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E T H I C S

Feminist Reconceptualizations in Ethics

VIRGINIA HELD

WHEN FEMINIST perspectives are brought to bear in ethics, they may at first suggest topics overlooked or neglected by the philosophical field of inquiry known as “moral philosophy” or “ethics.” Such topics include discrimina- tion against women and justifiable remedies, abortion and reproductive technologies and the moral problems involved, violence against women, and many others.

Soon attention may be turned to the moral theory appealed to in any discussion of ethical problems. And it will be seen that moral theory, like other philosophical theory, has a long history of gender bias.1 Ethics, like most of philosophy, has been built on assumptions, and constructed with concepts, that are by no means gender-neutral.

In comparison with nonfeminist approaches, feminists characteristically begin with different concerns and give different emphases to the issues we consider. The significance of shifts such as these can be great; as Lorraine Code notes, “Starting points and focal points shape the impact of theoretical discussion.”2 Far from merely providing additional insights that can be in- corporated into traditional theory, feminist explorations often require radi- cal transformations of existing fields of inquiry and theory.3 From a feminist point of view, moral theory, along with almost all theory, will have to be transformed to take adequate account of the experience of women.

I will begin this essay with a brief examination of how various fundamen- tal aspects of the history of ethics have not been gender-neutral. I will discuss three issues where feminist rethinking is transforming moral concepts and theories. And I will suggest some of the profound implications such rethink- ing has for the transformation of society.

BIAS IN THE HISTORY OF ETHICS

Consider the ideals embodied in the phrase “the man of reason.” As Gen- evieve Lloyd has told the story, what has been taken to characterize the man of reason may have changed from historical period to historical period, but in each, the character ideal of the man of reason has been constructed in conjunction with a rejection of whatever has been taken to be characteristic of the feminine. “Rationality,” Lloyd writes, “has been conceived as tran-

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EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 8/13/2019 7:09 PM via COMMUNITY COLLEGE OF BALTIMORE COUNTY AN: 360038 ; Kourany, Janet A..; Philosophy in a Feminist Voice : Critiques and Reconstructions Account: ns111077.main.eds1

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scendence of the ‘feminine,’ and the ‘feminine’ itself has been partly consti- tuted by its occurrence within this structure.”4

This has, of course, fundamentally affected the history of philosophy and of ethics. The split between reason and emotion is one of the most familiar of philosophical conceptions. The advocacy of reason “controlling” unruly emotion, of rationality guiding responsible human action against the blind- ness of passion, has a long and highly influential history, almost as familiar to nonphilosophers as to philosophers. Lloyd sums it up:

From the beginnings of philosophical thought, femaleness was symbolically asso- ciated with what Reason supposedly left behind—the dark powers of the earth goddesses, immersion in unknown forces associated with mysterious female pow- ers. The early Greeks saw women’s capacity to conceive as connecting them with the fertility of Nature. As Plato later expressed the thought, women “imitate the earth.”5

In asserting its claims and winning its status in human history, reason was thought to have to conquer the female forces of unreason. Reason and clar- ity of thought were early associated with maleness, and, as Lloyd says, “What had to be shed in developing culturally prized rationality was, from the start, symbolically associated with femaleness.” In later Greek philo- sophical thought, the form-matter distinction was articulated, with a similar hierarchical and gendered association. Maleness was aligned with active, determinate, and defining form; femaleness with mere passive, indetermi- nate, and inferior matter. Plato, in the Timaeus, compared the defining as- pect of form with the father and indefinite matter with the mother; Aristotle also compared the form-matter distinction with the male-female distinction. To quote Lloyd again, “This comparison . . . meant that the very nature of knowledge was implicitly associated with the extrusion of what was symbol- ically associated with the feminine.”6

The associations among reason, form, knowledge, and maleness have persisted in various guises and have permeated what has been thought to be moral knowledge, as well as what has been thought to be scientific knowl- edge and the practice of morality. The associations between the philosophi- cal concepts and gender cannot be merely dropped and the concepts retained regardless of gender, because gender has been built into them in such a way that, without it, they will have to be different concepts. As feminists repeat- edly show, if the concept of “human” were built on what we think about “woman” rather than on what we think about “man,” it would be a very different concept. Ethics, thus, has not been a search for universal, or truly human, guidance but a gender-biased enterprise.

Other distinctions and associations have supplemented and reinforced the identification of reason with maleness, and of the irrational with the female; on this and other grounds “man” has been associated with the human, “woman” with the natural. Prominent among distinctions reinforcing the latter view has been that between the public and the private. Again, these

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provide as familiar and entrenched a framework as do reason and emotion, and they have been as influential for nonphilosophers as for philosophers. It has been supposed that in the public realm man transcends his animal nature and creates human history. As citizen, he creates government and law; as warrior, he protects society by his willingness to risk death; and as artist or philosopher, he overcomes his human mortality. Here, in the public realm, morality should guide human decisions. In the household, in contrast, it has been supposed that women merely “reproduce” life as natural, biological matter. Within the household, the “natural” needs of man for food and shelter are served, and new instances of the biological creature that is man are brought into being. But what is distinctively human and what transcends any given level of development to create human progress have been thought to occur elsewhere.

This contrast was made explicit in Aristotle’s conceptions of polis and household; it has continued to affect the basic assumptions of a remarkably broad swath of thought ever since. In ancient Athens, women were confined to the household; the public sphere was literally a male domain. The associ- ations of the public, historically male sphere with the distinctively human, and of the household, historically a female sphere, with the merely natural and repetitious, have persisted, even though women have been permitted to venture into public space. These associations have deeply affected moral theory, which has often supposed the transcendent, public domain to be relevant to the foundations of morality in ways that the “natural” behavior of women in the household could not be.

To take some representative examples, David Heyd, in his discussion of supererogation, claims that a mother’s sacrifice for her child cannot be an example of the supererogatory because it belongs, in his view, to “the sphere of natural relationships and instinctive feelings (which lie outside moral- ity).”7 J. O. Urmson had earlier taken a similar position, saying, “Let us be clear that we are not now considering cases of natural affection, such as the sacrifice made by a mother for her child; such cases may be said with some justice not to fall under the concept of morality” (emphasis added).8 And in his article “Distrusting Economics,” Alan Ryan argues persuasively about the questionableness of economics and other branches of the social sciences built on the assumption that human beings are rational, self-interested cal- culators. He discusses various examples of behavior, such as that of men in wartime, which is not self-interested and which shows the assumption to be false; but nowhere in the article is there any mention of the activity of moth- ering, which would seem to be a fertile locus for doubts about the usual picture of rational man as self-interested.9 Although Ryan does not provide the kind of explicit reason offered by Heyd and Urmson for omitting moth- ering from consideration as relevant to his discussion, it is difficult to under- stand the omission without a comparable assumption being implicit here, as it so often is elsewhere. Without feminist insistence on the relevance for mo- rality of the experience in mothering, this context is largely ignored by moral

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theorists. And yet from a gender-neutral point of view, how can this vast and fundamental domain of human experience possibly be imagined to lie “out- side morality”?

