This is not an ESSAY. No Plagiarism. Read the material and write a 250 word summary summarizing the main idea.  

⁞ Instructions: 2

After reading all of Chapter 7, please select ONE of the following primary source readings:

• “Nichomachean Ethics” by Aristotle (starting on page 179) -or-
• “The Need for More than Justice” by Annette C. Baier (starting on page 188) 

Write a short, objective summary of 250 words which summarizes the main ideas being put forward by the author in this selection.

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The Need for More Than Justice

ANNETTE C. BAIER

In recent decades in North American social and moral philosophy, alongside the
development and discussion of widely influential theories of justice, taken as
Rawls takes it as the ‘first virtue of social institutions,’1 there has been a counter-
movement gathering strength, one coming from some interesting sources. For some
of the most outspoken of the diverse group who have in a variety of ways been
challenging the assumed supremacy of justice among the moral and social virtues
are members of those sections of society whom one might have expected to be
especially aware of the supreme importance of justice, namely blacks and women.
Those who have only recently seen the correction or partial correction of long-
standing racist and sexist injustices to their race and sex, are among the
philosophers now suggesting that justice is only one virtue among many, and one
that may need the presence of the others in order to deliver its own undenied value.
Among these philosophers of the philosophical counterculture, as it were—but an
increasingly large counterculture—I include Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Stocker,
Lawrence Blum, Michael Slote, Laurence Thomas, Claudia Card, Alison Jaggar,
Susan Wolf and a whole group of men and women, myself included, who have
been influenced by the writings of Harvard educational psychologist Carol
Gilligan, whose book In a Different Voice (Harvard 1982; hereafter D.V.) caused a
considerable stir both in the popular press and, more slowly, in the philosophical
journals.

Let me say quite clearly at this early point that there is little disagreement that
justice is a social value of very great importance, and injustice an evil. Nor would
those who have worked on theories of justice want to deny that other things matter
besides justice. Rawls, for example, incorporates the value of freedom into his
account of justice, so that denial of basic freedoms counts as injustice. Rawls also
leaves room for a wider theory of the right, of which the theory of justice is just a
part. Still, he does claim that justice is the ‘first’ virtue of social institutions, and it
is only that claim about priority that I think has been challenged. It is easy to
exaggerate the differences of view that exist, and I want to avoid that. The
differences are as much in emphasis as in substance, or we can say that they are
differences in tone of voice. But these differences do tend to make a difference in
approaches to a wide range of topics not just in moral theory but in areas like
medical ethics, where the discussion used to be conducted in terms of patients’
rights, of informed consent, and so on, but now tends to get conducted in an
enlarged moral vocabulary, which draws on what Gilligan calls the ethics of care as
well as that of justice.

For ‘care’ is the new buzz-word. It is not, as Shakespeare’s Portia demanded,
mercy that is to season justice, but a less authoritarian humanitarian supplement, a
felt concern for the good of others and for community with them. The ‘cold jealous
virtue of justice’ (Hume) is found to be too cold, and it is ‘warmer’ more
communitarian virtues and social ideals that are being called in to supplement it.
One might say that liberty and equality are being found inadequate without
fraternity, except that ‘fraternity’ will be quite the wrong word, if as Gilligan
initially suggested, it is women who perceive this value most easily. (‘Sorority’ will
do no better, since it is too exclusive, and English has no gender-neuter word for
the mutual concern of siblings.) She has since modified this claim, allowing that
there are two perspectives on moral and social issues that we all tend to alternate
between, and which are not always easy to combine, one of them what she called
the justice perspective, the other the care perspective. It is increasingly obvious that
there are many male philosophical spokespersons for the care perspective

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(Laurence Thomas, Lawrence Blum, Michael Stocker) so that it cannot be the
prerogative of women. Nevertheless Gilligan still wants to claim that women are
most unlikely to take only the justice perspective, as some men are claimed to, at
least until some mid-life crisis jolts them into ‘bifocal’ moral vision (see D.V., ch.
6).

