Cuidados - Lindeman

Lindemann, H. (2019). An invitation to feminist ethics: Oxford University Press.
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5
Standard Moral Theories from a
Feminist Perspective
When people talk of theory, they can mean all kinds of things, so
probably it would be just as well if I told you how I’m using the term
here. Moral theories are formal, systematic attempts to organize our
thinking about how we ought to live or what we ought to do. They seek
to explain why certain ways of living or acting are better than others.
But they also prescribe certain courses of conduct and provide ways of
justifying actions, based on one account or another of what’s morally
valuable.
Beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing on into the
twenty-first, three moral theories in particular—social contract theory,
utilitarianism, and Kantian ethics—have dominated how ethics is
taught and thought about in English-speaking countries. All three
were originally developed between 1650 and 1800 or so, in reaction to
the medieval idea that the fundamental source of morality is God and
that its most authoritative teachers are the priests and pastors of the
Christian church. Because these three theories emphasize rationality
over religion, they are often called “Enlightenment” theories. Because
the theories are associated with the rise of secular nation-states, also
known as liberal democracies, since their citizens were supposed to
enjoy a variety of personal freedoms, you’ll hear them called “liberal”
theories, as well.
Feminists have criticized the dominant liberal theories on a number
of grounds, but you won’t be able to decide if the criticisms are persua-
sive unless you have a minimal grasp of the theories themselves. We’ll
start with social contract theory, since that’s the oldest of the three.
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5.1. Social Contract Theory
Suppose there’s no God to tell us what to do or punish those who

disobey his commandments. And suppose too that there are no
governments—no laws, no police, no courts—stopping us from doing
whatever we want. In the Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes imagined
such a “state of nature” and concluded it would leave us badly stunted.
In the state of nature, Hobbes wrote, there would be
no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and

consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of
the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious
building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as
require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no ac-
count of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of
all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man,
solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Hobbes took this dismal view because outside of an ordered society,

the things we need to survive are in short supply, so we would have
to compete for them. And in that competition, he figured, we would
look out for ourselves and maybe our families and friends, but with
strangers, all bets would be off. If we were smart, we’d take what they
had, even if that meant killing them. The catch is that they’d to do the
same to us, which is why we’d live in a state of constant fear. If this
sounds too grim to be believed, think of how people behave when
governments collapse, hoarding supplies, looting shops, and rioting in
the streets. Or think of how often nations go to war with each other to
pursue their own interests in the absence of enforceable laws.
The only way out of the state of nature, Hobbes thought, is for
people to join forces. Peaceful coexistence is better than “the war of
all against all” because then you can divide the labor that produces
the goods people need, and you can distribute these goods so that
everybody gets a share. Moreover, the division of labor allows you to
produce more of everything that’s necessary or useful, from food and
clothing to knowledge and art. As a result, you’ll be better off. But,
argued Hobbes, before people can coexist peacefully they have to have
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Standard Moral Theories 77
two guarantees. The first is a guarantee that others won’t harm them,
and the second is a guarantee that others will stick to their agreements.
You won’t have much of a life if you have to keep looking over your
shoulder to make sure you aren’t about to be stabbed in the back. And
you’ll be little better than a slave if you have to work for someone who
promises you a weekly paycheck but keeps coming up with excuses for
not living up to his end of the bargain.
The question then arises as to who or what could make these
guarantees. For Hobbes the answer was clear: the state. Governments
can make the rules that are necessary if we are going to live together,
and they can enforce these rules through the police and the courts.
To escape the state of nature, then, people must agree to be governed.
Hobbes believed that there really is such an agreement, and he called
it the social contract.
The social contract, Hobbes claimed, not only makes social living
possible, it also makes morality possible. Under the social contract
we can afford to care about others, because the contract releases us
from the continual fear that previously forced us to look out only for
ourselves. On the condition—and only on the condition—that other
people will do the same thing, we can set aside our personal, self-
centered inclinations in favor of obedience to the sovereign of the
state. For later social contract theorists, morality consisted of obeying,
not the sovereign, but the set of rules that rational people would agree
to follow for the benefit of all, provided that everyone else follows
them too.
The most influential social contract theorist of the twentieth cen-
tury was surely John Rawls, whose Theory of Justice (1971) offered a
powerful picture of free and rational persons choosing the principles
that govern the basic structure of society from behind an imaginary
“veil of ignorance.” The veil is hung between these people and the so-
ciety they are designing, and it keeps them from seeing where they
would end up in that society—what their race, sex, or social class
would be, how much money they would have, or even what kind of
life they would value. If they chose the principles of justice without
knowing how their choice would affect them personally, Rawls
believed, they wouldn’t be tempted to arrange the society in favor
of their own interests. What they would do, he thought, was try to
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maximize their share of what he called “primary goods,” the things

that all rational persons are presumed to want, no matter what their
plan of life might be: “We are to suppose,” said Rawls, “that each in-
dividual has a rational plan of life drawn up subject to the conditions
that confront him. It schedules activities so that various desires can
be fulfilled without interference” (1971, 92–93). The primary goods
needed for any life plan include many of the freedoms enumerated in
the Bill of Rights, such as freedom of speech, freedom of conscience,
freedom from arbitrary arrest, the right to own property, and the right
to vote and run for office. Other primary goods are power, authority,
opportunities, income, wealth, and, oddly, self-respect.
So then the question is how to distribute these goods fairly. And
that’s where the principles of justice come in. Rawls thought that if
the people behind the veil of ignorance were rational, they’d have to
agree to three principles of justice, in “lexical” order—that is, an order
in which no item further down the list may contradict or undermine
any earlier item.
1. The Liberty Principle. Each person is to have an equal right to

the most extensive system of basic liberties that’s compatible
with everyone else’s right to the same thing. This principle is the
most important, and its requirements come first.
2. The Equality of Fair Opportunity Principle. People with sim-
ilar abilities and skills are to have equal access to offices and
positions.
3. The Difference Principle. Inequalities in social and economic
institutions are justified only if allowing them maximally
benefits the people who are the worst off.
Rawls offered three justifications for these principles of justice.

The first is a way of reasoning about morality he called reflective equi-
librium. The method ensures that our beliefs are rational, because it
directs us to look at our moral principles in the light of our considered
judgments in particular cases, and if there’s a contradiction between
the two, we’re to throw out whichever one we’re less sure of. Rawls
thought that our moral judgments are “considered” when we’re well
informed and thinking clearly, in a cool and detached manner. Let’s
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suppose, for instance, that after collecting the facts and considering
the matter dispassionately, you decide it’s okay to join the Army, but
at the same time, you endorse the principle that killing people is al-
ways wrong. In that case, you’re contradicting yourself. One of the
two beliefs has got to go, but which one you discard depends on how
firmly you held them both to begin with. If joining the Army is what
matters most to you, then you’ll have to modify the principle against
killing; if you’re a committed pacifist, you’ll have to find another line
of work. And then you do the same thing with all the rest of your prin-
ciples and considered judgments, one after the other. If you follow the
method of reflective equilibrium properly, you’ll end up with moral
beliefs that nowhere contradict one another, and that’s what makes
them rational. Rawls thought that if we put the three principles of jus-
tice into reflective equilibrium with our considered opinions about
what’s just or unjust in particular cases, we’ll find that the principles
will be consistent with those opinions.
The second justification for the three principles, argued Rawls, is
that they are the ones that rational people would agree to, voluntarily,
under the ideal conditions that would obtain behind the veil of igno-
rance. The obligation to do what the principles require is therefore a
contractual one. As we’ve seen, none of the deliberators behind the veil
know where they’re going to end up in the society under construction.
So if they’re smart, they’ll make sure that the people who are worst off
get as much as they can, since the deliberators themselves might be
among them. And that’s what Rawls said too. According to his “max-
imin” argument, the rational way to choose how goods will be distrib-
uted when you don’t know what you’ll be getting is to maximize the
minimal amount of primary goods that anybody in the society would
get. You probably learned this strategy when you were a child. Maybe
you and your sister had one gigantic chocolate chip cookie between
you, and your mom told you that you had to share. I’ll bet that she said
one of you should do the dividing that the other should have first pick.
That’s the maximin strategy: The one who divides doesn’t know which
half she’ll get, so she’s got a real incentive to make both halves exactly
even, down to the last crumb.
The biggest complaint lodged against social contract theory is that
the agreement it’s based on is purely hypothetical. Nobody actually
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signed such a contract, and even if somebody once did, you and I cer-
tainly didn’t. How, then, could it have a hold on us? Why should actual
flesh-and-blood people be bound by principles of justice that were
agreed on by hypothetical contractors?
Rawls’s answer, and this is his third justification for the principles
of justice, was borrowed from Kantian ethics: Reason commands it.
Philosophical reflection, he thought, will show us that when you and
I accept the principles that fictional contractors would choose be-
hind the veil, we express our nature as autonomous agents. Autonomy
means “self-governance,” and according to both Kant and Rawls,
people can govern themselves because they’re rational. Rationality,
they argued, is the same everywhere, regardless of one’s special desires
or particular social position. So when we’re acting as rational beings
who, because we’re rational, are also free to govern ourselves, we’re
also thinking impartially, not singling ourselves out for special treat-
ment. In Rawls’s version of the theory, impartial reasoning is mod-
eled by people who enter the social contract behind the veil, where
markers of race, class, gender, and so on are stripped away.
While Hobbes and Rawls are two of the most important social con-
tract theorists, there are other versions of the theory as well. What
they all have in common, though, is the concept of “morals by agree-
ment,” to use the philosopher David Gauthier’s phrase. It’s this ideal
agreement and the alleged rationality that underlies it that supposedly
gives morality its authority over us.
5.2. Utilitarianism
The philosophers David Hume (1711–1776), Jeremy Bentham (1748–

1832), and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) took a very different ap-
proach to morality. Rather than seeing it as a matter of agreeing to
rules for social conduct, they thought of it as the attempt to increase
as much as possible the amount of happiness in the world. Hume orig-
inally proposed the theory, but it was Bentham who, in The Principles
of Morals and Legislation, first formulated the Principle of Utility: The
moral value of an act lies in its tendency “to augment or diminish the
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happiness of the party whose interest is in question.” He proposed a