The result of the distinction between public and private, as usually formu- lated, has been to privilege the points of view of men in the public domains of state and law, and later in the marketplace, and to discount the experience of women. Mothering has been conceptualized as a primarily biological ac- tivity, even when performed by human beings, and virtually no moral theory in the history of ethics has taken mothering, as experienced by women, seri- ously as a source of moral insight, until feminists began to do so in recent years.10 Women have been seen as emotional rather than rational beings, and thus incapable of full moral personhood. Women’s behavior has been interpreted as “natural” and driven by instinct, and thus as irrelevant to morality and to the construction of moral principles, or it has been inter- preted, at best, as in need of instruction and supervision by males better able to know what morality requires and better able to live up to its demands.

The Hobbesian conception of reason is very different from the Platonic or Aristotelian conceptions before it and from the later conceptions of Rous- seau or Kant or Hegel; all have in common the habit of ignoring and dispar- aging the experience and reality of women. Consider Hobbes’s account of man in the state of nature contracting with other men to establish society. These men hypothetically come into existence fully formed and independent of one another, and decide either to enter civil society or stay outside of it. As Christine Di Stefano writes, “What we find in Hobbes’s account is a vital concern with the survival of a gendered subject conceived in modern mascu- line terms. . . . In the state of nature, Hobbes’s masculine egoism carries the day. . . . The specifically gendered dimension of this egoism is underscored by a radical atomism erected on the denial of maternity.”11

In The Citizen, where Hobbes gave his first systematic exposition of the state of nature, he asks us to “consider men as if but even now sprung out of the earth, and suddenly, like mushrooms, come to full maturity, without all kind of engagement with each other.”12 Di Stefano points out that it is an incredible feature of Hobbes’s state of nature that the men in it “are not born of, much less nurtured by, women, or anyone else” and that, to abstract from the complex web of human reality an abstract man for rational pe- rusal, Hobbes has “expunged human reproduction and early nurturance from his account of basic human nature and primordial human relations. Such a descriptive strategy ensures that Hobbes can present a thoroughly atomistic subject.”13

From the point of view of women’s experience, such a subject or self is unbelievable and misleading, even as a theoretical construct. The man-made political Leviathan Hobbes erects on these foundations “is effectively com- posed,” Di Stefano writes, “of a body politic of social orphans who have socially acculturated themselves.” Hence, Hobbesian man “bears the telltale signs of a modern masculinity in extremis: identity through opposition,

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denial of reciprocity, repudiation of the (m)other in oneself and in relation to oneself.”14

Rousseau and Kant and Hegel paid homage, respectively, to the emo- tional power, the aesthetic sensibility, and the familial concerns of women. But since in their views morality must be based on rational principle and since women were incapable of full rationality, or a degree or kind of ratio- nality comparable to that of men, women were deemed to be inherently wanting in morality. For Rousseau, women must be trained from childhood to submit to the will of men lest their sexual power lead both men and women to disaster. For Kant, women were thought incapable of achieving full moral personhood, and women lose all charm if they try to behave like men by engaging in rational pursuits. For Hegel, women’s moral concern for our families could be admirable in its proper place, but it is a threat to the more universal aims to which men, as members of the state, should aspire.15

These images of the feminine as what must be overcome if knowledge and morality are to be achieved, of female experience as naturally irrelevant to morality, and of women as inherently deficient moral creatures are all built into the history of ethics. Examining these images, feminists find that they are not the incidental or merely idiosyncratic suppositions of a few philoso- phers whose views on many topics depart far from the ordinary anyway; they are the nearly uniform reflection in philosophical and ethical theory of patriarchal attitudes pervasive throughout human history. Or they are exag- gerations of ordinary male experience, which then reinforce rather than tem- per other conceptions and institutions reflective of male domination. At any rate, they distort the actual experience of many men as well as women. An- nette Baier has speculated why it is that moral philosophy has so seriously overlooked the trust among human beings that in her view is an utterly central aspect of moral life. “The great moral theorists in our tradition,” she says, “not only are all men, they are mostly men who had minimal adult dealings with (and so were then minimally influenced by) women.” For the most part they were “clerics, misogynists, and puritan bachelors,” and thus it is not surprising that they focus their philosophical attention “so single- mindedly on cool, distanced relations between more or less free and equal adult strangers.”16

As feminists, we deplore the male domination that so much of philosophy and moral theory reflects. But we recognize that the problem requires more than changing patriarchal attitudes, for moral theory as so far developed is incapable of correcting itself without almost total transformation. It cannot simply absorb the gender that has been “left behind,” even if both genders want it to. To continue to build morality on rational principles opposed to the emotions and to include women among the rational will leave no one to reflect the promptings of the heart, which promptings can be moral rather than merely instinctive. To simply bring women into the public and male domain of the polis will leave no one to speak for the household. Its values have been hitherto unrecognized, but they are often moral values. Or to

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continue to seek contractual restraints on the pursuits of self-interest by at- omistic individuals and to have women join men in devotion to these pur- suits will leave no one involved in the nurturance of children and the cul- tivation of social relations, which nurturance and cultivation can be of the greatest moral import.

There are very good reasons for women not to want simply to be ac- corded entry as equals into the enterprise of morality as so far developed. In a recent survey of types of feminist moral theory, Kathryn Morgan laments that “many women who engage in philosophical reflection are acutely aware of the masculine nature of the profession and tradition, and feel their own moral concerns as women silenced or trivialized in virtually all the official settings that define the practice.”17 Clearly women should not agree, as the price of admission to the masculine realm of traditional morality, to aban- don our own moral concerns as women.

And so we are trying to shape new moral theory. Understandably, we are not yet ready to offer fully developed feminist moral theories. But we can suggest some directions our project is taking. As Morgan points out, there is not likely to be a “star” feminist moral theorist on the order of a Rawls or a Nozick:

There will be no individual singled out for two reasons. One reason is that vital moral and theoretical conversations are taking place on a large dialectical scale as the feminist community struggles to develop a feminist ethic. The second reason is that this community of feminist theoreticians is calling into question the very model of the individualized autonomous self presupposed by a star-centered male- dominated tradition. . . . We experience it as a common labour, a common task.18

Promising dialogues are proceeding on feminist approaches to moral the- ory. As Alison Jaggar makes clear in her useful overview, there is no unitary view of ethics that can be identified as “feminist ethics.” Feminist ap- proaches to ethics share a commitment to “rethinking ethics with a view to correcting whatever forms of male bias it may contain.” While those who develop these approaches are “united by a shared project, they diverge widely in their view as to how this project is to be accomplished.”19

Not all feminists, by any means, agree that there are distinctive feminist virtues or values. Some are especially skeptical of the attempt to give positive value to such traditional “feminine virtues” as a willingness to nurture, or an affinity with caring, or a reluctance to seek independence. They see this approach as playing into the hands of those who would confine women to traditional roles.20 Other feminists are skeptical of all claims about women as such, emphasizing that women are divided by class and race and sexual orientation in ways that make any conclusions drawn from “women’s expe- rience” dubious.21

Still, it is possible, I think, to discern some focal points in current feminist attempts to transform ethics into an acceptable theoretical and practical ac- tivity. In the glimpse I have presented of bias in the history of ethics, I

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focused on what, from a feminist point of view, are three of its most ques- tionable aspects: the split between reason and emotion, and the devaluation of emotion; the public-private distinction and the relegation of the private to the natural; and the concept of the self as constructed from a male point of view. In the remainder of this discussion, I will examine further how some feminists are exploring these topics. We are showing that previous treatment of them has been distorted, and we are trying to reenvision the realities and recommendations with which these aspects of moral theorizing should deal.

