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Caring about Justice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Jonathan Dancy
Jonathan Dancy
Affiliation:
University of Keele
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Extract

In the post-Gilligan debate about the differences, if any, between the ways in which people of different genders see the moral world in which they live, I detect two assumptions. These can be found in Gilligan's early work, and have infected the thought of others. The first, perhaps surprisingly, is Kohlberg's Kantian account of one moral perspective, the one more easily or more naturally operated by men and which has come to be called the justice perspective. (What I mean by calling this Kantian will emerge shortly.) This is the perspective whose claims Gilligan initially found suspect, not because she thought it a distorted account of the way in which male subjects operated, but because she disputed its claims to be the only account or the best or dominant one. Throughout the ensuing debate Kohlberg's account has been left in place, and challenged not for correctness but only for uniqueness.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 67 , Issue 262 , October 1992 , pp. 447 - 466
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1992

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References

1 In a Different Voice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 58–59.Google Scholar

2 See Gilligan, C. and Wiggins, G., ‘The Origins of Morality in Early Childhood Relationships’, in Kagan, J. and Launch, S. eds The Emergence of Morality in Young Children (Cambridge: Harvard, 1987)Google Scholar, and Flanagan, O. and Jackson, K., ‘Justice, Care and Gender: The Post-Gilligan Debate Revisited’, Ethics 97 (1987), 622–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 See Kohlberg, L., The Psychology of Moral Development (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984), 225.Google Scholar

4 Ross, W. D., The Right and The Good (Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1930), esp. ch. 2Google Scholar, and The Foundations of Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939).Google Scholar

5 There is of course an interesting question of method here: is it a reputable method of approach to suppose the central element of the justice approach to be that one which is common to all versions (supposing there to be only one)? One might claim that this approach constitutes a crude attitude towards theory, supposing theories to be ad hoc collections of mutually indifferent parts.

6 In a Different Voice, 26.Google Scholar

7 Ibid., 29.

8 Ibid., 26–27.

9 Ibid., 27.

10 Ibid., 26.

11 Ibid., 28.

12 Ibid., 28.

13 Ibid., 29.

14 For recent attempts in this direction, see McDowell, John ‘Virtue And Reason’, The Monist, 62 (1979), 331–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Non-cognitivism and Rule-following’, in Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule, Holtzman, S. and Leich, C. (eds) (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981)Google Scholar. See also my Moral Reasons (Blackwell, forthcoming).

15 Gilligan, and Wiggins, , ‘The Origins of Morality’, op. cit.Google Scholar

16 I am particularly grateful to Candace Vogler for helping me to understand the nature of a more radical feminist attitude in this area, and want also to thank David Bakhurst, Elisa Carse, Sarah Dancy and Christine Sypnowich for helpful discussion of earlier drafts.