“hedonic” (happiness) calculus for measuring this value. You add up
the total happiness the act produces, subtract the pains involved, and
if the benefit outweighs the burden, the act has good tendencies on
the whole. Next you add up how many people would benefit by the act
(and to what degree), subtract the number who would be harmed by
it (and the degree of harm), and if more people would be helped than
hurt, the act has good tendencies for those who are affected by it. In
these calculations, everybody’s happiness is to be considered impar-
tially, “each to count as one and none for more than one.” For Bentham,
then, the aim of morality was to choose the action that yields the best
ratio of pleasure to pain, all things considered.
Bentham’s good friend was the Scottish philosopher, historian, and
economist James Mill, and James’s son, John Stuart Mill, was the (god-
less) Bentham’s godson. It was John Stuart Mill who refined the theory
of utilitarianism and gave it its definitive shape. In his Utilitarianism
(1861) he formulated the Greatest Happiness Principle, according
to which the ultimate end for human beings is “an existence exempt
as far as possible from pain, and as rich as possible in enjoyments.”
Morality, Mill argued, necessarily follows this principle, bidding us
to choose the course of conduct that will promote the greatest happi-
ness for the greatest number. And since the experiences of pain and
enjoyment aren’t confined solely to humans, he agreed with Bentham
that all beings capable of feeling pain are the subjects of morality. Mill
distinguished, as Bentham didn’t, among higher and lower pleasures,
insisting that it was better to be a philosopher, however dissatisfied,
than a contented pig. But he agreed with Bentham that nonhuman
animals have a moral standing of their own, and their interest in not
feeling pain deserves equal consideration with that of human beings.
“The question is not,” wrote Bentham, “Can they reason? nor Can they
talk? but, Can they suffer?” Most utilitarians, from Mill to the present-
day Peter Singer, agree that Bentham’s question is the right one.
Both Bentham and Mill took it for granted that people ought not
to be interfered with except if such interference prevents harm to
others. The state, they thought, should never meddle in people’s lives
for their own good. It’s not the state’s business to determine what a
person’s good really is, and when it tries, the result will generally be
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worse than if people are left to their own devices. In Mill’s eloquent
essay On Liberty (1859) he declares, “Over himself, over his own body
and mind, the individual is sovereign.” For that reason Mill opposed
the state-sanctioned persecution of Mormons in the United States,
laws punishing victimless crimes, and state-imposed restrictions of
freedom of speech.
If you take the idea that you should maximize the amount of hap-
piness in the world seriously, you have to admit that the money you
spent at the movies last night should have gone to Oxfam or some
other organization that feeds starving people at home and abroad,
since saving their lives is surely more important than your frivolous
pleasures. You’d obviously have to scale back your standard of living,
and instead of going out partying with your friends, you’d need to vol-
unteer at the local homeless shelter and the animal shelter as well. But
where do you draw the line? Do you have to give up your college ed-
ucation and turn over your tuition money to the poor? Do you have
to renounce your cushy job and start building houses for the home-
less? It seems as if the unlimited demands of utilitarianism elbow out
most of the things that give meaning to our lives, including, the phi-
losopher Bernard Williams complained, any reason we might have to
take morality seriously. Moreover, not only does utilitarianism seem
to leave no room for our personal plans and projects, but it also seems
to give you no time for special attention to friends and family, because
it insists that we figure out the consequences for everyone equally, not
matter how they are related to us. And finally, the demand that we
calculate precisely the burdens and benefits of our acts grotesquely
violates our common-sense belief that moral value can’t be assigned
by crunching numbers.
In The Methods of Ethics (1874) the utilitarian Henry Sidgwick
introduced the “indirect strategy” for getting around these objections.
He argued that while maximizing happiness is the proper standard for
judging actions, it’s not the only or always the best motive for acting.
If a father takes care of his baby because he loves him, utilitarianism
doesn’t require him to stop and think whether his action promotes
the general happiness. A painter can paint because she needs to, not
because her pictures make others happy. You can have dinner with
your friend because you like him, not because dining with friends
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makes the world a better place. But the moral worth of these acts can
be assessed by thinking about how unhappy we’d be if there were no
love, art, or friendship in the world.
Besides, as Mill and Sidgwick both pointed out, utilitarian moral
theory isn’t meant for ordinary people in ordinary circumstances.
“The occasions,” observed Mill, “on which any person (except one in
a thousand) has it in his power . . . to be a public benefactor, are but
exceptional; and on these occasions alone is he called on to consider
public utility; in every other case, private utility, the interest or hap-
piness of some few persons, is all he has to attend to.” Sidgwick put
the point even more bluntly, remarking that it may be best, on util-
itarian grounds, for ordinary people not to be utilitarians at all. It’s
better for them to believe that the morality they’re already familiar
with is “absolutely and universally prescribed, since any other view of
it may dangerously weaken its hold over their minds.” Utilitarianism,
he declared, is a moral theory for the exceptional—“either for persons
generally under exceptional circumstances, of for a class of persons de-
fined by exceptional qualities of intellect, temperament, or character.”
Not all utilitarians are quite so plainspoken. Nor do they all aim at
maximizing pleasure or happiness. Some utilitarians think it’s more
important to satisfy as many preferences as possible, while others think
the best thing is to meet the greatest number of interests. And many
utilitarians, such as Mill, focus on rules for acting rather than single
actions. What they all agree on, though, is that acts (or rules) are to
be judged right or wrong solely on the basis of their consequences for
all affected parties, with no one singled out for special consideration.
5.3. Kantian Ethics
The consequences be damned, said Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). In

the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785), he argued that the
consequences have nothing whatever to do with the morality of an
action. For Kant the point of morality is freedom, the main problem is
how to achieve it, and the solution, which reason commands, is to be
a law-giving citizen in a “kingdom” of other free lawgivers.
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To act freely, Kant wrote, is to act without being constrained either

by other people or by the laws of nature. If there’s a gun to your head,
you can’t act freely, and if you have to do what your genetic makeup
forces you to do (think of how pigeons behave), you aren’t free either.
Although Kant thought we can’t know for sure that we are free, the
fact that we’re rational gives us good grounds for supposing we are.
To understand what he means, all you have to do is think about what’s
motivating you when you fill in the last line of this ancient argument:
All men are mortal.

Socrates is a man.
Therefore ______________.
When you say to yourself, “Therefore Socrates is mortal,” it doesn’t

seem as if you’re obeying any law of biology, like the reflex that dilates
your pupils when you move from sunlight into the dark. And you
surely aren’t obeying any law of physics, like the one you have to
comply with if you fall out of a second-story window. Whatever it is
that lets you make the inference about Socrates’s mortality, it seems
to have nothing to do with the laws governing the natural world. And
not having to obey the dictates of nature is a kind of negative freedom.
But independence from natural forces isn’t really freedom, thought
Kant, if it’s lawless. Freedom, after all, isn’t the same as anarchy, and
free people aren’t just loose cannons, plowing into things on a whim
or acting out of perversity. If you’re free you act for reasons, and
reasons, Kant argued, must be based on some principle. Let’s suppose
your principle for acting is this one: “Always do what your mother tells
you.” If you adopt this principle, are you acting freely? No, because
you’ve put yourself under your mother’s law. And if your principle
is “Do whatever makes you feel good,” you aren’t free either, because
then you’ve made yourself a slave to your own appetites. Kant thought
there was only one principle that lets you be free, and that’s the one
that has no constraint on it of any kind except that it gives law.
Let’s think about that for a minute. What makes something a law is
that its scope is universal. “Jemima should pay John next Tuesday” is
not a law, because it applies only to Jemima. Universalize it as “People
should pay their debts” and it is a law, binding not only on Jemima
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but on everybody else as well. Law is impartial, applying to eve-

ryone and favoring no one. “People should pay their debts,” though,
isn’t the law that lets us be free, because it have a specific content and
that constrains it so that the content, rather than we ourselves, ends
up telling us what to do. The law we’re looking for preserves our au-
tonomy by letting us choose what we’re going to do. It has no content
at all. It’s merely the form of law.
And what’s this law that has no content but only form? I already
gave you a hint when I said that what makes something a law is that its
scope is universal. The law that’s all form and no content is the law that
says, “Universalize!” Or, if you’d rather, “Apply your reason for acting
to everybody!” Nobody can make us obey this law, because we’re free.
And we can remain free, said Kant, only if we obey it. If we don’t, ei-
ther other people or our own passions will govern us. This law (usu-
ally translated as an “imperative”) binds us categorically. That is, there
are no ifs about it. A hypothetical imperative, by contrast, is one you
ought to follow if you care about achieving a certain goal: If you want
to avoid sexually transmitted diseases, you ought to use a condom. If
you want to ace this course, you ought to keep up with the readings.
Hypothetical imperatives are possible, thought Kant, because we have
desires. The Categorical Imperative, on the other hand, is possible be-
cause we have the ability to reason. It binds us simply because, Kant
argued, every rational person must accept it.
The Categorical Imperative (which Kant also called the Supreme
Principle of Morality) is formulated three different ways in the
Groundwork, although later Kant scholars question whether they’re
all identical. The first formulation, which emphasizes the idea that the
law is all form and no content, is this one: Act only on that maxim
through which you can at the same time will that it should become a
universal law. By “maxim” Kant meant your reason for acting. What
he was telling you here is that if, say, your reason for running a red
light is that you’re in a hurry, you should ask yourself whether “People
should always run red lights when they’re in a hurry” is a law that eve-
rybody could act on without contradiction. Kant argued that if you
asked yourself this question, you’d see that you’re trying to have it both
ways: you want the law against running red lights to be a law for eve-
rybody, but not be a law for you. Since nothing can be a law and not
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be a law at the same time, you’re caught in a contradiction. And since