REASON AND EMOTION

In the area of moral theory in the modern era, the priority accorded to rea- son has taken two major forms. On the one hand has been the Kantian, or Kantian-inspired, search for very general, abstract, deontological, universal moral principles by which rational beings should be guided. Kant’s Categor- ical Imperative is a prime example. It suggests that all moral problems can be handled by applying an impartial, pure, rational principle to particular cases. It requires that we try to see what the general features of the problem before us are and that we apply to the problem an abstract principle or rules derivable from it. This procedure, it is said, should be adequate for all moral decisions. We should thus be able to act as reason recommends, and resist yielding to emotional inclinations and desires in conflict with our rational wills.

On the other hand, the priority accorded to reason in the modern era has taken a Utilitarian form. The Utilitarian approach, reflected in rational choice theory, recognizes that persons have desires and interests, and it sug- gests rules of rational choice for maximizing the satisfaction of these desires and interests. While some philosophers in the tradition espouse egoism, es- pecially of an intelligent and long-term kind, many do not. They begin, how- ever, with assumptions that what is morally relevant are the gains and losses of utility to theoretically isolable individuals and that morality should aim to maximize the satisfaction of individuals. Rational calculation about such an outcome will, in this view, provide moral recommendations to guide all our choices. Like the Kantian approach, the Utilitarian approach relies on ab- stract general principles or rules to be applied to particular cases. And it holds that although emotion is, in fact, the source of our desires for certain objectives, the task of morality should be to instruct us on how to pursue those objectives most rationally. Emotional attitudes toward moral issues themselves interfere with rationality and should be disregarded.

Although the conceptions of what the judgments of morality should be based on and how reason should guide moral decisions are different in Kan- tian and Utilitarian approaches, they share a reliance on a highly abstract, universal principle as the appropriate source of moral guidance, and they share the view that moral problems are to be solved by the application of

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such an abstract principle to particular cases. Both admire the rules of rea- son to be appealed to in moral contexts, and both denigrate emotional re- sponses to moral issues.

Many feminist philosophers have questioned whether the reliance on ab- stract rules, rather than the adoption of more context-respectful approaches, can possibly be adequate for dealing with moral problems, especially as women experience them. Though Kantians may hold that complex rules can be elaborated for specific contexts, there is nevertheless an assumption in this approach that the more abstract the reasoning applied to a moral prob- lem, the more satisfactory. And Utilitarians suppose that one highly abstract principle, the Principle of Utility, can be applied to every moral problem no matter what the context.

A genuinely universal or gender-neutral moral theory would be one that would take account of the experience and concerns of women as fully as it does the experience and concerns of men. When we focus on women’s expe- rience of moral problems, however, we find that they are often especially concerned with actual relationships between embodied persons and with what these relationships seem to require. Women are often inclined to attend to rather than to dismiss the particularities of the context in which a moral problem arises. And many of us pay attention to feelings of empathy and caring to help us decide what to do rather than relying as fully as possible on abstract rules of reason.

Margaret Walker, for instance, contrasts feminist moral “understanding” with traditional moral “knowledge.” She sees the components of the former as involving “attention, contextual and narrative appreciation, and commu- nication in the event of moral deliberation.” This alternative moral episte- mology holds that “the adequacy of moral understanding decreases as its form approaches generality through abstraction.”22

The work of psychologists such as Carol Gilligan has led to a clarification of what may be thought of as tendencies among women to approach moral issues differently from men. Rather than seeking solutions to moral prob- lems by applying abstract rules of justice to particular cases, many of the women studied by Gilligan were concerned with preserving actual human relationships and with expressing care for those for whom they felt responsi- ble. Their moral reasoning was typically more embedded in a context of particular others than was the reasoning of a comparable group of men.23

One should not equate tendencies women in fact display with feminist views, since the former may well be the result of the sexist, oppressive condi- tions in which women’s lives have been lived. But many feminists see our own consciously considered experience as lending confirmation to such psy- chological studies.

Feminist philosophers are in the process of reevaluating the place of emo- tion in morality in at least two respects. First, many think morality requires the development of the moral emotions, in contrast to moral theories em- phasizing the primacy of reason. As Annette Baier observes, the rationalism

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typical of traditional moral theory will be challenged when we pay attention to the role of parent:

It might be important for father figures to have rational control over their violent urges to beat to death the children whose screams enrage them, but more than control of such nasty passions seems needed in the mother or primary parent, or parent-substitute, by most psychological theories. They need to love their chil- dren, not just to control their irritation.24

So the emphasis in traditional theories on rational control over the emo- tions, rather than on cultivating desirable forms of emotion, is challenged by feminist approaches to ethics.

Second, emotions will be respected rather than dismissed by many femi- nist moral philosophers in the process of gaining moral understanding. The experience and practice out of which we can expect to develop feminist moral theory will include embodied feeling as well as thought. In an over- view of a vast amount of writing, Kathryn Morgan states that “feminist theorists begin ethical theorizing with embodied, gendered subjects who have particular histories, particular communities, particular allegiances, and particular visions of human flourishing. The starting point involves valoriz- ing what has frequently been most mistrusted and despised in the western philosophical tradition.”25 Foremost among the elements being reevaluated are women’s emotions. The “care” of the alternative feminist approach to morality appreciates rather than rejects emotion, and such caring relation- ships cannot be understood in terms of abstract rules or moral reasoning. And the “weighing” so often needed between the conflicting claims of some relationships and others cannot be settled by deduction or rational calcula- tion. A feminist ethic will not just acknowledge emotion, as do Utilitarians, as giving us the objectives toward which moral rationality can direct us; it will embrace emotion as providing at least a partial basis for morality itself and certainly for moral understanding.

Trust is essential for at least some segments of morality.26 Achieving and maintaining trusting, caring relationships is quite different from acting in accord with rational principles or satisfying the individual desires of either self or other. Caring, empathy, feeling for others, being sensitive to each other’s feelings—all may be better guides to what morality requires in actual contexts than may abstract rules of reason or rational calculation.

