Ethics, Justice, and the “Private Sphere”

Abstract

Issues of family justice, in particular--from child custody and terms of divorce to physical and sexual abuse of wives and children--have become increasingly visible and pressing, and are commanding increasing attention from police and court systems. There is clearly a major justice crisis' in contemporary society arising from issues of gender (Okin, 1989, p. 7). This essay is a first effort to explore an issue that has troubled me for years, but that until now I had not given kind of sustained thought it merits. I want to reflect at some length about matters of ethics and justice germane to discursive construction of so-called private sphere. I am concerned about lack of, and need for, justice in personal relations. Put another way, I believe that there are reasons to challenge conventional moral theories and related sedimented cultural assumptions which maintain not only that there are distinct public and private spheres of cultural but also that these spheres are and should be regulated by different kinds of standards. The ideas I advance in this paper were rehearsed in my book, Who Cares?: Women, Care, and Culture (1994) and my critical analyses of Carol Gilligan's of care (Wood, 1994). In this essay, I will argue that decisively immoral actions in families are discursively normalized through public institutions and widely embraced justifications for not intervening in private relations. I am suggesting that prevailing discursive structures and practices that affect families reflect assumptions of major moral theories that exclude families from regulation by and accountability to public codes of justice. The result is private relations that too often violate conditions for minimally civil and safe life. I recognize that my thesis challenges conventional thought in two respects. First, idea that social, public regulation is appropriate and necessary to ensure justice in private relations disputes traditional split between public and private as discussed early by Aristotle in his Ethics and more recently by scholars such as Rawls (1971, 1975) and Unger (1986).(1) Like many others before and since his time, Aristotle argued that personal ethics govern and ensure quality of life in private sphere. For Aristotle and many who followed him, it is only in public sphere that we must create habits (laws, rules, policies, and codes) to ensure civil conduct among individuals not bound by love and affection. The view that private relations are rightly ordered by personal feelings is reflected in more modern theories of ethics, justice, and social life. Second, and by extension, my thesis reverses a long-held and substantial premise of Western societies, forcefully articulated by Reinhold Niebuhr (1932/1960), among others, that private ethics are not applicable to public decisions and actions. That same premise underlies Kohlberg's (1984) response to Gilligan's charge that his theory of moral development failed to account for an ethic of care, which Gilligan claimed was more typical of women and was relevant to personal, concrete settings in which women's lives more than men's are embedded. To that, Kohlberg replied that he and Gilligan were interested in two different realms of life: His concern was with public morality or what he called the good life, whereas her concern was private relations. Kohlberg insisted that private life is and should be regulated by principles different than those relevant to public morality.(2) Turning that argument on its head, I am asserting, first, that principles of public justice should apply to domestic relations. I hasten to add that I do not regard principles of public justice as assuring ideal conditions for private relations; I do, however, regard them as minimum standards to safeguard individuals against injustice, exploitation, and harm in private relationships. …