Care Ethics: Moving Forward

Abstract

The three books considered here take very different approaches within the developing area of feminist ethics that grow out of the work of Carol Gilligan and other theorists of care. Juxtaposing the books allows us to see some interesting elements in the evolution of thinking about and to raise some questions about lines of future development in feminist ethics. Susan Hekman's Moral Voices, Moral Selves (1995) is not so much about the of per se as it is about the philosophical possibilities of Carol Gilligan's work. In this regard, Hekman's work represents a different fork on this branch of the evolutionary tree of feminist ethics than most of the ethic of care literature. Hekman begins her book with an argument about the radical implications of Carol Gilligan's psychological writings. Hekman argues that Gilligan's writings are best understood not as an alternative reading of psychological theories of moral development but as a displacement of this scientific model altogether. Hekman reads Gilligan as a call, instead, for multiple voices, narratives, and accounts of development. Hekman situates Gilligan's work within a sea change in thinking about the universalist and absolutist epistemology of modernity. Stepping outside of the paradigm of modem man, Hekman explores many of the possibilities and problems within postmodern alternatives. She sets as her goals both to offer a description of these changes and to argue for the alternative account of moral life they imply. In a chapter in which she considers the views of philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum, Hekman suggests that there is no turning back from the criticisms postmodern thinkers have raised; Aristotle is no answer. Nevertheless, Hekman is aware of and tries to counter the claims that postmodem thinking is necessarily depoliticizing. She argues that changing our notions of moral agency does not require that we abolish agency. In her constructive argument, then, she turns to Ludwig Wittgenstein's use of language games to describe what she thinks