Care Ethics: Moving Forward

The three books considered here take very different approaches within the developing area of feminist ethics that grow out of the work of Carol Gilligan and other theorists of care. Juxtaposing the books allows us to see some interesting elements in the evolution of thinking about care and to raise some questions about lines of future development in feminist ethics.

Susan Hekman's Moral Voices, Moral Selves (1995) is not so much about the ethic of care per se as it is about the philosophical possibilities of Carol Gilligan's work. In this regard, Hekman's work represents a different fork on this branch of the evolutionary tree of feminist ethics than most of the "ethic of care" literature. Hekman begins her book with an argument about the radical implications of Carol Gilligan's psychological writings. Hekman argues that Gilligan's writings are best understood not as an alternative reading of psychological theories of moral development but as a displacement of this scientific model altogether. Hekman reads Gilligan as a call, instead, for multiple voices, narratives, and accounts of development. Hekman situates Gilligan's work within a "sea change" in thinking about the universalist and absolutist epistemology of modernity. Stepping outside of the paradigm of modern "man," Hekman explores many of the possibilities and problems within postmodern alternatives. She sets as her goals both to offer a description of these changes and to argue for the alternative account of moral life they imply. In a chapter in which she considers the views of philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum, Hekman suggests that there is no turning back from the criticisms postmodern thinkers have raised; Aristotle is no answer. Nevertheless, Hekman is aware of and tries to counter the claims that postmodern thinking is necessarily depoliticizing. She argues that changing our notions of moral agency does not require that we abolish agency. In her constructive argument, then, she turns to Ludwig Wittgenstein's use of language games to describe what she thinks moral philosophy might more fruitfully consider: in her view, a discursive account of morality better enables feminists to describe morality outside of a masculinist frame, better accounts for the relationship of subjectivity to morality, and provides a starting point for the confrontation of differences. Moral voices that are multiple are best understood as grounded in the multiple selves and self-understandings of people. But with acknowledgment to Jean-François Lyotard and Michel Foucault, Hekman does not conceive of "self-understanding" as a process of self-construction: "we acquire a moral voice from the social, cultural, historical setting that also constitutes our subjectivity; moral voices vary with race, class, and gender even within a particular social situation. It is never my voice, but always our voice" (1995, 160). Nevertheless, Hekman points out, it is difficult to see this social constructionist element in moral discussions because moral language games "are unique in their claim to certainty" (1995, 160). As a result, even though selves experience themselves as constituted by their sense of morality, and even though moral views may clash, observers and analysts may understand the discursive battle in a different way. This broader perspective, I think, is where Hekman believes feminist philosophers can find the "rhetorical spaces" ¹ to confront difficult issues such as difference.

Hekman has read widely and usefully engages the ideas that she is reporting and drawing upon. Her argument is well made and supported. Her reading of Gilligan, though it would probably not be the psychologist's own reading, seems plausible and suggests ways in which shaking loose disciplinary bounds can be highly creative. Nevertheless, Hekman's thesis has a few fundamental problems. In the first place, a general point of criticism concerns the focus on the self. The notion that morality is rooted in the self, that is, that selves take their meaning from their sense of morality, is to some extent an accurate description of the place of morality in people's lives, and this approach certainly follows from Hekman's reading of Gilligan...