contradictions are irrational, your own ability to reason will show you
that you can’t act on this maxim.
Because people’s ability to reason makes them so valuable you can’t
set a price on them (their humanity gives them “dignity” rather than
price), the second formulation goes like this: Act in such a way that
you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person
of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as
an end. Note that Kant didn’t say that you must never treat people as
means to your ends. When you order pizza, you’re using the delivery
person as a means to your end and there’s certainly nothing wrong
with that (at least, not if you remember to tip). What the second for-
mulation forbids is your using other people as if they didn’t have their
own purposes and desires, as if the only reason for their existence was
to serve you. While it sounds odd to talk about using the humanity
in your own person merely as means to your ends, I think what Kant
had in mind is a case where a person’s reason tells her to not, say, have
another beer, so she throws reason out the window and chugs it down
anyway. Dismissing your ability to reason when it gets in your way
is deeply disrespectful of yourself, because it’s your ability to reason,
Kant thought, that makes you so precious. (Kant thought you were
disrespectful to your humanity when you commit suicide.) This for-
mulation of the Categorical Imperative underscores the idea that your
worth isn’t just instrumental. You’re valuable for yourself alone, and
not merely because you’re useful.
And all other people are valuable in and of themselves too, just like
you. That’s the idea of the third formulation: All maxims as proceeding
from our own making of law ought to harmonize with a possible
kingdom of ends as a kingdom of nature. Because the laws you make for
yourself, by an act of your own autonomy, must be laws for all other
free lawmakers as well, you have to be sure that your laws don’t con-
tradict theirs. This formulation seems to be a restatement of the first,
in that it commands you to universalize whatever reasons you have for
acting so that they’re reasons for everyone. But the picture here is of a
kingdom of self-legislators, a kingdom in which every citizen is king.
It’s a beautiful picture, really: a free people, living together as self-
legislating citizens in a kingdom where, because they’re all rational,
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they’re free. And because the rationality that produces their freedom
also gives them a worth that’s “unconditioned and incomparable,” as
Kant put it, they honor the goodness in others as well as their own.
The Categorical Imperative is particularly useful for stopping
people from free riding. But as some philosophers see it, that’s just
the problem. A major objection to the whole Kantian line of thought
is that it’s hard to make sense of the idea that moral rules allow no
exceptions. Is it really true, for example, that you must never run a
red light when you’re in a hurry, even to take a woman in labor to
a hospital in the middle of the night when there’s no other car any-
where near the intersection? Let’s say that the Categorical Imperative
shows you that you must never take other people’s property without
their permission, because if you make a law that other people must
keep their hands off what doesn’t belong to them but it’s not a law
for you, you generate a contradiction. And let’s say too that the
Categorical Imperative shows you that you must always keep mor-
ally permissible promises, again because you can make yourself an
exception to this law only on pain of contradiction. Now suppose
that since you’re a natural slob, you brother made you promise you’d
be properly dressed at his wedding. When you get to the church,
though, you suddenly notice a big stain on your tie. The service is
about to begin and there’s nobody left in the vestry, but the minister
has left a tie hanging on the back of the door. To obey the law about
not breaking promises, you’ll have to take someone else’s property.
To obey the law about not taking other people’s property, you’ll have
to break a promise. But if Kant was right and moral rules are uncon-
ditional, you are categorically forbidden to do either of these things,
even though they’re the only two options open to you. How on earth
does that make sense?
It’s a puzzle, all right, and we have Kant’s deepest sympathy. In the
final paragraph of the Groundwork he said, “It is no discredit to our
deduction of the supreme principle of morality, but rather a reproach
which must be brought against reason as such, that it cannot make
comprehensible the absolute necessity of an unconditioned practical
law. . . . While we do not comprehend the practical unconditioned ne-
cessity of the moral imperative, we do comprehend its incomprehen-
sibility.” (See Lindemann's ad hoc Rule Number 96: Oh dear God.).
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5.4. What’s Wrong with This Picture?
These thumbnail sketches of the more prominent moral theories are

meant to give you an idea of the differences among them, which are
surely considerable. Less visible, maybe, is how much the theories
have in common. But it’s their commonalities that trouble many
feminists, so rather than offer criticisms of each theory in turn, I’ll
show you three pictures that underlie all of them and explain what
it is that feminists think the pictures get wrong. These pictures are
simplifications, of course, and what they portray emerges only if you
stand back and notice the things the theories emphasize, the things
they take for granted, and the things they don’t mention. When you
do that you start to see, first, the picture of the person who’s supposed
to act on the theories; second, the picture of the society in which this
person lives; and third, the picture of human reason that the person
exercises when making moral judgments. Let’s examine these pictures
with an eye to how power operates in the guise of gender, so that we
can see more clearly what they distort, paint over, or leave out al-
together. (This is an instance of Lindemann’s ad hoc Rule Number
57: When the Wizard of Oz says, “Pay no attention to the man behind
the screen,” get out your magnifying glass.)
The Picture of the Person
The first thing to notice about the people who’re meant to lead their
lives in accordance with the theories is that they’re detached from other
people. They act on their own, unconstrained by their relationships
to family or friends. They might have such relationships, but the
theories aren’t much interested in them. Hobbes populates the State of
Nature with individuals who spring up out of the ground full grown,
like mushrooms. The citizens of the Kingdom of Ends don’t seem to
have parents either, much less lovers or children. And if utilitarian
moral agents have special responsibilities to housemates, siblings, or
grandparents, you won’t find that out by reading Mill. None of the
theories does much to ensure that people will have any connections to
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one another aside from the minimal ones needed to keep the society
from collapsing, and all of them picture the agent as what the phi-
losopher Charles Taylor calls a “punctual” self—like a dot on a page,
unconnected to other dots.
The second thing to notice is that these people are self-sufficient.
You can tell this because they all want to be let alone. Hobbes isn’t
worried about what would happen to him if he became ill, he’s wor-
ried that his neighbors will attack him. The Categorical Imperative
operates primarily to tell you what you mustn’t do to other people,
not what you must do for them. Mill is worried more about state in-
terference in people’s lives than about the ways the state might be able
to give aid to the needy. For the most part, the theories take it for
granted that the people they are talking about can look after them-
selves without any help from anybody. (Lindemann’s ad hoc Rule
Number 59: Oh, honey.)
The third thing to notice is that each of these people has just as
much social power as everybody else. None of them is socially dis-
advantaged and none has to report to a higher-up. The parties to the
social contract are presumed to negotiate from positions of equality,
and indeed in the Rawlsian version of the theory, this presumption is
explicitly built in. Kantian persons are lawgivers and judges, powerful
enough so they don’t have to notice that the laws they’d be willing
to accept might not be equally acceptable to socially disadvantaged
people for whom the laws could be harmful or beside the point. And
utilitarian persons don’t have to report to any higher-up because they
are the higher-ups. As Sidgwick so revealingly put it, utilitarianism
is for “a class of persons defined by exceptional qualities of intellect,
temperament, or character,” who by virtue of these qualities are fitted
to make policies for the public good. Williams calls these people
“government house” utilitarians, because it’s easy to imagine them as
bureaucrats, government officials, or corporate managers.
The fourth thing to notice is that the people are calculators and
planners. The individuals who are hammering out the social contract
are trying in a self-interested fashion to get the best bargain they can
for themselves, which requires a certain amount of strategizing and
gamesmanship (knowledge of the maximin strategy, for example)
as each determines his own advantage by figuring out what other
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90 Overviews
people are likely to do. Rawlsian social contractors all have rational
life plans: They know where they’re going in the long run, and they
exercise the watchful self-control that’s required to get them there.
Bentham’s and Mill’s moral agents are rational planners too, though as
managers and policymakers—they typically direct their planning to-
ward others rather than themselves. And Kantian moral agents are the
quintessential calculators. What’s morally valuable about them and
the only source of their value is their ability to reason.
The trouble with the picture of the persons who populate these
theories—the judge, the policymaker, the manager, the contractor, the
gamesman—is that it represents, in ideal form, the responsibilities,
privileges, and concerns of only some actual people in a certain kind
of society and even then, only at a particular time in their lives. The
kind of person who’s supposed to act on these theories is both unat-
tached and self-sufficient; he’s the powerful equal of the other people
to whom the theory applies: he promotes his own interests over the
interests of those he’s responsible for and assumes his peers will do
the same; he enters freely into contracts with other free contractors;
he uses his reason to plan out the course of his own life or to manage
and coordinate the efforts of others; and he commands the resources
needed to do these things.
What a number of you will find missing from these accounts is large
chunks of your own experience of life. In fact, what many of you won’t
find there is yourselves. Though the theories don’t acknowledge it, the
picture of the ideal or representative person they offer is, as Margaret
Urban Walker aptly puts it, “none of us at all times, and many of us at
no times” (1998, 21–22). In particular, the idealized picture of inde-
pendent, unattached, powerful agents seeking to promote their own
interests, plan for themselves and others, or enhance their autonomy
through voluntary and impersonal interactions misrepresents many
women’s lives. Which people get to live the kind of life these theories
depict depends on their gender, race, age, class, and other factors on
which the uneven distribution of social privilege is based. And that’s a
problem for three different reasons.
First of all, it’s a problem because, as a representation of what real
people are really like, it’s false. None of us stands on our own; we all
live firmly embedded within a thick web of social relationships. We
91
couldn’t even be the persons we are if it weren’t for all the other per-
sons who respond to us, care for us, teach us, include us in their activ-
ities, and find room for us in their society. That’s what Annette Baier
meant when she said we’re all “second persons,” persons produced by
other persons rather than punctual selves. Moreover, all of us have
needed help at various points in our lives and will doubtless need it
again. Then too, many people aren’t in a position to pursue their own
interests by bargaining on equal terms with other contractors. To
quote Baier again, “Contract is a device for traders, entrepreneurs, and
capitalists, not for children, servants, indentured wives, and slaves”
(1994, 113). May people have to follow policies made by others, rather
than make policy themselves. And the circumstances of many people’s
lives don’t permit them to make long-range plans, while other people
don’t think it’s very important or useful to try to live their lives ac-
cording to a long-range plan. (I never had one, myself. I got along just
fine without it.)
Second, if the picture of persons underlying these theories isn’t sup-
posed to represent real people but instead is meant to be an ideal to-
ward which all real people ought to strive, then it’s still false, because
it’s based on a contradiction. If you’re going to get anywhere near the
ideal yourself, you need vast amounts of support from other people
who, because they’re supporting you, can’t have the kind of life you
live. Who’s supposed to nurture, protect, and socialize children so that
they can grow up to be self-sufficient utilitarians? Who’s supposed to
take care of autonomous individuals when they fall ill or are badly
injured? Who’s supposed to do the social contractors’ laundry, clean
their bathrooms, or cook their meals so that they’re free to pursued
their life plans? To realize the ideal you need people—mostly, they’ve
been women—to look after you, but because they’re looking after you,
they aren’t free to pursue the ideal for themselves.
Third, the idealized representation of persons on which these
theories are based isn’t just false, it’s harmful. Though all of us are sup-
posed to aim at it, the ideal isn’t necessarily the best or only one. Some
people—those suffering from Alzheimer’s disease or cognitively im-
paired people, for example—couldn’t possibly hope to be autonomous
in the sense that Kant means, but they might have very good lives if
they (and the rest of us) aimed at something else. Other people have
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92 Overviews
excellent reasons to reject various aspects of the ideal on moral, polit-

