Moral Perspectives

Gender, Ethics, and Political

Theory
Joan C. Tronto
• Feminist scholars in these fields try to understand
how to think ethically and act politically to end
women's oppression.
• Confrontation of Feminist scholars:
• How is the subject of human action, what can she
know?
• How can one persuade others about the necessity
for moral and political reform or revolution?
• Focused Question:
• Who are women?
• What is knowledge about morality and politics?
• How do people develop their moral views?
Introduction

• Fundamental Ethical Questions:

• How should we act towards others?
• Ethics is intertwined with the study of political theory,
which asks:
• How should we best structure institutions and practices so
that we may live our lives to allow people to achieve their
goals?
• Women's contributions had been usually ignored, and
their lives, and experiences remain in these questions.
• Contemporary philosophy- quite wary about including
feminist insights into its disciplinary perspectives.
• Professional philosophy- ethics has until recently been
considered a less central aspect of the discipline as well.
BROADENING ETHICS AND POLITICAL THEORY:
CHANGING THE STARTING ASSUMPTIONS
2 Disciplines
1. Ethics
2. Political
• Like religious ethics, the form of secular modermist
morality is deductive.
• Philosophers lay down first principles-natural freedom,
universal value of pleasure, univerzability-and from them
make inferences to lesser principles and applications.
• While not all political theory is equally rigid in following
what Margaret Walker (1998) eventually called a
'theoritical-juridicial' conception, political theory shares
with ethics a search for a universal perspective. Looking
at this philosophical tradition, feminist scholars found that
two critical aspects of women's lives were ignored.
Neither ethics nor political theory provided a way to
explain women's oppression, and neither provided a way
to take central the importance of women's moral
experiences (Jaggar and Rothenberg,1993).
• Several major directions of feminist thinking have begun to
transform the nature of political theory and ethics.
• Within poilitcal theory, scholars have focused on its
historical and conceptual dimension
• Other political theorista focused on conceptual change.
• -fundamental transformation in such concepts as freedom,
power, and autonomy.
• -Important innovation- focus on changing border between
'public' and 'private' life
• -continuing debates within contemporary liberal political
theory
• Aristotle-public and private life was simple: Private life-
was a prerequisite for the more important realm of public
engagement.
• Traditional Liberalist-individuals exercise their vital rights
to comprise the meaning of their life in the private sphere,
but the public sphere exists to regulate the private.
• Feminist-How public and private life are framed and
constituted?
• Aristotle saw economic life as a part of the private
sphere.
• Marxists, economic activity is centrally a public
concern
• Women’s relegation to the private sphere and their
exclusion from political life was deter_x0002_mined
by men in the public sphere, and women had no
way of contesting this decision, since they had no
public life.
The place of ethics in feminist philosophy

• In ethics, the critical conceptual issue has not been the

relationship of public and private life, since ethical
questions arise in both spheres.
• Instead, the feminist discussion in ethics has been
parallel to a larger discussion about the centrality of ethics
in philosophy and the connection between ethics and
other branches of philosophy, such as epistemology and
metaphysics.
Standpoint epistemology and feminist ethics

• Feminist transformations in epistemology – the

philosophy of knowledge –provide an important starting
point for feminist ethics.
• Feminist epistemologists have insisted that knowledge is
contextual, that is, knowledge is generated in a particular
historical and geographical location.
• Thus, the ideal that knowledge can be independent of its
human knowers, who are themselves always embodied in
social settings, appears to be an illusion.
Standpoint epistemology and feminist ethics

• Once knowledge is so situated, how does that affect

ethics?
• One possibility is that it makes ethics, understood as the
process by which universal laws are derived, a suspect
enterprise.
Feminist ethics and politics from multiple standpoints

• Given multiple standpoints, how might feminists

interested in ethics proceed?
• Throughout the twentieth century, ethics proceeded as a
field of study from the recognition of a reliable way to
produce knowledge.
• Urban Walker draws a contrast between two ways of
moral theorizing. Traditionally, ethics has used a
‘theoretical-juridical’ conception of morality, which aims to
produce impersonal, action-guiding rules that are
timeless, context-less, and pure.
Feminist ethics and politics from multiple standpoints