The fear that a feminist ethic will be a relativistic “situation ethic” is mis- placed. Some feelings can be as widely shared as are rational beliefs, and feminists do not see their views as reducible to “just another attitude.” In her discussion of the differences between feminist and nonfeminist medical eth- ics, Susan Sherwin shows why feminists reject the mere case-by-case ap- proach that prevails in nonfeminist medical ethics. The latter also rejects the excessive reliance on abstract rules characteristic of standard ethics, and in this way resembles feminist ethics. But the very focus on cases in isolation makes it difficult to attend to general features in the institutions and prac-

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tices of medicine that, among other faults, systematically contribute to the oppression of women.27 The difference of approach can be seen in the treat- ment of issues in the new reproductive technologies that may further de- crease the control of women over reproduction.

This difference is not one of substance alone; Sherwin shows its implica- tions for method as well. With respect to reproductive technologies, one can see clearly the deficiencies of the case-by-case approach: what needs to be considered is not only choice as seen in the purely individualistic terms of the focus on cases but control at a more general level and how such control affects the structure of gender in society. Thus, a feminist perspective does not always counsel attention to specific case versus appeal to general consid- erations, as some sort of methodological rule. But the general considerations are often not the purely abstract ones of traditional and standard moral theory; they are the general features and judgments to be made about cases in actual (which means, so far, male-dominated) societies. A feminist evalua- tion of a moral problem should never omit the political elements involved; and it is likely to recognize that political issues cannot be dealt with ade- quately in purely abstract terms any more than can moral issues.

The liberal tradition in social and moral philosophy argues that in a plu- ralistic society, and even more clearly in a pluralistic world, we cannot agree on our visions of the good life, on what is the best kind of life for human beings, but we can hope to agree on the minimal conditions for justice, for coexistence within a framework allowing us to pursue our visions of the good life.28 Many feminists contend that the commitment to justice needed for agreement in actual conditions on even minimal requirements of justice is as likely to demand relational feelings as a rational recognition of abstract principles. Human beings can and do care—and are capable of caring far more than most do at present—about the suffering of children quite distant from them, about the prospects for future generations, and about the well- being of the globe. The mutually disinterested rational individualists of the liberal tradition would seem unlikely to care enough to take the actions needed to achieve moral decency at a global level, or environmental sanity for decades hence, just as they seem unable to represent caring relationships within the family and among friends. Annette Baier puts it thus:

A moral theory, it can plausibly be claimed, cannot regard concern for new and future persons as an optional charity left for those with a taste for it. If the morality the theory endorses is to sustain itself, it must provide for its own continuers, not just take out a loan on a carefully encouraged maternal instinct or on the enthusi- asm of a self-selected group of environmentalists, who make it their business or hobby to be concerned with what we are doing to mother earth.29

The possibilities, as well as the problems (and we are well aware of some of them), in a feminist reenvisioning of emotion and reason need to be fur- ther developed, but we can already see that the views of nonfeminist moral theory are unsatisfactory.

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THE PUBLIC AND THE PRIVATE

A second questionable aspect of the history of ethics is its conception of the distinction between the public and the private. As with the spilt between reason and emotion, feminists are showing how gender bias has distorted previous conceptions of these spheres, and we are trying to offer more ap- propriate understandings of “private” morality and “public” life.

Feminists reject the implication that what occurs in the household occurs as if on an island beyond politics. In fact, the personal is highly affected by the political power beyond, from legislation about abortion to the greater earning power of men, to the interconnected division of labor by gender both within and beyond the household, to the lack of adequate social protec- tion for women against domestic violence.30 Of course we recognize that the family is not identical with the state, and we still need concepts for thinking about the private and the personal, the public and the political; but we do know they will have to be very different from the traditional concepts.

Feminists have also criticized deeper assumptions about what is distinc- tively human and what is “natural” in the public and private aspects of human life, and what is meant by “natural” in connection with women.31

Consider the associations that have traditionally been built up: the public realm is seen as the distinctively human realm in which man transcends his animal nature, while the private realm of the household is seen as the natural region in which women merely reproduce the species. These associations are extraordinarily pervasive in standard concepts and theories, in art and thought and cultural ideals, and especially in politics. So entrenched is this way of thinking that it was reflected even in Simone de Beauvoir’s path- breaking feminist text, The Second Sex, published in 1949.32 In thinking about the household and about politics, as about many other topics, femi- nists need to transcend our own early searches for our own perspectives.

Dominant patterns of thought have seen women as primarily mothers, and mothering as the performance of a primarily biological function. Then it has been supposed that while engaging in political life is a specifically human activity, women are engaged in an activity that is not specifically human. Women accordingly have been thought to be closer to nature than men, to be enmeshed in a biological function involving processes more like those in which other animals are involved than like the rational discussion of the citizen in the polis, or the glorious battles of noble soldiers, or the trading and rational contracting of “economic man.”33 The total or relative exclusion of women from the domain of public life has thus been seen as either fitting or inevitable.

The view that women are more determined by biology than are men is still extraordinarily prevalent. From a feminist perspective it is highly question- able. Human mothering is a different activity from the mothering engaged in by other animals, as different as the work and speech of men is from what

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might be thought of as the “work” and “speech” of other animals. Of course, all human beings are animal as well as human. But to whatever ex- tent it is appropriate to recognize a difference between “man” and other animals, so is it appropriate to recognize a comparable difference between “woman” and other animals, and between the activities—including mother- ing—engaged in by women and the behavior of other animals.

Human mothering shapes language and culture, it forms human social personhood, it develops morality. Animal behavior can be highly complex, but it does not have built into it any of the consciously chosen aims of moral- ity. In creating human social persons, human mothering is different in kind from merely propagating a species. And human mothering can be fully as creative an activity as those activities traditionally thought of as distinctively human, because to create new persons and new types of persons can surely be as creative as to make new objects, products, or institutions. Human mothering is no more “natural” or “primarily biological” than is any hu- man activity.

Consider nursing an infant, often thought of as the epitome of a biological process with which mothering is associated and women are identified. There is no more reason to think of human nursing as simply biological than there is to think this way of, say, a businessmen’s lunch. Eating is a biological process, but what and how and with whom we eat are thoroughly cultural. Whether and how long and with whom a woman nurses an infant are also human, cultural matters. If men transcend the natural by conquering new territory and trading with their neighbors and making deals over lunch to do so, women can transcend the natural by choosing not to nurse their children when they could, or choosing to nurse them when their culture tells them not to, or singing songs to their infants as they nurse, or nursing in restaurants to overcome the prejudices against doing so, or thinking human thoughts as they nurse, and so forth. Human culture surrounds and characterizes the activity of nursing as it does the activities of eating or governing or writing or thinking.