ical, religious, or personal grounds, but because the standard theories
are dominant in our culture, the actual people who can’t or don’t con-
form to their picture of the ideal person appear substandard or mor-
ally defective, not what “we” are or should be. When people appear to
be morally defective, they’re often treated as morally defective, and
this restricts their ability to live responsibly and well.
The Picture of Society
The second picture on which these prominent moral theories are based
is that of a society consisting of two spheres: the public and the private.
The public sphere is the one in which people’s freedom is secured by
rights. These rights are couched negatively, in terms of things the state
or other individuals may not do to you, and can be fairly summed up
as the right not to be interfered with. Because freedom is the central
value of this sphere, it’s governed by a “thin” conception of the good
life, that is, the view of what it means to live well is left deliberately
sketchy so that each person can decide for herself what’s important
in life and how best to achieve it. So the public sphere is the sphere
in which people make choices. The public sphere is also the place for
impartiality: no one’s interests or rights are to count for more than
anyone else’s. And finally, in the public sphere the laws or principles
for conduct are universal and impersonal. The supposedly impersonal
and universal nature of truth itself gives these laws their authority.
If the public sphere is the sphere of rights, the private sphere is the
sphere of the good. It’s here that people pursue their various “thick”
visions of the best way to live, whether as a white nationalist, an artist,
a political activist, or whatever. The private sphere is the one in which
relationships and the responsibilities that arise from them are fre-
quently unchosen. It’s the place for favoritism, because it’s the sphere
of friendship, love, and families— relationships in which another
person is singled out for special consideration rather than treated like
everybody else. The private sphere is particularistic rather than uni-
versal; it’s quirky, unsystematic, and personal.
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Any theory that’s primarily concerned with the basic structure of

society, or says each person is to count for one and none for more
than one, or tells you that if you do something for one person you
have to be willing to do it for all, is focusing on relationships in the
public sphere, not the private. For that reason it’s sometimes said that
the dominant theories treat the private sphere as if it isn’t the busi-
ness of morality. This isn’t strictly true, of course. None of the theories
permits you to kill your girlfriend as long as you do it in the privacy
of your own home, for example. But all three theories fail utterly to
acknowledge the morally crucial labor that must be done in families
and other private places if society is to function at all. It’s in the places
marked “private” that vast amounts of unpaid and socially unrecog-
nized work goes on—the work of forming selves and then holding
them in their identities, caring for children and others who need it,
and transmitting morality from one generation to the next. And be-
cause this work is gendered, in that it’s primarily women who are ex-
pected to do it, the theories in effect withhold moral recognition from
many of the activities that make up most women’s lives. Because the
dominant moral theories offer a picture of the public sphere as one in
which each person is just as free as every other, they represent women
as having choices about whether to engage in the reproductive labor
of the private sphere. The theories show women choosing to provide
loving maternal care, or persuading their husbands to provide loving
paternal care, or deciding to have an abortion. But here again the pic-
ture is false. Many women don’t have these choices. The fathers of
their children walk out on them; they have no access to abortion or
their moral beliefs forbid it; the child is a niece or granddaughter with
nobody else to look after her. Even if reproductive and caring labor
really were optional, though, it could still be objected that no decent
society leaves the care of its vulnerable children, elderly, and ill or dis-
abled solely up to those who choose to provide it. (Lindemann’s ad hoc
Rule No. 26: What were you thinking?)
Although social contract theory, utilitarianism, and Kantian ethics
offer a picture of society whose public sphere is supposed to be
governed by impartiality and universality, this too is false. As the pic-
ture of the persons who inhabit this society has already demonstrated,
the theories aren’t impartial. Instead, they favor persons whose social
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94 Overviews
standing, concerns, and occupations look suspiciously like those of

well-to-do white men. The ideal of impartiality is intended to empha-
size the ways in which we’re all alike, which is why the theories assume
that in the public sphere people’s basic interests are the same. They as-
sume, for example, that while we all might have different plans for how
to get ahead in our jobs, we all basically care about living according to
plan, or about not being interfered with, or about bargaining on equal
terms with others. The assumption that we do care about these things
tends to steamroll over the differences in people’s needs, their cultural
traditions, their abilities and talents, and how they’re expected to act
when they’re in public.
Nor are the theories in fact universal, because the center of relations
among independent strangers is the male-dominated public world of
politics, war, and work outside the home. Those relations are impor-
tant only to certain sorts of people, and they’re out of the question
or a matter of indifference to many others. If the theories were truly
concerned with including as many people as possible, wouldn’t they
focus instead on the lack of control, the dependency, and the rela-
tions of love and friendship that make up the fabric of most people’s
everyday lives? Attention to these matters would quickly reveal the
importance of the particular and the personal in all of morality, not
just the part that’s supposed to govern the public sphere. A great many
of the choices we make in our everyday lives can’t and shouldn’t be
universalized. I may not be aiming at the same things you’re after;
I might not want or need to go where you go. The notion of univer-
sality effectively excludes people who look (suspiciously) like women
and men of color, transpeople, disabled people, and the elderly from
the society the liberal theories depict. By carving that society into
two spheres and populating the private sphere with anybody who
doesn’t fit the “universal” norm, the theories keep such people from
participating fully in the social contract, pure Kantian rationality, or
the promotion of the public good.
All of which is to say that the division of society into two spheres
is a fiction. It serves the social contract, Kantian, and utilitarian
theories well, in that it creates a boundary that can be policed so that
the preoccupations of powerful people in a certain kind of society are
seen as the important ones, the ones that are governed by morality.
95
The reality, though, is that morality can’t be boxed off in this way. It
permeates all of society, including the parts where the misfits live.
The Picture of Rationality
What gives morality its hold over us? Why, that is, should we do the
right thing if it’s inconvenient or embarrassing or even costs us our
life? One possible answer is “Because God commands it,” but that
answer doesn’t satisfy people who (a) don’t believe in God or (b) be-
lieve in God but aren’t sure we know precisely what he wants us to do
(“Thou shalt not kill.” Not even in self-defense? In a just war? How
about animals?). The dominant moral theories, rejecting religious
faith as the basis for morality, tell us we have to do the right thing
because reason commands it. Now, reason is a fine thing. Feminists
are delighted when people offer reasons for what they do and tackle
their moral disagreements with other people in a rational manner.
But they have been seen to raise a delicate eyebrow at the picture
of rationality that underlies social contract, Kantian, and utilitarian
theories.
For one thing, here again the picture leaves a lot out. It excludes
the emotions, rather than acknowledging that feelings such as grati-
tude, resentment, and anger play a useful role in our moral thinking. It
excludes what we care about, rather than acknowledging that what we
care about often is the reason we ought to do something. It excludes
trust, rather than acknowledging that trust is what keeps our moral
judgments from being paranoid. And it excludes narrative or other
representational modes of reasoning, rather than acknowledging that
stories and images are powerful tools for making moral sense of the
world and our place in it.
Furthermore, the picture exaggerates the role of reason in morality.
The method of reasoning recommended by Rawls, for example, is that
you put your considered moral judgments into reflective equilibrium
with your moral principles so that none of your beliefs contradict
any other. But suppose you were raised to believe that the white race
is superior to all other races, and when you grew up, having never
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96 Overviews
interacted with people who weren’t white, you thought it over care-
fully and concluded that whites really are superior, with the result that
you now hold the belief very firmly. And suppose all of your moral
principles are consistent with this belief. In that case, your system of
beliefs is in reflective equilibrium, so it’s rational. The trouble is, it’s
also evil. Even if you follow the method very carefully, you can’t count
on it to rid you of bigotry, hatred, and cruelty. (Time for a Nazi ref-
erence, since no self-respecting book on ethics is complete without
one: Many Nazi officials were highly educated, cultured gentlemen.
They were behaving with perfect rationality.)
And finally, the picture shows reason operating at a high level
of abstract idealization, which tends to produce bad arguments.
Consider this one, from the philosopher Christine Korsgaard’s
Sources of Normativity (1996, 143). Korsgaard imagines that you are
tormenting a stranger and he calls on you to stop, asking how you
would like it if someone did the same to you. Unless you take the
stranger’s words as mere noise, she says, you are acknowledging that
this is a human being speaking. Then, like the good Kantian philoso-
pher she is, she argues that since you see yourself as worthy of moral
consideration “in so far as you are just human, just someone,” your
rationality compels you to see that the stranger’s humanity deserves
moral consideration as well. If you don’t, she concludes, you’re being
inconsistent.
Oh, really? This argument assumes that you think the stranger is
just like you in being human, and you’re just like him in being human.
In many cases, though, people don’t think that others are just human
beings exactly like themselves. They think there are different kinds
of human beings and that some kinds may be enslaved, others may
be slaughtered, still others may be outlawed, and others again are fit
only to satisfy the sexual and domestic wants of men. If you think
there are different kinds of human beings, then you aren’t being in-
consistent in doing to a stranger what you wouldn’t want done to you.
We can deplore the fact that many people do think certain kinds of
people are fair game for abusive treatment, but the problem isn’t that
they’re irrational. They only look that way if rationality is idealized
and abstracted from the social and moral contexts in which actual
people live.
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5.5. The PowerPoint Problem
Taken together, then, the three pictures underlying social contract

