor Kantian ethics had devoted much attention to these matters. Even Aristotelian ethics pays little attention to caring and to the efforts required to maintain relationships. |
In modern moral theory, concerns pertaining to close personal relationships and private domains of life, such as sexuality, family and friendship, have tended to be ignored. Although the canonical figures of philosophical ethics all had something to say about these domains of life, the written works which have dominated ethical discourse in recent centuries focus on matters of public morality, that is, matters that presuppose no close or special connection between persons. Gilligan's writings belong to a growing counter-current in ethics toward regarding the personal point of view as an appropriate, and perhaps the only possible, standpoint for justified moral reasoning. Many mainstream moral philosophers had previously held that justification in moral reasoning requires such features as impartiality and universalizability. The personal point of view reflects someone's distinctive history, embodiment and network of social relationships, not to mention her desires and emotions. It seems to be irreducibly partial and particular. The notion that the personal point of view is unavoidable in moral reasoning thus requires a reconceptualization of what it means for moral reasoning, or, more broadly, moral understanding, to be justified. Particularly for sympathizers of care ethics, a moral perspective that is self-reflectively aware of its own relational-embeddedness is superior as a standpoint for moral reasoning to any would-be detached, disinterested, impartial, universalistic point of view. |
Emotion in philosophy
In virtue of this focus on the personal, a fourth influence of Gilligan's work was to add a feminist perspective to another trend in philosophy--the defence of the role of emotion in moral life. Mainstream moral philosophy had previously tended to view the moral point of view as based on reason. Emotion was regarded not merely as irrelevant but as a cause of bias and distortion in moral understanding. Some mainstream philosophers had already begun to argue on various grounds that emotion was morally important (cf. Bernard Williams, 'Morality and the Emotions', in Problems of the Self, 1973). Feminists added to this challenge the idea that the denigration of emotion was part and parcel of the cultural devaluation of women. Defending emotion, including its role in moral understanding, has become for feminists part of the project of elevating cultural esteem for women. |
Fifth, Gilligan's work contributed to the growing conviction that women are more relationally oriented than men, and that men are more individualistic than women. This conviction is widespread among feminists despite their reluctance to generalize about the moral perspectives of all women. Many feminists believe that women are more likely than men to realize and acknowledge the interdependencies between people, and that people's identities depend upon those interdependencies. Men, on this view, are more likely than women to ignore the importance of relationships. As a result, men are more likely than women to retain an implausibly individualistic outlook and to seek an impersonal, impartial, universalistic stance for moral reasoning. |
Responses to Gilligan
Gilligan's work was followed by a torrent of feminist-inspired writings about personal relationships, caring and nurturing, the differences between care and justice, relational self-identity and the importance of emotional responsiveness to others. Contributors to this development include: Annette Baier, Seyla Benhabib, Lawrence Blum, Claudia Card, Owen Flanagan, Marilyn Friedman, Jean Grimshaw, Virginia Held, Kathryn Jackson, Alison Jaggar, Nel Noddings, Bill Puka, Sara Ruddick, Joan C. Tronto and Margaret Walker. |
Despite the widespread, interdisciplinary influence of Gilligan's work, some feminists began by the mid 1980s to raise criticisms of care ethics and of Gilligan's arguments for a distinctively female moral orientation. Several objections are noteworthy here. First, the empirical correlation between gender and moral perspective was not uniform and the data themselves were open to various interpretations. Some feminists suggested detaching Gilligan's (apparent) claim of a gender difference from her claim about the distinction between justice and care perspectives, and evaluating each claim separately. |
Second, women's orientation toward care and personal relationships seemed mainly to reflect the social role of the traditional, full-time heterosexual wife and mother. (Certain female-oriented professions, such as nursing, exhibit a caring focus, but Gilligan's discussion of it did not draw on specifically professional details.) This role, however, is morally problematic. Although it has brought satisfaction to many women, it limits women's lives in important ways. It requires female heterosexuality, promotes women's dependence on men and consequent economic and social vulnerability, and submerges women's own desires and aspirations in the moral project of caring endlessly for others. Few would disagree with Gilligan that a care orientation reflects women's traditional role experiences. The dispute is over how to evaluate the resulting orientation. The fact that a moral orientation reflects women's experiences and standpoints is not in itself a reason to think that it is superior to all others or even sound in its own right. A relational care perspective might well be limited and flawed by the oppressive aspects of the role experiences that produced it. |
A third objection is that the empirical research underlying Gilligan's discussion of care ethics was based only on white, middle-class, heterosexual women, and her writings did not acknowledge that differences among women might make a difference to their moral perspectives. It is an open question whether a care ethics would emerge in the perspectives of lesbians, black women, poor women, or any others who diverge in important ways from Gilligan's research sample (Michele M. Moody-Adams, 'Gender and the Complexity of Moral Voices', in Claudia Card, ed., Feminist Ethics, 1991). In the 1980s, many feminists grew resistant to generalizations that purported to represent 'women' without qualification. Concern to articulate differences among women due to such factors as sexual orientation, race, class, religion, ethnicity, nationality, age and ableness became a major feminist theme. If moral orientation is linked to significant life experiences and if life experiences vary in tandem with these other factors, then we might well need lesbian ethics, black womanist ethics and so on. Thus, where Gilligan initially referred to only two moral orientations, care and justice, some feminists now began to talk about a multiplicity of perspectives among women. |
Conclusion
To summarize: feminist ethics shares the general feminist goal of eliminating the subordination and oppression of women and enhancing societal respect for women's viewpoints and capacities. Toward this end, feminist ethics adopts a number of diverse methodological strategies, including the defence of theories and concepts that seem more compatible with women's modes of reflection and understanding than do those of mainstream ethics. Some of these strategies were developing simultaneously for non-feminist reasons in mainstream philosophical ethics. These coincident strategies include: a search for alternatives to Kantian and utilitarian ethics, legitimation of the personal point of view, defence of the role of emotion in moral judgment and development of a relationally oriented moral psychology. |
This ia an extract from pp. 205-11 of "Feminism in Ethics: Conceptions of Autonomy," by Marilyn Friedman, in The Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy, ed. Miranda Fricker and Jennifer Hornsby, published by Cambridge University Press. Copyright Cambridge University Press, 2000. |
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