We are continually being presented with images of the humanly new and creative as occurring in the public realm of the polis or in the realms of the marketplace or of art and science outside the household. The very term “re- production” suggests mere repetition, the bringing into existence of repeated instances of the same human animal. But human reproduction is not repeti- tion. This is not to suggest that bringing up children in the interstices of patriarchal families, in society structured by institutions supporting male dominance, can achieve the potential of transformation latent in the activity of human mothering. But the activity of creating new social persons and new kinds of persons is potentially the most transformative human activity of all. And it suggests that morality should concern itself first of all with this activ- ity, with what its norms and practices ought to be, and with how the institu- tions and arrangements throughout society and the world ought to be struc- tured to facilitate the right kinds of development of the best kinds of new

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persons. The flourishing of children ought to be at the very center of moral, social, political, economic, and legal thought, rather than, as at present, at the periphery, if attended to at all.

Revised conceptions of public and private have significant implications for our conceptions of human beings and relationships between them. Some feminists suggest that instead of interpreting human relationships on the model of the impersonal “public” sphere, as standard political and moral theory has so often done, we might consider interpreting them on the model of the “private,” or of what these relationships could be imagined to be like in postpatriarchal society. The traditional approach is illustrated by those who generalize, to regions of human life other than the economic, assump- tions about “economic man” in contractual relations with other men. It sees such impersonal, contractual relations as paradigmatic, even, on some views, for moral theory. Many feminists, in contrast, consider the realm of what has been misconstrued as the “private” as offering guidance to what human beings and their relationships should be like in regions beyond those of family and friendship, as well as in more intimate contexts. Sara Ruddick looks at the implications of the practice of mothering for the conduct of peace politics. Marilyn Friedman and Lorraine Code consider friendship, especially as women understand it, as a possible model for human relation- ships.34 Others see society as noncontractual rather than contractual.

Clearly, a reconceptualization is needed of the ways in which every hu- man life is entwined with both personal and social components. Feminist theorists are rethinking and reorganizing the private and the public, the per- sonal and the political, and thus morality.

THE CONCEPT OF SELF

Let me turn now to the third aspect of the history of ethics that is being reenvisioned by feminists: the concept of self. A major emphasis in a feminist approach to morality is the recognition that more attention must be paid to the domain between the self as ego, as self-interested individual, and the universal, everyone, others in general. Traditionally, ethics has dealt with these poles of individual self and universal all. Often it has called for impar- tiality against the partiality of the egoistic self; sometimes it has defended egoism against claims for a universal perspective. But most standard moral theory has hardly noticed as morally significant the intermediate realm of family relations and relations of friendship, of group ties and neighborhood concerns, especially from the point of view of women.

When it has noticed this intermediate realm, it has often seen its attach- ments as threatening to the aspirations of the man of reason or as subversive of “true” morality. In seeing the problems of ethics as problems of reconcil- ing the interests of the self with what would be right or best for “everyone,” standard ethics has neglected the moral aspects of the concern and sympathy

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that people actually feel for particular others, and what moral experience in this intermediate realm suggests for an adequate morality.

The region of “particular others” is a distinct domain, where what can be seen to be artificial and problematic are the very egoistic “self” and the uni- versal “all others” of standard moral theory. In the domain of particular others, the self is already constituted to an important degree by relations with others, and these relations may be much more salient and significant than the interests of any individual self in isolation.35 The “others” in the picture, however, are not the “all others,” or “everyone,” of traditional moral theory; they are not what a universal point of view or a view from nowhere could provide.36 They are, characteristically, actual flesh-and- blood other human beings for whom we have actual feelings and with whom we have real ties.

From the point of view of much feminist theory, the individualistic as- sumptions of liberal theory and of most standard moral theory are suspect.37

Even if we were freed from the debilitating aspects of dominating male power to “be ourselves” and to pursue our own interests, we would, as persons, still have ties to other persons, and we would at least in part be constituted by such ties. Such ties would be part of what we inherently are. We are, for instance, the daughter or son of given parents or the mother or father of given children, and we carry with us at least some ties to the racial or ethnic or national group within which we developed into the persons we are.

If we look at the realities of the relation between mothering person (who can be female or male) and child, we can see that what we value in the relation cannot be broken down into individual gains and losses for the individual members in the relation. Nor can it be understood in universalis- tic terms. Self-development apart from the relation may be much less impor- tant than the satisfactory development of the relation. What matters may often be the health, growth, and development of the relation-and-its-mem- bers in ways that cannot be understood in the individualistic terms of stan- dard moral theories designed to maximize the satisfaction of self-interest. Neither can the universalistic terms of moral theories grounded in what would be right for “all rational beings” or “everyone” handle what has moral value in the relations between mothering person and child.

Feminism is, of course, not the only locus of criticism of the individualistic and abstractly universalistic features of liberalism and standard moral the- ory. Marxists and communitarians also see the self as constituted by its so- cial relations. But in their usual form Marxist and communitarian criticisms pay no more attention than liberalism and standard moral theory to the experience of women, to the context of mothering, or to friendship as women experience it.38 Some nonfeminist criticisms, such as offered by Ber- nard Williams, of the impartiality required by standard moral theory, stress how a person’s identity may be formed by personal projects in ways that do not satisfy universal norms yet ought to be admired. Such views still

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interpret morality from the point of view of an individual and his project, not a social relationship such as that between mothering person and child. And nonfeminist criticisms in terms of traditional communities and their moral practices, as seen, for instance, in the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, often take traditional gender roles as given or else provide no basis for a radical critique of them.39 There is no substitute, then, for feminist explora- tion of the area between ego and universal, as women experience this area, or for the development of a refocused concept of relational self that could be acceptable from a feminist point of view.

Relationships can be evaluated as trusting or mistrustful, mutually con- siderate or selfish, harmonious or stressful, and so forth. Where trust and consideration are appropriate, which is not always, we can find ways to foster them. But to understand and evaluate relationships and to encourage them to be what they can be at their best require us to look at relationships between actual persons and to see what both standard moral theories and their nonfeminist critics often miss. To be adequate, moral theories must pay attention to the neglected realm of particular others in the actual relation- ships and actual contexts of women’s experience. In doing so, problems of individual self-interest versus universal rules may recede to a region more like background, out-of-focus insolubility, or relative unimportance. The salient problems may then be seen to be how we ought best to guide or maintain or reshape the relationships, both close and more distant, that we have, or might have, with actual other human beings. Particular others can be actual children in need on distant continents or the anticipated children of generations not yet even close to being born. But they are not “all rational beings” or “the greatest number,” and the self that is in relationships with particular others and is shaped to a significant degree by such relations is not a self whose ego must be pitted against abstract, universal claims.

The concept of a relational self is evolving within feminist thought. Among the interesting inquiries it is leading to is the work done at the Stone Center at Wellesley College.40 Psychologists there have posited a self-in-rela- tion theory and have conducted empirical inquiries to try to establish how the female self develops. In working with a theory that a female relational self develops through a mutually empathetic mother-daughter bond, they have been influenced by Jean Baker Miller’s reevaluation of women’s psy- chological qualities as strengths rather than weaknesses. In the mid-1970s, Miller identified women’s “great desire for affiliation” as one such strength. Nancy Chodorow’s Reproduction of Mothering has also influenced the work done at the Stone Center.41 Chodorow argued that a female sense of self is reproduced by a structure of parenting in which mothers are the pri- mary caretakers and that sons and daughters develop differently in relation to a parent of the same sex, or a parent of different sex, as primary caretaker. Daughters come to define themselves as connected to or in relation with others. Sons, in contrast, come to define themselves as separate from or less connected with others. An implication often drawn from Chodorow’s work

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is that parenting should be shared equally by fathers and mothers so that children of either sex can develop with caretakers of both the same and different sex.