theory, utilitarianism, and Kantian ethics suggest that the theories really
aren’t up to the job of illuminating the moral experience of all people
everywhere. In particular, they’re silent about a number of the activi-
ties, concerns, and circumstances that make up the greater part of the
lives of many women and many men of color, especially if they are poor,
disabled, gay, old, or otherwise disadvantaged by their social situation.
Well, could the theories speak to the moral situation of the people
they have neglected? Do these silences imply in a strictly log-
ical way that the theories can’t handle the moral realities of socially
disadvantaged people? No. I suspect that in fact they can’t, but my
talk of pictures is deliberate, because pictures don’t logically imply
anything—they represent a state of affairs. It’s the actual state of af-
fairs that’s important here, not what might in principle be possible.
The question isn’t whether the theories could accommodate the ex-
perience of women and relatively powerless men, the point is that
they don’t. Their repeated, intensive focus on certain topics in moral
theorizing and their consistent exclusion of others has created what
Cheshire Calhoun calls an “ideology of the moral life.” It’s an ideology
because it’s politically loaded (in favor of privileged white men) and
because it represents as normal and natural what’s actually the effect
of social power. As a direct result of what it emphasizes and what it
leaves out, certain kinds of moral capacities and knowledge, impor-
tant differences among people, and the moral demands that make up
the bulk of many people’s day-to-day lives don’t get registered as the
proper concerns of a moral theory at all. The ideology keeps forcing
our attention back on the topics and problems that matter to the ideal
man who is supposed to, but doesn’t, represent all of us.
You can think of this as the PowerPoint problem. If you’ve ever put
together a PowerPoint presentation, you know that while the software
offers you a number of content layouts, text-and-image layouts, and
text-and-graph layouts, it offers only two standardized text layouts: a
page-width layout with a title and bullet points, and a two-column
layout with a title and bullet points. The page-width layout lets you
display a string of facts with supporting points under each, and the
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98 Overviews
two-column layout lets you compare or contrast two items. That’s it. If
you want to compare three items, you’re out of luck, and if you want to
circle around an idea instead of laying it out in a linear fashion, you can’t
do that either. Nor can you present a conversation or a story. If you’re
very clever you might be able to customize the layout, but there’s no
easy way to do it, so the chances are you won’t. As a result, you’re repeat-
edly forced into a very limited kind of thinking, the kind that’s used by
the corporate executives for which the software program seems to have
been designed. And because PowerPoint is the dominant technology
for making presentations, the more you use it, the more likely it is that
you’ll take it for granted that that kind of thinking is normal and right.
I believe that the three most widely known moral theories are
plagued by a feminist version of the PowerPoint problem. As Baier
puts it, “The great moral theorists in our tradition not only are all
men, [but] with a few significant exceptions . . . they are a collec-
tion of clerics, misogynists, and puritan bachelors” (1994, 3). The
theories reflect their authors’ social circumstances, focusing on the
sorts of preoccupations and concerns that mark a certain kind of
prosperous and respectable masculine life. And because they’re domi-
nant theories, they offer no incentive to take account of other kinds of
lives. If you study them long enough, you’ll consider that way of doing
ethics normal and right.
Is there any point, then, in studying Kant and Mill and Rawls? Of
course there is. In the first place, the dominant theorists should be
studied just because they are dominant. They’ve provided a vocab-
ulary and a set of ideas that help us to make moral sense of each
other. The second reason to study them is that many of the concepts,
arguments, distinctions, and methodologies they have developed are
well worth having: They help us sort out what we ought to do and
why we ought to do it. These theorists are powerful voices in a long-
standing conversation in Western culture about crucially important
questions concerning human existence. How might we best live to-
gether? Who should I strive to be? What should I care about? What
must I take responsibility for? All morally developed persons must
find their own answers to questions of this kind, but they don’t have
to do it all by themselves. There are rich resources at their disposal in
the standing theories.
9
While the theories can’t be dismissed, then, their neglect of gender

and other factors that determine who has power over whom means
that those of us who want to think clearly and carefully about ethics
means we’ll have to roll up our sleeves and get to work. We have to
get a better understanding of the consequences for ethics of taking
seriously the moral claims and perspectives of people who don’t oc-
cupy positions of social privilege. What happens when moral theory
becomes skeptical of ideal relationships of equality as the basis for mo-
rality and shifts its focus to relationships of dependency and vulner-
ability? What happens when moral selves are represented as having
bodies and emotions as well as minds? What happens when ethical
attention moves from and idealized, supposedly universal human
nature to particular persons and social groups? I’ll take up these
questions and a few more in the next chapter.
For Further Reading
Baier, Annette C. 1985. “Cartesian Persons.” In Postures of the Mind: Essays

on Mind and Morals. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press,  74–92.
Baier, Annette C. 1994. Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Calhoun, Cheshire. 1988. “Justice, Care, Gender Bias.” Journal of
Philosophy 85, no. 9: 451–63.
Held, Virginia. 1987. “Non-contractual Society: A Feminist View.” In Science,
Morality, and Feminist Theory, ed. Marsha Hanen and Kai Nielsen.
Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 111–15.
Korsgaard, Christine M. 1996. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Walker, Margaret Urban. 1998. Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in
Ethics. New York: Routledge.
Walker, Margaret Urban. 2003. Moral Contexts. Lanham, MD: Rowman
& Littlefield.
10
6
Feminist Ethics of Care
and Responsibility
The late Harvard psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg claimed that people

become morally mature by going through certain distinct stages. You,
being a mature adult, have presumably outgrown the idea that being
good means helping and pleasing other people (stage 3 on Kohlberg’s
scale), and you’ve come to see that morality consists of a set of rules
for maintaining the social order (stage 4). You might even be mature
enough to sum up the rules in a principle such as “the greatest good
for the greatest number” (stage 5) or to think of morality in terms of
universal principles of justice (stage 6), though Kohlberg claimed that
not everyone reaches these heights of maturity.
To determine where you are on Kohlberg’s scale, you could think
about this dilemma, which is one in the series he created to measure
moral development in adolescence:
In Europe, a woman was near death from cancer. One drug might
save her, a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had re-
cently discovered. The druggist was charging $2,000, ten times what
the drug cost him to make. The sick woman’s husband, Heinz, went
to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get
together about half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife
was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But
the druggist said, “No.” The husband got desperate and broke in to
the man’s store to steal the drug for his wife. Should the husband
have done that? Why?
Because your level of moral maturity has presumably hit stage 4 or

higher, you’re old enough to think about Heinz’s dilemma in terms of
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Feminist Ethics of Care and Responsibility 101
conflicting rules: There’s the rule about saving lives, but there’s also the
rule against stealing. So, if you tackle the dilemma the way Kohlberg
thought you would, you’ll weigh these rules against each other. Since
the rule that says “Save life” takes priority over the rule that says “Don’t
steal,” you’ll conclude that Heinz was justified in stealing the drug.
Kohlberg, heavily influenced by the impartial, impersonal, uni-
versalistic theories of morality we’ve just explored, and convinced
that Kantian ethics was superior to utilitarianism, thought that the
moral reasoning of mature adults must conform to one or the other
of the dominant theories. But when Carol Gilligan, also a Harvard
psychologist, conducted her own studies of moral development, she
heard many of her research subjects speaking to her “in a different
voice.” Rather than talking about rights and rules, they were using the
language of relationships and connection. Rather than abstract rea-
soning, their thinking was contextual and concrete. And, Gilligan
argued, this “different voice” was especially likely to be heard when
the research subjects were girls and women. Note the contrast, for ex-
ample, between eleven-year-old Jake’s way of thinking about Heinz’s
dilemma and how eleven-year-old Amy tackles it.
Jake: For one thing, a human life is worth more than money, and if
the druggist only makes $1,000, he is still going to live, but if Heinz
doesn’t steal the drug, his wife is going to die. [Why is life worth
more than money?] Because the druggist can get a thousand dollars
later from rich people with cancer, but Heinz can’t get his wife again.
[Why not?] Because people are all different and so you couldn’t get
Heinz’s wife again.
Jake, who thinks “the only thing that is totally logical” is math,
considers the moral dilemma to be “sort of like a math problem with
humans.”
AMY: [Should Heinz steal the drug?] Well, I don’t think so. I think
there might be other ways besides stealing it, like if he could borrow
the money or make a loan or something, but he really shouldn’t steal
the drug—but his wife shouldn’t die either. [Why shouldn’t he steal
the drug?] If he stole the drug, he might save his wife then, but if he
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102 Overviews
did, he might have to go to jail, and then his wife might get sicker
again, and he couldn’t get more of the drug, and it might not be
good. So, they should really just talk it out and find some other way
to make the money.
Amy, who sees the problem as a narrative of relationships that extend

over time instead of taking Jake’s freeze-frame view of it, is concerned
to maintain rather than break off connections: “The world should just
share things more and then people wouldn’t have to steal” (Gilligan
1982, 26–29).
According to Kohlberg’s measurements, Jake is a stage 4 thinker,
while Amy clearly is still at stage 3. But is Amy really morally less
mature than Jake? Gilligan doesn’t think so. Instead, she explains the
difference between the two as a difference in moral orientation: Jake
is oriented toward what she calls “justice,” while Amy is oriented to-
ward “care.” Girls and women tend to look immature on Kohlberg’s
scale, says Gilligan, because Kohlberg based his findings on a study
of eighty-four boys whose development he followed for a period of
twenty years, and in that study, the justice orientation predominates.
Gilligan is careful to say that the “different voice” is not the voice of all
women across cultures and through time, any more than the voice of
justice is the voice of all men. Even so, in a society like ours, “Social
status and power combine with reproductive biology to shape the ex-
perience of males and females and the relations between the sexes,”
and this gendered experience produces “different modes of moral
understanding” (1982, 2, 32). The mode that’s concerned with the
activity of care centers morality around the understanding of respon-
sibility and relationships, while the mode that’s concerned with justice
centers morality around the understanding of right and rules.
Notice the connection Gilligan draws between what people expe-
rience and how they think. The people who lived through the Great
Depression of the 1930s, for instance, tended to hoard and save even
when times were good again. Similarly, people who’ve lived on their
own for a long time tend to be a little self-absorbed. But it’s not only
experiences of this kind that shape our thinking. As the philosopher
Sara Ruddick explains, thinking also “arises from and is shaped by the
practices in which people engage” (1989, 9). A practice is a socially
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recognized, regular way of doing something that has a point to it.