• In contrast, Urban Walker urges feminists to think of

ethics in terms of an ‘expressive-collaborative’ model, in
which social prac_x0002_tices, and the ways in which
ethics actually operates in people’s lives, are primary.
 As Urban Walker writes:
Morality is always something people are actually doing
together in their commu_x0002_nities, societies, and
ongoing relationships. It s not up to academic philosophers
to discover it or make it up… Without already knowing a
good deal about (what we call) moral reasoning, moral
rules, moral responsibility, and so on, we wouldn’t know
where to begin or what we are talking about.
• We’re all in the same boat, epistemically, in this way.
Feminist, race, gay and lesbian, and post-colonial
philosophy has taken this farther: what we know about the
social relations that embody our moral ones, and so what
we are inclined to identify as the subject matter of ethics,
is likely to be directly related to which places in our
particular ways of life we occupy, and what the particulars
of those ways of life are. (Walker, 2002: 175)
Ontology and feminist ethics

• Another key question within philosophy that has a bearing

on feminist ethics is the question of ontology, or being
itself.
• What does it really mean to be a person? What is the
notion of the self?
• This issue is central for feminist thinkers, many of whom
have argued, in a variety of ways, that the category
‘human,’ and the very notion of what it means to be
human, have been mainly inflected by the lives of men.
Ontology and feminist ethics
• Since Kant, most philosophers have presumed that what it means
to be a human individual is to be autonomous, that is, literally,
capable of making one’s rules for oneself.
• In recent years, feminist philosophers have begun to describe
humans as possessed of ‘relational autonomy,’ that is, an
autonomy that is not absolute but also needs to be contextualized
(Mackenzie and Stoljar, 2000).
• Finally, feminists have insisted that philosophers cannot ignore
the intersection of their disciplinary concern with ‘ethics,’ how we
ought to live, and moral psychology, what actual human beings
are capable of doing, in terms of moral reasoning and action.
CURRENT DEBATES

• The great progress made in adding the question of

context to feminist ethics and political theory is an
accomplishment of note.
• How should we think about the aspects of human
contexts that are relevant to ethical discussions?
• In this section, I will consider the issues that currently
concern feminist scholars in ethics and political theory.
• These include the nature of the self, the definition of
‘women,’ the care–justice debate, and the problems of evil
and responsibility for wrongs.
Who is the subject/self?

• In both ethics and political theory, the question of who

constitutes the subjectof the inquiry remains a thorny and
unavoidable issue
• After all, in order for ‘someone’ to act, there has to be a
someone to do it.
• Or does there? One of the most ferocious debates
throughout feminism in the last twenty years has
concerned the status of postmodern or poststructuralist
thought, and whether these currents are useful and
important to feminists
Who is the subject/self?