In the early 1980s, Carol Gilligan offered her view of the “different voice” with which girls and women express their understanding of moral prob- lems.42 Like Miller and Chodorow, Gilligan valued tendencies found espe- cially in women to affiliate with others and to interpret their moral respon- sibilities in terms of their relationships with others. In all, to value autonomy and individual independence over care and concern for relationships was seen as an expression of male bias. Psychologists at the Stone Center have tried to elaborate on and to study a feminist conception of the relational self. In a series of working papers, researchers and clinicians have explored the implications of the conception of the relational self for various issues in women’s psychology (for example, power, anger, work inhibitions, vio- lence, eating patterns) and for therapy.

The self as conceptualized in these studies is seen as having both a need for recognition and a need to understand the other, and these needs are seen as compatible. They are created in the context of mother-child interaction and are satisfied in a mutually empathetic relationship. This requires not a loss of self but a relationship of mutuality in which self and other both express an understanding of each other’s subjectivity. Both give and take in a way that not only contributes to the satisfaction of their needs as individuals but also affirms the “larger relational unit” they compose.43 Maintaining this larger relational unit then becomes a goal, and maturity is seen not in terms of individual autonomy but in terms of competence in creating and sustaining relations of empathy and mutual intersubjectivity.

The Stone Center psychologists contend that the goal of mutuality is rarely achieved in adult male-female relationships because of the traditional gender system, which leads men to seek autonomy and power over others and to undervalue the caring and relational connectedness that is expected of women. Women rarely receive the nurturing and empathetic support they provide. Accordingly, these psychologists look to the interaction that occurs in mother-daughter relationships as the best source of insight into the pro- motion of the healthy relational self. This research provides an example of exploration into a refocused, feminist conception of the self and into em- pirical questions about its development.

In a quite different field, that of legal theory, a refocused concept of self is leading to reexamination of such concepts as property and autonomy and the role these have played in political theory and constitutional law. For instance, the legal theorist Jennifer Nedelsky questions the dominant im- agery in constitutional law and in our conceptions of property: the imagery of a bounded self, a self contained within boundaries and having rights to property inside a wall—rights to exclude others and to exclude government. The boundary metaphor, she argues, obscures and distorts our thinking about human relationships and what is valuable in them: “The boundedness

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of selves may seem to be a self-evident truth, but I think it is a wrong-headed and destructive way of conceiving of the human creatures law and govern- ment are created for.” In the domain of the self’s relation to the state, the central problem, she argues, is not “maintaining a sphere into which the state cannot penetrate, but fostering autonomy when people are already within the sphere of state control or responsibility.” What we can from a feminist perspective think of as the male “separative self” seems on an end- less quest for security behind such walls of protection as those of property. Property focuses the quest for security “in ways that are paradigmatic of the efforts of separative selves to protect themselves through boundaries.”44 But surely property is a social construction, not a thing; it requires the involve- ment of the state to define what it is and to defend it. Only constructive relationships can provide what we seek to assure through the concept of property.

In a discussion of autonomy, Nedelsky recognizes that, of course, femi- nists are centrally concerned with the freedom and autonomy to live our own lives. But, she argues, to express these concerns we need a language that will also reflect “the equally important feminist precept that any good theo- rizing will start with people in their social contexts. And the notion of social context must take seriously its constitutive quality; social context cannot simply mean that individuals will, of course, encounter one another.” The problem, then, is how to combine the claim that social relations are a large part of what we are with the value of self-determination. Liberalism has been the source of our language of freedom and self-determination, but it lacks the ability to express comprehension of “the reality we know: the cen- trality of relationships in constituting the self.”45

In developing a new conception of autonomy that avoids positing self- sufficient and thus highly artificial individuals, Nedelsky points out, first, that “the capacity to find one’s own law can develop only in the context of relations with others (both intimate and more broadly social) that nurture this capacity,” and, second, that “the ‘content’ of one’s own law is compre- hensible only with reference to shared social norms, values, and concepts.”46

She sees the traditional liberal view of the self as implying that the most perfectly autonomous man is the most perfectly isolated, and this she finds pathological.

Instead of developing autonomy through images of walls around one’s property, as do the Western liberal tradition and United States constitu- tional law, Nedelsky suggests that “the most promising model, symbol, or metaphor for autonomy is not property, but childrearing. There we have encapsulated the emergence of autonomy through relationship with oth- ers. . . . Interdependence [is] a constant component of autonomy.”47 And she goes on to examine how law and bureaucracies can foster autonomy within relationships between citizen and government. This does not entail extrapolating from intimate relations to large-scale ones; rather, the insights

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gained from experience with the context of childrearing allow us to recog- nize the relational aspects of autonomy. In work such as Nedelsky’s we can see how feminist reconceptualizations of the self can lead to the rethinking of fundamental concepts even in terrains such as law, thought by many to be quite distant from such disturbances.

To argue for a view of the self as relational does not mean that women need to remain enmeshed in the ties by which we are constituted. Increas- ingly, women are breaking free from oppressive relationships with parents, with the communities in which we grew up, and with men—relationships in which we defined our selves through the traditional and often stifling expec- tations of others.48 These quests for self have often involved wrenching in- stability and painful insecurity. But the quest has been for a new and more satisfactory relational self, not for the self-sufficient individual of liberal the- ory. Many might share the concerns expressed by Alison Jaggar that discon- necting ourselves from particular others, as ideals of individual autonomy seem to presuppose we should, might render us incapable of morality, rather than capable of it if, as so many feminists think, “an ineliminable part of morality consists in responding emotionally to particular others.”49

I have examined three topics on which feminist philosophers and femi- nists in other fields are thinking anew about where we should start and how we should focus our attention in ethics. Feminist reconceptualizations and recommendations concerning the relation between reason and emotion, the distinction between public and private, and the concept of the self are pro- viding insights that are deeply challenging to standard moral theory. The implications of this work are that we need an almost total reconstruction of social, political, economic, and legal theory in all their traditional forms, as well as a reconstruction of moral theory and practice at more comprehen- sive, or fundamental, levels.

TRANSFORMATIONS OF SOCIETY

As we look ahead, we can see some of the directions in which feminist re- thinking of the basic assumptions and concepts of standard moral theorizing is leading.