Basketball is a practice: there are rules for how you play it and the
point is to score more baskets than the opposing team. Farming is a
very different kind of practice, but it too has rules for doing it properly
and its point is to produce food and fibers. Education is a practice; so
is law; so is Twitter.
Although the moral theories we’ve been looking at have had little
to say about this, some practices get more respect than others, and the
knowledge connected with those practices carries a certain authority.
There will be times when you’d much rather have, say, a plumber’s
knowledge than a lawyer’s, but when the toilet’s working again and
the bathroom’s mopped up, you’ll find it easy to agree that a lawyer’s
knowledge is socially more authoritative than is the plumber’s. Whose
knowledge actually counts as knowledge and who gets to say what
counts are functions, in part, of how power is distributed within a
society. Those who are “in a position to know” are the people who
participate in the practices—medicine, science, law, politics, corpo-
rate management—that command the most social prestige. As we saw
in the previous chapter, the thinking of the men who developed the
standing moral theories was shaped by their participation in several
of these practices.
What would happen, though, if we decided that what women know
is just as authoritative as the knowledge of socially prestigious men?
A large part of the feminist project has been to legitimate women’s
knowledge, to insist that what can be learned from women’s less pres-
tigious practices ought to be taken just as seriously as what can be
learned from the experience of men. In particular, feminist ethicists
have explored women’s practices to see what kind of moral knowledge
lives there.
6.1. The Ethics of Care
And this is how care comes into the picture. In the United States, but
also in many other societies, women do far more unpaid, hands-on
caregiving than men: they change the diapers, wash the dishes, clean
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104 Overviews
the bathrooms, do the shopping, take the dog to the vet, feed and dress
the children, take care of ill or disabled family members, and pro-
vide long-term care for elderly relatives. Even when married women
have full-time jobs, they still do the vast majority of the housework,
childcare, and eldercare. According to the Family Caregiver Alliance,
66 percent of family caregivers are women, while the average care-
giver is a woman who works outside the home and provides twenty
hours a week giving care to her mother. Women spend as much as
50 percent more time giving care than men do. The total cost of an in-
dividual woman’s caregiving in terms of lost wages and Social Security
benefits amounts to $324,044. The sociologists Eleanor Maccoby and
Robert Mnookin’s 1998 study of families in California indicates that
after a divorce or in cases where the parents never married, roughly
75 percent of dependent children live with and are cared for by their
mothers rather than their fathers—a figure that approaches 100 per-
cent when the children are infants or toddlers. From 1980 to 2009, the
percentage of single-parent households jumped to 29.5 percent. The
jump was caused by an increase in births to unmarried women and by
the increasing prevalence of divorces among couples.
Paid caregivers are mostly women, too. Almost 96 percent of pro-
fessional nurses are women, and the percentage of women providing
day care for children is close to 99 percent. The practice of care, then,
is overwhelmingly a woman’s practice.
Suppose we take this practice seriously, as if it were just as impor-
tant as the practice of law or medicine. How does caregiving shape the
thinking of those who engage in it? And even more to the point, for
present purposes, how does caregiving shape its practitioners’ moral
thinking? That’s a big question, because there are so many different
forms that caregiving can take and so many different circumstances
under which care is given. So let’s whittle it down, temporarily, to
the practice of mothering. It’s not that mothering is paradigmatic
of women’s work—there are plenty of women, after all, who aren’t
mothers—but mothering is a form of caregiving that most of us have
received and all of us are familiar with, so it’s a good place to start. Then
we can ask what kind of moral thinking is involved in the caregiving
mothers do. Since every practice has a point, we can begin by thinking
about the point of mothering, because that shows us something about
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the standards we could use to judge whether someone is doing the

work of mothering well or badly. Once we’ve taken a snapshot of that
particular practice, we can use what we’ve learned to make some gen
eral observations about other kinds of caregiving. In coming at the
question this way, we develop an ethics of care.
The Point of Mothering
Broadly speaking, the point of mothering is to bring about the child’s

well-being. But this can be broken down into three different kinds of
general responsibilities. The first (and maybe the most important) is
protection—the responsibility of keeping the child safe from harm.
When you mother a child, you’re supposed to see to it that she doesn’t
run out into the street, eat poisonous substances, fall out the window,
become the victim of a child molester, and so on. Protection requires
preemptive thinking: you have to be alert to possible sources of danger
in the child’s environment and try to keep the child from being hurt by
them. Sometimes, one of the sources of danger is the mother herself.
Ruddick tells the story of Julie, whose ten-month-old baby wouldn’t
sleep. For the first four months the baby was awake every other hour,
day and night, around the clock, and for the six months after that she
slept no more than two hours at a time. The father’s work frequently
kept him from home, so Julie was often alone with the baby. One night
she woke—again—to hear the baby screaming, but this time as she
approached the crib, her throat constricted and she pictured herself
lifting the baby and throwing her at the window, then watching the
glass smash and the baby hitting the pavement three stories below.
Sickened by these thoughts, Julie wrapped the baby carefully and rode
with her on the bus all night from one end of the city to the other,
thinking the child would be safe with her if they weren’t alone. Julie
did what she could to protect her baby, and as Ruddick points out,
“What she did was enough” (1989, 67).
The second responsibility of mothering is nurturance. If children
need protection, they also need to grow, so mothers must foster that
growth. This is partly a matter of providing food, clothing, and shelter,
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106 Overviews
but it also involves giving comfort, love, trust, and respect, so that the
child can develop spiritually as well as physically. Nurturance requires
concrete thinking: you have to be receptive to this particular child’s
needs. Let’s suppose, for example, that your thirteen-year-old son
Andy keeps leaving his bike lying at the side of the driveway instead
of putting it in the shed where it belongs. You remind him to the point
of nagging, but he always “forgets.” So you start thinking concretely,
imagining, as well as you can, what it’s like to be Andy. Lately he’s been
having bad dreams, and as you reflect on this it strikes you that these
dreams have all had a fairly prominent spider motif. You wonder, Are
there spiders in the shed? And is Andy afraid of spiders? You ask him
and he says, “Yeah,” but you can see, because you’re paying careful
attention, that he’s ashamed to be afraid of such a trivial thing. Now
that you know what’s wrong, you can figure out how to respond. The
kind of nurturance he needs from you is help in overcoming his fear,
plus a way to regain his self-respect. So you make a concrete sugges-
tion: You’ll give him a broom and go with him to the shed to keep him
company while he chases the spiders away. And if he’s not quite up for
that, you’ll chase the spiders while he keeps you company.
The third responsibility is training, so that the child can live well
in the society of others. It includes toilet training; teaching the child
to speak; drilling table manners into her; setting limits on her behav
ior; helping her exercise her capacity for kindness, bravery, hon-
esty, and respect; asking her (for the thousandth time) to please shut
the door; showing her how to be morally reliable as well as socially
savvy. Training requires reflexive thinking: you have to examine your
motives for disciplining, intervening in, turning a blind eye toward, or
insisting on a particular bit of behavior. You must have confidence in
your own judgments so that you don’t always cave in to social pressure
instead of doing what you think you should, but you also have to un-
derstand how much power you have over your child so that you don’t
bully or dominate her. If you always give way, you’re abdicating your
power, which is a way of relinquishing responsibility. That produces
the fluttering, ineffectual mother, the emotionally distant mother,
or the mother who treats her ten-year-old daughter like a girlfriend.
If you abuse your power, then instead of showing the child how to
be a morally responsible person, you’ll train her by force, which, in
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Ruddick’s words, “is more like battle than love” (1989, 118). The abuse
of power produces the stage mother, the mother who disciplines by
yelling and hitting, and the rigid perfectionist. Guarding against both
the abdication and the abuse of maternal power requires a kind of
hardheaded trust, self-trust as well as trust in the child. The trust is
hardheaded because it can’t be indiscriminate. It has to be critical. If
it isn’t, you won’t be appropriately angry at yourself when you’ve been
unreliable, or angry at your child when he lets you down.
This exploration of the point of mothering and the kind of thinking
it requires doesn’t just show us how to give this kind of care—it shows
us how to do it well. The reason is that the standards or values for
assessing the performance of any practice are right there inside the
practice. Some of these are standards for doing the practice correctly
in the technical sense. Others, as we’ll see in a moment, are ethical
standards, telling you the morally right or admirable way to do it.
General Features of Care
Now that we’ve looked at the point of one practice of care, we can use
what we saw there to make some general observations about other
practices of care: care of poor or homeless people, mental health care,
nursing care, care of frail elderly people, home care for people with
serious disabilities, hospice care, social work, outpatient care, and so
on. What does our snapshot of mothering show us about responsible
caregiving in general?
The first thing it shows is that caring well both requires and is an
expression of a caring relationship. You have to care about the person
you care for, so that the caregiving doesn’t become impersonal, cold,
or self-serving. Let’s say that ever since your mother died, your dad’s
house has been a mess and he hasn’t been eating properly. Because
you don’t want people to think you’re neglecting him, you arrange for
a housekeeper, but you draw the line at visiting him and you don’t
think about him very much except when you use the Cash app every
month for the housekeeper’s salary. Are you taking care of him? Yes.
Are you taking good care of him? No, because you aren’t doing it in a
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108 Overviews
caring manner. To care in this sense is to feel concern for your charge
(the philosopher Eva Feder Kittay’s term for the person receiving the
care), which is to say that a caring relationship engages the emotions.
As we saw in the story of Julie, though, the relationship shouldn’t be
sentimentalized into a gooey mess of sweet tender feelings. Some of
the emotions it engages are homicidal, and then caring well require
you to stop yourself from acting on your feelings. At other times,
caring well requires you to express your anger, grief, or frustration,
because that’s what lets you stay connected to the person in your care.
Notice that in the way I’m using the word here, “caring” doesn’t just
refer to the emotions; as the philosopher Virginia Held points out, it’s
also a moral term. It a good thing to care about others, a bad thing
when we don’t. Because “care” is a moral term, we can use it to guide
how and when to act on our feelings, as well as to evaluate specific
instances of caregiving.
The second thing our snapshot of mothering shows us is that the
caring relationship requires engagement with another’s will. If you care
about the person you are caring for, you interact with him not simply
as an object of your care but as someone with wants, intentions, and
desires of her own. You don’t high-handedly impose your own will on
your charge, riding roughshod over his wishes, because that would
be an abuse of the power you have over him. To prevent that abuse,
the educator Nel Noddings calls on caregivers to practice “engross-
ment,” which consists of such close attention to the feelings, needs,
ideas, or wants of their charges that the caregivers’ own needs and
wants are displaced. Good caregivers, she says, “try to apprehend the
reality of the other.” “My motive energy flows toward the other and
perhaps, although not necessarily, toward his ends. . . . I allow my
motive energy to be shared; I put it at the service of the other” (1984,
33). Engrossment is a way of opening yourself up to your charge, let-
ting yourself be filled with how things are for him, who he is, what
he wants.
The third thing our snapshot of mothering shows is that caring
well requires you to pay attention to the particulars rather than being
guided by abstract thinking. Suppose you work as an aide in the
Alzheimer’s unit of a nursing home. You believe in the principle of
respect for autonomy, and since people can’t exercise their autonomy
109
when they’re deceived, you think it’s wrong to lie to the nursing-home
residents. For the same reason, you think it’s wrong to humor them in
their delusions. One day, however, as you walk down the hall you see
an elderly resident having an animated conversation with the image
of a lady in hoopskirts and bonnet that forms a part of the design of
the wallpaper. If you were to act on your principle of refusing to col-
laborate in the residents’ dementia, you’d go to her and explain that
the lady on the wall isn’t real. But in this case, with this resident, you
can see the delusion is harmless and the resident is having a lovely
time, so you walk on by. By thinking about this resident in particular,
rather than about morality in general, you provide her with morally
admirable care. This isn’t to say that you must never engage in abstract
thinking. But as Noddings put it, “We keep our objective thinking tied
to a relational stake at the heart of caring. When we fail to do this, we
can climb into clouds of abstraction, moving rapidly away from the
caring situation into a domain of objective and impersonal problems
where we are free to impose structure as we will. If I do not turn away
from my abstractions, I lose the one cared-for. Indeed, I lose myself
as one-caring, for I now care about a problem instead of a person”
(1984, 36).
Thinking Critically about the Ethics of Care
All right so far? Actually, no. Just look at the picture we’ve created
of the morally responsible caregiver. It seems that we have cleverly
and painstakingly reinvented the sexist stereotype of the self-effacing
housewife who is all wrapped up in her husband and children and who
doesn’t bother her pretty little head about public affairs. (This is an in-
stance of Lindemann’s ad hoc Rule Number 28: Sometimes when you
try to reinvent the wheel you end up with a flat tire.) In fact, a number
of feminist ethicists have argued (repeatedly) that each of the three
central features of the ethics of care reinforces that womanly stereo-
type, prescribing courses of action and ways of thinking that ought to
be condemned. First, because the caregiver is supposed to care about
her charge, she’s open to exploitation. Second, because the caregiver
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110 Overviews
is supposed to engross herself in the needs and wants of her charge,

