The debate over women and moral theory revisited

Feminists Read Habermas (RLE Feminist Theory): Gendering the Subject of Discourse

Volumn , Issue , 2013, Pages 181-204

  Benhabib, Seyla ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 85086540110     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: 10.4324/9780203094006-14     Document Type: Chapter

References (49)

1. Joan Kelly Gadol, “The Social Relations of the Sexes: Methodological Implications of Women’s History, " Women, History and Theory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 2-3.
2. Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue;pp. 44 ff.
3. Michael Sandel, “The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self, " Political Theory, Vol. 12, No. 1 (1984).
4. Taylor, “Die Motive einer Verfahrensethik, " Moralitat und Sittlichkeit, Wolfgang Kuhlmanm, ed. (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt, 1986), pp. 194-217;
5. Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
6. The commonalities and the tensions in these approaches have been explored in the Introduction to Feminism as Critique, Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell, eds.
7. Owen Flanagan and Kathryn Jackson give a very clear and helpful overview of theproblems involved in Gilligan’s various formulations to date concerning the two perspectives. They write: "… her recent work still shifts between the ideas that the two ethics are incompatible alternatives to each other but are both adequate from a normative point of view; that they are complements of one another involved in some sort of tense interplay; and that each is deficient without the other and ought to be integrated.” See “Justice, Care, and Gender: The Kohlberg-Gilligan Debate Revisited, " Ethics 97 (April 1987), pp. 622-37, here p. 628.
8. See Nel Noddings, Caring, A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Noddings’s dichotomous reasoning which sharply distinguishes between “law and justice” as male and “receptivity, relatedness, and responsiveness” as female is deeply at odds with Gilligan’s and my attempts to overcome these sharp dichotomous in a more integrated approach to moral reasoning and moral judgment.
9. See, Noddings, p. 2 ff. for a particularly sharp statement.
10. Lawrence A. Blum, “Gilligan and Kohlberg: Implications for Moral Theory, " Ethics 98 (April 1988), p. 472.
11. Blum, “Gilligan and Kohlberg, " p. 477.
12. Blum, “Gilligan and Kohlberg, " p. 478.
13. Blum, “Gilligan and Kohlberg, " p. 479.
14. Blum, “Gilligan and Kohlberg, " p. 481.
15. Blum, “Gilligan and Kohlberg, " p. 482.
16. Blum here refers to Kohlberg’s position in “Synopses and Detailed Response to Critics, " p. 343.
17. Jürgen Habermas, “Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, " Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, p. 178.
18. Habermas, “Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, " p. 179.
19. Habermas, “Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, " p. 180.
20. Habermas, “Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, " p. 180.
21. Kohlberg, “Synopses and Detailed Response to Critics, " pp. 229-30.
22. See G. Nunner-Winkler, “Two Moralities? A Critical Discussion of an Ethic of Care and Responsibility versus an Ethic of Rights and Justice, " in W.M. Kurtines and J.L. Gewirtz, eds., Morality, Moral Behavior, and Moral Development (New York: Wiley, 1984), pp. 348-61.
23. Carol Gilligan, “Moral Orientation and Moral Development, " in Women and Moral Theory, E.F. Kittay and Diane T. Meyers, eds. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1987), p. 20.
24. Habermas, “Justice and Solidarity, " p. 47.
25. The theme of “mutual recognition” and the significance of these relations of recognition for moral theory are at the center of Axel Honneth’s Habilitiationsschrift.
26. Habermas, “Justice and Solidarity, " p. 46.
27. See Linda Nicholson for an early statement of this criticism, “Women, Morality and History, " Social Research, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Autumn 1983), pp. 514-37.
28. Carol Gilligan, Ellen C. Dubois, Mary C. Dunlop, Catharine A. MacKinnon, Carrie J. Menkel-Neadow, “Feminist Discourse, Moral Values and the Law-A Conversation, " The 1984 James McCormick Mitchell Lecture, Buffalo Law Review, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Winter 1985), p. 39.
29. See Londa Schiebinger, “Skeletons in the Closet. The First Illustrations of the Female Skeleton in Eighteenth-Century Anatomy, " The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laquer, eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 42-83;
30. Judith Butler, “Variations on Sex and Gender. De Beauvoir, Wittig and Foucault, " Feminism as Critique, Benhabib and Cornell, eds., pp. 128-43;
31. Jane Flax, “Postmodernism and Gender Relations in Feminist Theory, " Signs, Vol. 12, No. 4 (1987), pp. 621-43.
32. L. Kerber, “Some Cautionary Word for Historians,” “On In a Different Voice:An Interdisciplinary Forum,” Signs, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Winter 1986), pp. 304-10, here p. 306;
33. see also Linda Nicholson “Women Morality and History, " Women and Morality, Special Issue, Social Research, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Autumn 1983), pp. 514-37 for similar concerns about Gilligan’s work.
34. Jean Piaget, The Moral Judgment of the Child, Marjorie Gabain (New York:Free Press, 1965), p. 77.
35. See Claudia Card, “Women’s Voices and Ethical Ideals: Must We Mean What We Say?" Ethics, Vol. 99, No. 1 (October 1988), pp. 125-36.
36. Card’s concern with the way in which an ethics of care may hide or silence feelings of aggression and manipulation among the cared for parties, and the way in which a too sacri ficial ethics of care may be profoundly distortive of personality-think of extreme forms of motherly love and maternal solicitude-is welcome. Nonetheless, she is unfair to Gilligan in maintaining that she idealizes the “care approach.” Gilligan herself calls attention at various points to the dangers of self-effacement and self-denial which particularly women are prone to, cf. In A Different Voice, pp. 64 ff; 123 ff.
37. See also Catharine A. Mackinnon, et. al., “Feminist Discourse, Moral Values and the Law-A Conversation, Buffalo Law Review, pp. 25 ff.
38. Card, “Women’s Voices, " p. 130.
39. Card, “Women’s Voices, " p. 135.
40. F. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (New York:Doubleday and Co., 1956), pp. 170 ff.
41. MacKinnon, et al, “Feminist Discourse, Moral Values and the Law-A Conversation, " pp. 73-74.
42. Mark Warren uses the apt phrase of “neoaristocratic conservatism” to characterize Nietzsche’s political ideology but distinguishes between Nietzsche’s insights into power relations and his political views, see Nietzsche and Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), p. 3.
43. See her statement, “Dominance and submission made into sex, made into the gender difference, constitute the suppressed social content of the gender definitions of men and women.” MacKinnon, et. al., “Feminist Discourse, Moral Values and the Law, " p. 27.
44. “Feminist Discourse, Moral Values and the Law, " pp. 21-22.
45. For an analysis of the often contradictory visions of the political in Marx’s work and in the Marxist tradition, see Jean Cohen, Class and Civil Society: The Limits of Marxian Critical Theory (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1982);
46. Dick Howrad, The Marxian Legacy, (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988)
47. S. Benhabib, Critique, Norm and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory, Part 1.
48. Iris Young, “The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference, " Social Theory and Practice, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Spring 1986), p. 10.
49. Young, “The Ideal of Community and the Paths of Difference.”.