One is toward the view that any moral theory likely to be found satisfac- tory will have to combine aspects of an ethic of care with aspects of an ethic of justice. An ethic of care is indisputably important for a context in which we feel concern for and engage in the actual care of particular others, and we must insist that this context be recognized as one that is as relevant to moral theory as any of the contexts traditionally attended to. The ethics of care can and should be extended far beyond the household, encouraging more sensi- tive public policies and greater empathy for those distant from us and unlike ourselves. Still, an ethic of care alone may not be able to ground the criticism

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that is needed of social inequality and global injustice. Aspects of an ethic of justice continue to be needed, and not only for public or global contexts. Overcoming unjust inequalities in the way work is divided between women and men, in the household and elsewhere, requires clarity concerning what justice demands. And ending unjust violence and coercion against women and children in private as well as public spaces calls for an extension of the ethics of justice. At the same time, justice alone is unable to provide a full and nuanced morality of good lives, trusting relationships, successful fami- lies, and healthy communities. An ethic we can accept will need to weave together the moral concerns of care and justice.

Another discernible direction in feminist thought concerns the reshaping of society. We try to envision what society might be like if male dominance were to be overcome. Just because the gender structure is so fundamental, transforming it is likely to transform everything else. We wonder what all the different segments of society would be like, and what the relations be- tween them would be like. How they fit together would almost certainly be transformed, as would each domain.

In a feminist society, some segments might remain relatively intact and distinguishable from other segments—a democratic political system, say, with true equality for women at all levels. But if all such segments are infused with feminist values, and if all are embedded in a society hospitable to femi- nism, then the relative positions of the segments might change in fundamen- tal ways, as well as many of their internal characteristics.

A feminist society would be fundamentally different from a society com- posed of individuals each pursuing his own interest, especially his own eco- nomic interest, and evaluating public institutions by how well they facilitate or contribute to his own advancement—the traditional model of liberal and pluralistic society. It would be different as well from Marxist conceptions of society, with their neglect of the issues of women and the family, and differ- ent as well from conservative communitarian views, with their upholding of patriarchy.

Feminist society might be seen as having various relatively independent and distinct segments, with some not traditionally thought of as especially central and influential now being so, and with all such segments embedded in a wider network of social relations characterized by social caring and trust. Certainly the levels of caring and trust appropriate for the relations of all members of society with all others will be different from the levels appro- priate for the members of a family with one another. But social relations in what can be thought of as society as a whole will not be characterized by indifference to the well-being of others, or an absence of trust, as they are in many nonfeminist conceptions. What kinds and amounts of caring and trust might characterize the relations of the most general kind in society should be decided on the basis of experience and practice with institutions that have overcome male dominance.

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From the point of view of the self-interested head of household, the in- dividual’s interest in his own family may be at odds with the wider politi- cal and public interest. And aspects of mothering in patriarchal society have contributed to parochialism and racism. But from a satisfactorily worked-out feminist and moral point of view, the picture of the particu- laristic family in conflict with the good of society is distorted. The postpa- triarchal family can express universal emotions and can be guided by uni- versally shared concerns. A content and healthy child eager to learn and to love can elicit general approval. A child whose distress can be prevented or alleviated should elicit universal efforts to deal with the distress and pre- vent its recurrence. Any feminist society can be expected to cherish new persons, seeing in the face and body of a child both the specialness of a unique person and the universal features of a child’s wonder and curiosity and hope. Feminist society should seek to build institutions and practices and a world worthy of each particular child. But no particular child can flourish in isolation; feminist society should reflect the awareness that for each to do well, children must flourish together in an appropriate global environment.

Although feminist society would have democratic political processes, an independent judicial system to handle the recalcitrant, and probably mar- kets to organize some economic activity, these and other institutions would be evaluated in terms of how well they work to achieve feminist goals. And other segments of society might be recognized as far more central in doing so. Cultural expression would continually evaluate imaginative alternatives for consideration. It would provide entertainment not primarily to serve commercial interests or to relieve for a few hours the distress of persons caught in demeaning and exploitative jobs or with no jobs at all but to en- rich the lives of respected members of cultural and social communities.

A society organized along feminist lines would be likely to put the proper care and suitable development of all children at the very center of its con- cerns. Instead of allowing, as so often at present, family policies and ar- rangements for child care and for the education and health of children to be marginal concerns, vastly less important than military strength and corpo- rate profits, a feminist society might understand the future of children to be its highest priority. Its practices might then be guided by the fundamental considerations—global and local and in between—needed for all children, as for our own, to begin to lead the lives of their hopes.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This essay is a revised and expanded version of chapter 3 of Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

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NOTES

1. See, e.g., Cheshire Calhoun, “Justice, Care, Gender Bias,” Journal of Philoso- phy 85 (September 1988): 451–63.

2. Lorraine Code, “Second Persons,” in Science, Morality and Feminist Theory, ed. Marsha Hanen and Kai Nielsen (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1987), 360. 3. See, e.g., Sue Rosenberg Zalk and Janice Gordon-Kelter, eds., Revolutions in

Knowledge: Feminism in the Social Sciences (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1992). 4. Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Phi-

losophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 104. For detailed argu- ment that the association between reason and maleness is fundamental and lasting rather than incidental and expendable, see Phyllis Rooney, “Gendered Reason: Sex Metaphor and Conceptions of Reason,” Hypatia 6 (Summer 1991): 77–103. 5. Lloyd, Man of Reason, 2. 6. Ibid., 3, 4. For a feminist view of how reason and emotion in the search for

knowledge might be reevaluated, see Alison M. Jaggar, “Love and Knowledge: Emo- tion in Feminist Epistemology,” Inquiry 32 (June 1989): 151–76.

7. David Heyd, Supererogation: Its Status in Ethical Theory (New York: Cam- bridge University Press, 1982), 134. 8. J. O. Urmson, “Saints and Heroes,” in Essays in Moral Philosophy, ed. A. I.

Melden (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1958), 202. I am indebted to Mar- cia Baron for pointing out this example and the preceding one in her “Kantian Ethics and Supererogation,” Journal of Philosophy 84 (May 1987): 237–62. 9. Alan Ryan, “Distrusting Economics,” New York Review of Books, May 18,

1989, 25–27. For a different treatment, see Jane Mansbridge, ed., Beyond Self-Inter- est (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 10. Pioneering works are Joyce Trebilcot, ed., Mothering: Essays in Feminist

Theory (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Allanheld, 1984); and Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989). 11. Christine Di Stefano, Configurations of Masculinity: A Feminist Perspective

on Modern Political Theory (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 81–83. 12. Thomas Hobbes, The Citizen: Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Govern-

ment and Society, ed. B. Gert (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972), 205. 13. Di Stefano, Configurations of Masculinity, 84. 14. Ibid., 92, 104. 15. For examples of relevant passages, see Mary Mahowald, ed., Philosophy of

Woman: Classical to Current Concepts (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978); and Linda Bell, ed., Visions of Women (Clifton, N.J.: Humana Press, 1985). For discussion, see Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton, N.J.: Prince- ton University Press, 1979); and Lorenne Clark and Lynda Lange, eds., The Sexism of Social and Political Theory: Women and Reproduction from Plato to Nietzsche (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979). 16. Annette Baier, “Trust and Anti-Trust,” Ethics 96 (January 1986): 231–60;

quotation on pages 247–48. 17. Kathryn Pauly Morgan, “Strangers in a Strange Land: Feminists Visit Relativ-

ists,” in Perspectives on Relativism, ed. D. Odegaard and C. Stewart (Toronto: Agathon Press, 1990).