she’s in danger of losing her integrity. And third, because the caregiver
is supposed to focus on the particular needs and circumstances of her
charge, she’s oblivious to the broader concerns of social justice. These
are precisely the harms inflicted on women by the gendered power
system that favors men, and for that reason alone the ethics should
presumably be resisted rather than embraced. Can the ethics of care
be saved? Should it be saved? Let’s take up each problem in turn and
see what can be done about it.
The Problem of Exploitation. Suppose your widowed grandmother
suffers from rheumatoid arthritis, and the disease has progressed to
the point where she can’t scrub floors, do the laundry, or carry heavy
grocery bags anymore. Your parents have moved to another city, so
that leaves you and your two brothers to give her the care she needs.
As it happens, though, neither of your brothers is willing to do his fair
share of the necessary shopping and cleaning, and they don’t see why
you should do it either. They think your grandmother should sell the
house in which she’s lived for fifty years and move to the city where
your parents live so that your mother can take care of her. But your
loving concern for your grandmother won’t let you accept this solu-
tion. Guided by the ethics of care, you believe that caring about her is a
good thing, something you ought to do. So you respond to her needs,
taking seriously her desire to remain in familiar surroundings as long
as possible. And this puts you in the position of being exploited by
your brothers. You have to care about your grandmother eve if they
don’t, which leaves you to shoulder a burden that should, in fairness,
be divided equally among all three grandchildren.
Kittay’s solution to the problem of exploitation is to call for finan-
cial, economic, and logistical support for caregivers (she calls them
dependency workers). Kittay argues in Love’s Labor (1999) that if you
start from the fact of human dependency instead of from the assump-
tion that “all men are created equal,” then giving care to those who must
depend on others for support can be seen as one of the requirements of
justice. And because dependency workers must themselves depend on
other people for support, caring for them can also be seen as a require-
ment of justice. She thinks that we’ll know better what form this state-
funded support should take after we see more of the consequences of
1
insisting that society has a responsibility to help dependency workers.

The philosopher Diemut Bubeck has a different solution. Like Kittay,
she points out that women do a vastly disproportionate amount of the
work of care and that this is morally unjustifiable, but unlike Kittay,
Bubeck thinks the way to stop exploiting caregivers is to require respite
care as a duty of citizenship. Her idea, modeled on military service, is
that men and women alike would spend some period of their lives in
a “caring service” whose mission would be to provide backup care for
unpaid dependency workers. Either of these solutions would keep you
from being too badly exploited as you take care of your grandmother,
and they might even alter your brothers’ understanding of their own
responsibilities, both to their grandmother and to you.
The Problem of Integrity. (Warning, Nazis again.) Here’s a real-life
example of how the ethics of care can pose a threat to the caregiver’s
integrity. Teresa Stangl, the wife of the Kommandant of the concentra-
tion camp at Treblinka, was an anti-Nazi and a devout Catholic. She
was horrified by what she knew of her husband’s job, but even so she
maintained a home for him to return to when he could. By providing
her husband with domestic comfort, Stangl probably made it easier
for him to carry out the Nazis’ murderous agenda, yet the ethics of
care seemingly requires her to take up this attitude of “not my will
but thine be done.” Isn’t engrossment a matter of displacing your own
concerns, needs, and desires with those of the person you care for? If
so, what are you supposed to do when a conflict arises between your
charge’s wants and purposes and your own sense of what’s right? Does
a care ethic require you to sacrifice your integrity?
One solution that some feminist ethicists have proposed is to build
self-care into the ethics of care so that it doesn’t become an ethics of
self-erasure. This solution only works, though, if you are caring for
yourself for the right reason. If you’ve dedicated yourself so com-
pletely to your Nazi husband that your only motive for taking care of
yourself is that it lets you take better care of him, you stand in danger
of losing yourself altogether. But if you take care of yourself because
you care about yourself, you won’t lose sight of your own needs, in-
cluding the need to do what you think is right. Cheshire Calhoun
argues that integrity isn’t just the personal virtue of holding fast to
the moral values that are central to your sense of who you are. She
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112 Overviews
thinks it’s also a social virtue, which you exercise by standing for your
best moral judgment to other people. Standing up for your own best
judgments is a way of being reliable. Others can count on you not
to fold under pressure, or, since nobody’s perfect, they know that if
you do fold momentarily, they can count on you to be sorry and do
your best to repair the damage. A notion of integrity that consists of
this kind of accountability to others isn’t compatible with doing what
you know is wrong. Care arises from engaging with another’s will, not
sacrificing your own.
The Problem of Obliviousness to Social Justice. Because the ethics
of care tells you to pay attention to the particulars of a given inter-
personal relationship rather than to be guided by abstract thinking,
Claudia Card complains in a 1990 essay in Hypatia that it can’t help us
resist the evil that strangers do to strangers. Not only does the ethics’
up-close-and-personal focus leave us too nearsighted to see sexism,
racism, homophobia, ethnocentrism, and disregard for future genera-
tions, says Card, it also offers only patchwork solutions to the problems
of world hunger, war, and homelessness. This is a complaint about the
scope of the ethics of care. It doesn’t cover enough of the moral terrain.
The political scientist Joan Tronto’s solution to this problem is to
redraw the boundary that political theorists and others have marked
between morality and politics. Since care is a practice embedded in
social life, she claims, it has to be understood in a political context and
not just a moral one. Defining care as “a species activity that includes
everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’
so that we can live in it as well as possible” (1993, 103), she rejects
the idea that care is restricted to human interaction and that it must
take place in a relationship between two individuals. Societies as well
as individuals can care about homelessness for example, and the me-
chanic who fixes your transmission is giving care to your car. But be-
cause Tronto agrees with Card that care isn’t a broad enough moral
idea to solve the problems of your responsibilities to distant strangers,
social inequalities, and the irresponsibility that goes hand in hand
with privilege, she thinks that the ethics of care is incomplete without
the politics of care. Such a politics recognizes and supports the caring
labor that’s crucial to the existence of society. It shifts the goals of so-
cial policy from preserving autonomy to fostering interdependence;
13
from promoting interests to meeting needs. It values citizens even

when they aren’t self-sufficient. And as a practice, care produces not
only morally praiseworthy people, but better citizens in a democracy
as well.
You’ll have to decide for yourself how well these solutions work and
whether some of them might distort the ethics in ways that are unde-
sirable. Held and Ruddick, for example, think that Tronto’s definition
of care is too broad, claiming that once you go beyond person-to-
person relationships you’re no longer engaging with another’s will, so
you’re doing something other than the ethics of care. Some feminists
think that even if these solutions are the right ones, the ethics is still
objectionable because it’s fundamentally an ethics for white, middle-
class women, the ones who are preoccupied with kids and carpools
and a nice house in the suburbs. That’s not how the sociologist Patricia
Hill Collins sees it, though. She argues that the care ethic is visible in
the African American practice of “other mothering”—looking after
the children in the community through networks of grandmothers,
cousins, aunts, and neighbors who share this responsibility with the
biological mother. Collins also sees the ethics in the call-and-response
pattern of speech used in traditional African American church serv-
ices: the preacher makes a claim that’s appraised and affirmed by
the congregation, in a back- and-forth, emotional expression of
selves-in-relation.
6.2. Feminist Responsibility Ethics
While the ethics of care is probably the best-known body of feminist

theory, it’s not the only one. Care ethics is based on a morally cru-
cial relationship between people that has too often been ignored or
dismissed by nonfeminist ethicists, but relationships other than those
involving care are also morally important, and they too give rise to
responsibilities. Nor are relationships the only source of the moral
demands made on us. For these reasons, several feminist ethicists
(me, for example) have gone beyond care to develop a broader ethics
of responsibility.
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114 Overviews
Margaret Urban Walker isn’t so much interested in the abstract

questions that philosophers have traditionally raised about the
conditions under which someone is morally responsible (Was he
free to act otherwise? Did she form the proper intention?) as she is in
examining how responsibility works in practice. If you look carefully
at how people “do” responsibility, you’ll see something amazingly in-
tricate. For starters, there’s the rich variety of actions that fall within
this category. You’re willing to be the designated driver, a way of taking
responsibility. You acknowledge paternity, a way of accepting respon-
sibility. You abdicate the throne, a way of relinquishing responsibility.
You blame your parents for your lousy life, a way of deflecting respon-
sibility. You hire a nanny, a way of redirecting responsibility. You say,
“None of this would have happened if you’d kept your big mouth shut,”
a way of assigning responsibility. You ask your coworker to cover for
you, a way of renegotiating responsibility. You argue over whose turn it
is to clean the bathroom, a way of contesting responsibility. And that’s
not all. We hold people to their promises, excuse them, demand an
explanation, give them a standing ovation, let then stew in their own
juice, award them the Nobel Prize, and sentence them to death by le-
thal injection.
These activities are accompanied by a rich array of feelings: regret,
indignation, delight, shame, pride, satisfaction, grief, hope, anxiety, or
fear. There are conventional ways of apologizing or excusing yourself,
raising someone’s expectations, offering compensation, and taking
the credit. And there are a number of different things for which we
hold ourselves and each other responsible: tasks, roles, acts, the failure
to act, outcomes of action beyond our control, habits, attitudes, and
other people.
Notice how dynamic all of this is. It’s like a very complicated snow-
ball fight involving many players. Some throw, some duck, some are
hit, some build fortifications, some team up, some keep making new
snowballs, and the little kids run around getting in the way. Actually,
though, it’s even more complex than this analogy allows, because how
you’re supposed to participate in your society’s practices of responsi-
bility depends just as much on your gender, class, age, ethnicity, and
race as it does on your own achievements. The matter of who gets
to do what to whom is largely determined by the social power that’s
15
distributed according to these demographics, and so is the matter of

