リベラルの夢から醒めて

Abstract

According to Michael Walzer, “[i]nvoluntary associations is a permanent feature of social existence” and we cannot envision the more equal society without taking this social reality seriously. The paper starts with analyzing Walzer's claim that the gender hierarchy is the most ancient, enduring and “hardest” constrains of any other categorical inequalities and concludes with the suggestion of “social” possibility for the ethics of care to go beyond the current political boundaries. Firstly, I examine why feminist politics and theory seem to be unlocked within women's world and therefore they are often criticized by its emotional, sometimes intensively passionate way of arguments. However, as Walzer pointed out, involuntary lives such as female beings offer also the space of opposition and resistance. Then, I try to argue that the ethics of care, which mainly focus on how our society should maintain the relation of care without dominance and violence, provides the collective empowerment model for feminist politics, instead of the emancipation model. In the third section, I examine Eva Kittay's argument, which criticizes radically Rawlsian idea of liberal society constituting of autonomous, free, and equal citizens. Here, I distinguish the ethics of care from altruism, self-sacrifice, even so-called maternal love. The ethics of care prohibits anyone from being enforced on care responsibilities to needy dependents as well as deteriorating the relation of care into dominant relationship. In other words, the ethics of care tries to show us how we should begin to create our connectedness, which right-based ethics, such as ethics of justice takes for granted. I conclude the paper with remarking that the ethics of care is a certain kind of revolutionary program of feminist politics because it is committed to overthrow the most entrenched hierarchy, that is, the hierarchy of gender by empowering activities and relationship which are used to suppose that they belong to the women's world. The relation of care can provide us another kind of dream of creating a new kind of human relationship beyond the current political borders in global society.