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18. Kathryn Pauly Morgan, “Women and Moral Madness,” in Science, Morality and Feminist Theory, ed. M. Hanen and K. Nielsen, 223. 19. Alison M. Jaggar, “Feminist Ethics: Some Issues for the Nineties,” Journal of

Social Philosophy 20 (Spring–Fall 1989): 91–107; quotation on page 91. See also Jaggar, “Feminist Ethics: Projects, Problems, Prospects,” in Feminist Ethics, ed. Claudia Card (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991). 20. One well-argued statement of this position is Barbara Houston, “Rescuing

Womanly Virtues: Some Dangers of Moral Reclamation,” in Science, Morality and Feminist Theory, ed. M. Hanen and K. Nielsen. 21. See Elizabeth V. Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Fem-

inist Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988). See also Sarah Lucia Hoagland, Lesbian Ethics: Toward New Value (Palo Alto, Calif.: Institute of Lesbian Studies, 1989); and Katie Geneva Cannon, Black Womanist Ethics (Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1988). 22. Margaret Urban Walker, “Moral Understandings: Alternative ‘Epistemol-

ogy’ for a Feminist Ethics,” Hypatia 4 (Summer 1989): 15–28; quotations on pages 19, 20. See also Iris Marion Young, “Impartiality and the Civic Public,” in Feminism as Critique, ed. Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 23. See Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s

Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982); and Eva Feder Kittay and Diana T. Meyers, eds., Women and Moral Theory (Totowa, N.J.: Row- man and Littlefield, 1987). See also Joan C. Tronto, “Beyond Gender Difference to a Theory of Care,” Signs 12 (Summer 1987): 644–63. 24. Annette Baier, “The Need for More Than Justice,” in Science, Morality and

Feminist Theory, ed. M. Hanen and K. Nielsen, 55. 25. Morgan, “Strangers in a Strange Land,” 2. 26. See Baier, “Trust and Anti-Trust”; and Laurence Thomas, “Trust, Affirma-

tion, and Moral Character: A Critique of Kantian Morality,” in Identity, Character, and Morality: Essays in Moral Psychology, ed. Owen Flanagan and Amelie Oksen- berg Rorty (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990). 27. Susan Sherwin, “Feminist and Medical Ethics: Two Different Approaches to

Contextual Ethics,” Hypatia 4 (Summer 1989): 57–72. 28. See John Rawls, “Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical,” Philoso-

phy and Public Affairs 14 (Summer 1985): 251–75; Rawls, “The Priority of Right and Ideas of the Good,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 17 (Fall 1988): 251–76; Rawls, “The Idea of Overlapping Consensus,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 7 (Spring 1987): 1–25; and Ronald Dworkin, “Liberalism,” in Public and Private Mo- rality, ed. Stuart Hampshire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). See also Charles Larmore, Patterns of Moral Complexity (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1987). 29. A. Baier, “The Need for More Than Justice,” 53–54. 30. See Linda Nicholson, Gender and History: The Limits of Social Theory in the

Age of the Family (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); and Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981). See also Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988). 31. See Okin, Women in Western Political Thought; and Alison M. Jaggar, Fem-

inist Politics and Human Nature (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Allanheld, 1983).

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32. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. Parshley (New York: Bantam, 1953). 33. See Sherry B. Ortner “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” in Woman,

Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Z. Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1974). 34. See Marilyn Friedman, “Feminism and Modern Friendship: Dislocating the

Community,” Ethics 99 (January 1989): 275–90; and Code, “Second Persons.” 35. See Seyla Benhabib, “The Generalized and the Concrete Other: The

Kohlberg-Gilligan Controversy and Moral Theory,” in Women and Moral Theory, ed. E. Kittay and D. Meyers; Caroline Whitbeck, “Feminist Ontology: A Different Reality,” in Beyond Domination: New Perspectives on Women and Philosophy, ed. Carol C. Gould (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Allanheld, 1983); Janice Raymond, A Passion for Friends: Towards a Philosophy of Female Affection (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986); and Marilyn Friedman, “Individuality without Individualism: Review of Janice Raymond’s A Passion for Friends,” Hypatia 3 (Summer 1988): 13.

36. See Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). For a feminist critique, see Susan Bordo, “Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender-Skepticism,” in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990). 37. See Naomi Scheman, “Individualism and the Objects of Psychology,” in Dis-

covering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodol- ogy and Philosophy of Science, ed. Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka (Dor- drecht: Reidel, 1983). 38. On Marxist theory, see Lydia Sargent, ed., Women and Revolution (Boston:

South End Press, 1981). 39. Bernard Williams, Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–1980 (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Hampshire, Public and Private Morality; and Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981). For discussion, see Susan Moller Okin, Jus- tice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989). 40. On the Stone Center concept of self, see especially the following working

papers from the center, in Wellesley, Massachusetts: Jean Baker Miller, “The Devel- opment of Women’s Sense of Self,” Working Paper no. 12 (1984); Janet Surrey, “The ‘Self-in-Relation’: A Theory of Women’s Development,” Working Paper no. 13 (1985); and Judith Jordan, “The Meaning of Mutuality,” Working Paper no. 23 (1986). For a feminist but critical view of this work, see Marcia Westkott, “Female Relationality and the Idealized Self,” American Journal of Psychoanalysis 49 (Sep- tember 1989): 239–50. 41. Jean Baker Miller, Toward a New Psychology of Women (Boston: Beacon

Press, 1976); Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978). 42. Gilligan, In a Different Voice. 43. Jordan, “The Meaning of Mutuality,” 2. 44. Jennifer Nedelsky, “Law, Boundaries, and the Bounded Self,” Representa-

tions 30 (Spring 1990): 169, 181. See also Martha Minow, Making All the Differ- ence: Inclusion, Exclusion, and American Law (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990).

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45. Jennifer Nedelsky, “Reconceiving Autonomy: Sources, Thoughts and Possi- bilities,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 1 (Spring 1989): 9. See also Diana T. Meyers, Self, Society, and Personal Choice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). For a discussion of why feminist criticisms of the ideal of autonomy need not weaken arguments for women’s reproductive rights, see Sally Markowitz, “Abortion and Feminism,” Social Theory and Practice 16 (Spring 1990): 1–17.

46. Nedelsky, “Reconceiving Autonomy,” 11. 47. Ibid., 12. See also Mari J. Matsuda, “Liberal Jurisprudence and Abstracted

Visions of Human Nature,” New Mexico Law Review 16 (Fall 1986): 613–30. 48. See Mary Field Belenky, Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger,

and Jill Mattuck Tarule, Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1986). 49. Jaggar, “Feminist Ethics,” 11.

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