who has to account to whom. To return to a consideration that came
up in the discussion of identities, if you’re the president of the com-
pany you can lay off half the workforce; if you’re the cleaning woman,
you can’t. By the same token, a Hispanic laborer is much more likely to
be drug-tested than is a white stockbroker. And just as social position
influences whether and to what extent you may take responsibility,
assign responsibility, or avoid responsibility, so too it plays a role in
determining who gets to set or change the rules that govern the prac-
tice. An ethics of responsibility, then, can accommodate group as well
as individual responsibilities.
As Walker points out, though, practices of responsibility are often
rigged. The social forces that allow some people to take responsibility
for the things that are fun or rewarding, while imposing on other
people the kinds of responsibility that keep them from enjoying many
of the good things in life, are the same forces that hide the fact that
this is going on.
Some of these forces naturalize the uneven distribution of respon-
sibility. Mothering is a great example of this: It’s women’s nature to
care for children because they have a biologically hardwired ma-
ternal instinct while men, of course, don’t. By making this arrange-
ment seem to be a function of biological determinism, its coercive
nature is kept largely hidden from view. By the same token, women
are “naturally” better at cleaning up after the party, soothing hurt
feelings, and getting hot meals on the table. (Okay, there’s one legit-
imate exception here: Women really are naturally better at shopping
for shoes.)
Other forces privatize unfair assignments of responsibility. Gays
and lesbians, for example, are supposed to keep their sex lives pri-
vate, since it’s “not appropriate” for them to hold hands in public or do
the other things straight people do that show they’re with somebody.
The baker in Colorado who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay
couple received a lot of public support from people who believed it
was reasonable and good that they should keep their sexual orienta-
tion to themselves. Similarly, black people are supposed to stay in their
own part of town, since it’s not “appropriate” for them to be too visible
in white neighborhoods.
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116 Overviews
Still other forces normalize the unfairness. They focus so much at-
tention on the norms or standards for fulfilling a particular responsi-
bility that the question of why that kind of person is forced to assume
the responsibility is completely hidden from view. Think of the many
ways in which girls are taught the norms for looking attractive: be
thin, use gel and a blow-dryer to style your hair, shave your legs and
armpits, know how to apply makeup and nail polish, be careful how
you sit, never sweat, and on and on and on. Incessantly barraging
women with how-tos and don’ts is a fine way of concealing the unfair-
ness of requiring them to take far more responsibility for their appear-
ance than men take for theirs.
Notice that practices of responsibility look forward as well as
backward. Card points out that people who have suffered from un-
fair distributions of responsibility can do more than make backward-
looking assignments of blame for past wrongs. A woman who’s been
raped, for instance, can adopt a forward-looking stance that allows
her to take responsibility for what happened to her, not in the sense
of blaming herself, but in the sense of refusing to be a victim. She can
be responsible for rebuilding her life at the same time as she holds her
attacker responsible for his deed.
But what about the harder cases, where the person who wrongs
you doesn’t realize that what he’s doing is wrong? Normally, of course,
adults are expected to know the moral rules and to be aware of the
standards by which other people judge them. That’s part of what it
means to be a morally competent person. But Cheshire Calhoun
observes that morally competent people can be morally incompetent
in abnormal contexts. She’s thinking, for instance, of the really
thoughtful guy who offers to help his wife with the housework. In the
normal moral context, the injustice of assigning the responsibility for
vacuuming and dusting on the basis of gender rather than according
to who lives there is concealed. She just naturally cares more about
keeping the place clean than he does. Women are better at that sort of
thing than men. Since the normal context is the one this guy operates
out of, he can’t see the sexism behind the assumption that he’s doing
something nice rather than doing his share. That being the case, it
hardly seems fair for us to blame him. But feminists inhabit what
Calhoun calls an abnormal moral context—“abnormal” in the sense
17
that you can see things from it that aren’t visible in the normal context,
like the sexism in the husband’s offer. Because he’s morally incompe-
tent in the feminist context, we could excuse him on the same grounds
that we excuse young children’s wrongdoing: he’s not responsible for
his attitude because he’s still learning the moral rules. But Calhoun
thinks we should hold him responsible anyway. When we reproach
people who engage in sexist behavior, we teach them that what they’re
doing is wrong, motivate them to change the way they act, and show
that we respect them instead of treating them like children. This is one
way in which feminists can take responsibility for sexism.
A careful look at all the complicated activities that make up our
practices of responsibility, says Walker, suggests that morality isn’t
what the moral theorists working out of the Enlightenment tradition
seem to think it is. That tradition offers us a picture of the moral agent
as a solitary judge who uses lawlike principles that have been logically
deduced from some comprehensive moral theory to figure out what’s
right and wrong and to make rational choices. It assumes that mo-
rality is essentially knowledge and that the core of moral knowledge
is essentially theoretical. It’s a picture of general formulas applied to
particular cases whose “superfluous” details have been cleared away
so that the cases can be sorted into broad types, which makes for uni-
form judgments. It’s a picture of morality as an individually action-
guiding system within or for a person.
A feminist ethics of responsibility, by contrast, pictures morality as
something we do together. It permeates all of social life, so it can’t be
partitioned off from politics or from any other aspect of society. Morality
gives us a common vocabulary and a set of shared understandings
that we can use to define or contest our responsibilities. As such,
says Walker, it “both presupposes and seeks a continuing common
life” (1998, 63), a way of going on together as “us.” She calls this an
“expressive-collaborative” view of morality. It’s expressive in that the
intricate dance of taking, deflecting, and assigning responsibility by
appealing to socially recognized values is the medium through which
we express who we are. It’s collaborative in that the goal of morality
isn’t only to discover but also to construct shared understandings of
how to live well together. The test of the moral soundness of these
understandings is in the goodness of the social arrangements they
18
118 Overviews
produce and the ability of the people within those arrangements to

make moral sense of themselves in the life they live together.
These two samples of feminist moral theory display some
common themes. Both reject the idea that persons are punctual
and unconnected, and insist that selves are always nested in webs of
relationships. Both emphasize differences among people rather than
making abstract generalizations about human nature. Both regard
gender as an unjust arrangement of social power. Both use the lan-
guage of responsibilities rather than rights or duties. And both begin
from careful examinations of a number of actual, real-time personal
interactions. (This is Lindemann’s ad hoc Rule Number 4, borrowed
from Wittgenstein: It’s a mistake to theorize from too limited a set of
examples.) This on-the-ground quality is highly characteristic of femi-
nist ethics. In the next three chapters, however, we’re going to get even
closer to the ground, to see how feminist ethicists map the gendered
terrain of personal and social issues surrounding advances in biomed-
icine, violence, and globalization.
For Further Reading
Card, Claudia. 1990. “Caring and Evil.” Review essay. Hypatia 5, no.
1: 101–8.
Card, Claudia. 1996. The Unnatural Lottery: Character and Moral Luck.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Family Caregiver Alliance. 2015. “Women and Caregiving: Facts and Figures.”
https://www.caregiver.org/women-and-caregiving-facts-and-figures
Gilligan, Carol. 1982. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and
Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Held, Virginia. 1993. Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society and
Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Keller, Jean, and Eva Feder Kittay. 2018. “Feminist Care Ethics.” In
Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy, ed. Ann Garry, Serene J.
Khader, and Alison Stone. New York: Routledge, 540–55.
Kittay, Eva Feder. 1999. Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and
Dependency. New York: Routledge.
19
Maccoby, Eleanor E., and Robert H. Mnookin. 1998. Dividing the

Child: Social and Legal Dilemmas of Custody. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Noddings, Nel. 1984. Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral
Education. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ruddick, Sara. 1989. Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace.
Boston: Beacon.
Tronto, Joan. 1993. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of
Care. New York: Routledge.
Walker, Margaret Urban. 1998. Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in
Ethics. New York: Routledge.

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Lindemann, H. (2019). An invitation to feminist ethics: Oxford University Press.

5.1. Social Contract Theory

Suppose there’s no God to tell us what to do or punish those who

no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and

Hobbes took this dismal view because outside of an ordered society,

Standard Moral Theories 77

maximize their share of what he called “primary goods,” the things

1. The Liberty Principle. Each person is to have an equal right to

Rawls offered three justifications for these principles of justice.

Standard Moral Theories 79

The philosophers David Hume (1711–​1776), Jeremy Bentham (1748–​

Standard Moral Theories 81

happiness of the party whose interest is in question.” He proposed a

Standard Moral Theories 83

The consequences be damned, said Immanuel Kant (1724–​1804). In

To act freely, Kant wrote, is to act without being constrained either

All men are mortal.

When you say to yourself, “Therefore Socrates is mortal,” it doesn’t

Standard Moral Theories 85

but on everybody else as well. Law is impartial, applying to eve-

be a law at the same time, you’re caught in a contradiction. And since

Standard Moral Theories 87

5.4. What’s Wrong with This Picture?

These thumbnail sketches of the more prominent moral theories are

The Picture of the Person

Standard Moral Theories 89

Standard Moral Theories 91

excellent reasons to reject various aspects of the ideal on moral, polit-

The Picture of Society

Standard Moral Theories 93

Any theory that’s primarily concerned with the basic structure of

standing, concerns, and occupations look suspiciously like those of

Standard Moral Theories 95

The Picture of Rationality

Standard Moral Theories 97

5.5. The PowerPoint Problem

Taken together, then, the three pictures underlying social contract

Standard Moral Theories 99

While the theories can’t be dismissed, then, their neglect of gender

For Further Reading

Baier, Annette C. 1985. “Cartesian Persons.” In Postures of the Mind: Essays

The late Harvard psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg claimed that people

Because your level of moral maturity has presumably hit stage 4 or

Feminist Ethics of Care and Responsibility 101

Amy, who sees the problem as a narrative of relationships that extend

Feminist Ethics of Care and Responsibility 103

recognized, regular way of doing something that has a point to it.

6.1. The Ethics of Care

Feminist Ethics of Care and Responsibility 105

the standards we could use to judge whether someone is doing the

The Point of Mothering

Broadly speaking, the point of mothering is to bring about the child’s

Feminist Ethics of Care and Responsibility 107

General Features of Care

Feminist Ethics of Care and Responsibility 109

Thinking Critically about the Ethics of Care

is supposed to engross herself in the needs and wants of her charge,

Feminist Ethics of Care and Responsibility 111

The philosophers David Hume (1711–1776), Jeremy Bentham (1748–

The consequences be damned, said Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). In

While the ethics of care is probably the best-known body of feminist