Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics (review)

Margaret Urban Walker's Moral Understandings is indeed a feminist study in ethics. She sees feminist ethics as part of what Catharine MacKinnon claims is feminist theory's major project, namely, "to account for gender inequality in the socially constructed relationship between power—the political—on the one hand and the knowledge of truth and reality—the epistemological—on the other" (Walker 1998, 20). More specifically, Walker's approach to feminist ethics is what I term power-focused, as opposed to care-focused. A care-focused feminist approach to ethics has as its primary task the rehabilitation of such culturally associated "feminine" values as compassion, empathy, sympathy, nurturance, and kindness. It strives to make the culturally associated "female" virtue of care, for example, just as important in the moral domain as the culturally associated "male" virtue of justice. In contrast, a power-focused feminist approach to ethics is acutely sensitive to the fact that moral life and social life are intertwined. It insists that our moral responsibilities flow from our social position, which as Walker notes, depends on our "gender, age, economic status, race, and other factors that distribute powers and forms of recognition differentially and hierarchically" (1998, 22). Thus, Walker repeatedly shows the multiple ways in which our power, or lack thereof, shapes our moral understandings and determines whose ethical vision is privileged as authoritative. So far, the economically and socially powerful have tended to set the moral agenda for everyone. Walker regards this state of affairs as inequitable; as she sees it, moral understanding is not the exclusive property of the privileged few, but the home turf of everyone.

In delineating between feminist and nonfeminist approaches to ethics, Walker contrasts the "expressive-collaborative model" (1998, 60) of most feminist ethics with the theoretical-juridical model of most nonfeminist ethics. She argues that the reigning nonfeminist moral theories (utilitarianism and deontology) offer an abstract, authoritarian, impersonal, universalist view of moral consciousness. Whether a person is a utilitarian or a deontologist—someone who insists that the aggregate social good, or duty for duty's sake, is the sole criterion for moral behavior—he or she will view morality as a set of law-like principles, codes, or rules to apply impartially and rationally to the morally messy world in which human beings live. Walker acknowledges that this theoretical-judicial model of morality has been criticized not only by many feminist ethicists but also by some nonfeminist ethicists, including Aristotelians, Humeans, communitarians, contemporary casuists, pragmatists, historicists, and Wittgensteinians (1998, 53). But even though all of these nonconformists in ethics view morality as an expressive-collaborative enterprise —that is, "as a socially embodied medium of understanding and adjustment in which people account to each other for the identities, relationships, and values that define their responsibilities"—(1998, 61), it is, claims Walker, the feminists among them who relentlessly pursue "questions about authority, credibility, and representation in moral life" (1998, 54). It is they who focus on the fact that because not everyone has the same power to set or change moral terms, the pronoun we should be used very carefully in the realm of morality.

According to Walker, morality is not a product that exists in the depths of lonely moral agents who discover either through reason or intuition what is right and wrong for everyone, everywhere, and for all time. Rather, morality is the process by which people collaboratively weave an extraordinarily intricate web of moral understandings for themselves and others. Morality is the means through which particular people in particular places learn how to hold each other more or less responsible for each other's well being. They do so, says Walker, by telling three kinds of "needed stories" (1998, 111): narratives of relationship, of identity, and of value.

Narratives of relationship are responsibility stories. They describe our relationships with individuals: how we got into, or found ourselves in, a relationship; what we did to begin, maintain, or...