• Postmodernism and poststructuralism are not the same,

and there are many varieties of these systems of thought.
• Postmodernism and post_x0002_structuralism are not the
same, and there are many varieties of these systems
ofthought.
• In general, though, postmodernism refers to the social
condition of being in a new historical era.
• In this new moment, humans are made by a variety of
competing and dizzying forces.
Who is the subject/self?
• In political theory, the discussion of the self quickly
branches into the topic of poststructuralist concerns. If there
is no self, then how can one make a coherent argument for
political activity that will culminate in a political movement
(Moi, 1999)?
• Some feminist thinkers have argued that the need for a
coherent and whole self is not necessary in order to make
political theory meaningful (for example, Brown, 1995).
• Judith Butler’s pathbreaking account of how gender is
constructed and performed, rather than biological or set, is
an important example of how poststructuralist thought
operates (1990).
Who is the subject/self?
• Butler argues that gender is not so much a fixed category
as a set of contested pieces that are constantly in
negotiation.
• In saying this, Butler does not mean that anyone can invent
her own idea of gender, but that the categories that seem to
be fixed are in fact malleable.
• Martha Nussbaum is one critic of postmodern and
poststructuralist thought.
• In a strong attack on Butler in particular, she argued that
postmodern thought is too far removed from the lives of
actual women (1999a).
Who is the subject/self?
• To Nussbaum, Butler’s poststructuralist writings can quickly
become an arcane exploration of social forms.
• In her view, too great an appreciation of multiplicity and
fluidity results in a kind of relativism that lacks power to
make clear arguments about what is wrong with such forms.
Who are ‘women?’
• A second ongoing debate in feminist political theory and
ethics is the question of multiculturalism.
• Feminist scholars have been leading advocates for the
position that, given the centrality of context in ethical and
political theory, one needs constantly to be sensitive to the
differences among women and among their varying
experiences.
Who are ‘women?’
• Racial category, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion,
linguistic capacities, disability – all of these conditions affect
how a given woman is able to live her life and engage in
political and moral activity.
• Women of color raised these criticisms early and
continuously as an attempt to make feminists aware of the
limitations of their theories.4
• Third World women also raised these concerns and pointed
to the limitations of viewing the world only through Western
eyes.5
Care ethics and the justice/care debate
• Another current key debate in feminist ethics and political theory
is the discussion of care and justice.
• Feminists have made important contributions in understanding
justice; Iris Young provides a rich rethinking of justice
(Young,1990), as does Nancy Fraser (1997).
• But the care–justice debate arose out of feminist discourse, not
out of the philosophical mainstream.
• This debate originated in the writing of Carol Gilligan, whose
pathbreaking text, In a Different Voice (1982), posited that the
progress of moral development charted by her mentor, Lawrence
Kohlberg, had been too narrow because it left out women.
Care ethics and the justice/care debate
• Kohlberg’s original research on stages of moral development had
been conducted only with men as subjects
• First, the ethic of care is about different moral concepts; it is about
responsibility and relationships rather than rights and rules.
• Second, it is about concrete circumstances rather than abstract
and formal rules. Third, it expresses morality best not as a set of
principles but as an activity.
Care ethics and the justice/care debate
• Based on a liberal understanding of moral psychology, Gilligan’s
correction of Kohlberg was treated by mainstream philosophers
as a contribution to an understanding of private morality.
• Feminist scholars reacted in two ways. Many were very wary of
the similarity between such an ethic of care and the tradition of
responsibility for others that had oppressed women’s lives.
• Others enthusiastically embraced the idea that women’s lives
were to be the starting point for a serious rethinking of the values
that had driven men to structure social and political institutions as
they had (Held, 1993).
Evil, responsibility, and complicity

• Another set of questions that feminist thinkers have

begun to explore is the nature of evil.
• In a way, all feminist ethics starts from a presumption of at
least one evil: gender oppression.
• Another dimension of this concern with wrong-doing is
what Walker calls moral repair.
• Walker’s argument extends her claim that feminist ethics
needs to be an ‘ethics of responsibility,’ that is, ‘a
normative moral view [that] would try to put people and
responsibilities in the right places with respect to each
other’ (1998: 78).
FUTURE DIRECTIONS

• The increasing concern of feminist thinkers with evil and

moral repair also points towards another change that has
occurred in feminist writing.
• It is no longer possible to portray women simply as the
victims of a patriarchal order that oppresses them.
• Feminists have insisted that ethics and political theory as
fields of study muststart from the real world of power and
oppression.
FUTURE DIRECTIONS

• As a result, ethics and political theory now more

accurately reflect the complexities of self, society, political
institutions, and the nature of change.
• Whatever the future brings, feminist scholars will continue
to insist that our hopes start from a global, complex, and
morally inclusive vision.
Questions

• How morality shape humans in terms of ethics and

politics?
• What are the capacities of human beings in their
reasonings and actions in morality?
• Why it is important to discuss ethics and political theories
in human aspects?