Gilligan in her book did not offer any explanatory theory of why there should
be any difference between female and male moral outlook, but she did tend to link
the naturalness to women of the care perspective with their role as primary care-
takers of young children, that is with their parental and specifically maternal role.
She avoided the question of whether it is their biological or their social parental
role that is relevant, and some of those who dislike her book are worried precisely
by this uncertainty. Some find it retrograde to hail as a special sort of moral
wisdom an outlook that may be the product of the socially enforced restriction of
women to domestic roles (and the reservation of such roles for them alone). For
that might seem to play into the hands of those who still favor such restriction.
(Marxists, presumably, will not find it so surprising that moral truths might depend
for their initial clear voicing on the social oppression, and memory of it, of those
who voice the truths.) Gilligan did in the first chapter of D.V. cite the theory of
Nancy Chodorow (as presented in The Reproduction of Mothering [Berkeley
1978]) which traces what appears as gender differences in personality to early
social development, in particular to the effects of the child’s primary care-taker
being or not being of the same gender as the child. Later, both in ‘The
Conquistador and the Dark Continent: Reflections on the Nature of Love’
(Daedalus [Summer 1984]), and ‘The Origins of Morality in Early Childhood’ (in
press), she develops this explanation. She postulates two evils that any infant may
become aware of, the evil of detachment or isolation from others whose love one
needs, and the evil of relative powerlessness and weakness. Two dimensions of
moral development are thereby set—one aimed at achieving satisfying community
with others, the other aiming at autonomy or equality of power. The relative
predominance of one over the other development will depend both upon the
relative salience of the two evils in early childhood, and on early and later
reinforcement or discouragement in attempts made to guard against these two evils.
This provides the germs of a theory about why, given current customs of
childrearing, it should be mainly women who are not content with only the moral
outlook that she calls the justice perspective, necessary though that was and is seen
by them to have been to their hard won liberation from sexist oppression. They,
like the blacks, used the language of rights and justice to change their own social
position, but nevertheless see limitations in that language, according to Gilligan’s
findings as a moral psychologist. She reports their discontent with the individualist
more or less Kantian moral framework that dominates Western moral theory and
which influenced moral psychologists such as Lawrence Kohlberg, to whose
conception of moral maturity she seeks an alternative. Since the target of Gilligan’s
criticism is the dominant Kantian tradition, and since that has been the target also
of moral philosophers as diverse in their own views as Bernard Williams, Alasdair
MacIntyre, Philippa Foot, Susan Wolf, Claudia Card, her book is of interest as
much for its attempt to articulate an alternative to the Kantian justice perspective as
for its implicit raising of the question of male bias in Western moral theory,
especially liberal-democratic theory. For whether the supposed blind spots of that
outlook are due to male bias, or to nonparental bias, or to early traumas of
powerlessness or to early resignation to ‘detachment’ from others, we need first to
be persuaded that they are blind spots before we will have any interest in their
cause and cure. Is justice blind to important social values, or at least only one-
eyed? What is it that comes into view from the ‘care perspective’ that is not seen
from the ‘justice perspective’?

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Gilligan’s position here is mostly easily described by contrasting it with that of
Kohlberg, against which she developed it. Kohlberg, influenced by Piaget and the
Kantian philosophical tradition as developed by John Rawls, developed a theory
about typical moral development which saw it to progress from a pre-conventional
level, where what is seen to matter is pleasing or not offending parental authority-
figures, through a conventional level in which the child tries to fit in with a group,
such as a school community, and conform to its standards and rules, to a post-
conventional critical level, in which such conventional rules are subjected to tests,
and where those tests are of a Utilitarian, or, eventually, a Kantian sort—namely
ones that require respect for each person’s individual rational will, or autonomy,
and conformity to any implicit social contract such wills are deemed to have made,
or to any hypothetical ones they would make if thinking clearly. What was found
when Kohlberg’s questionnaires (mostly by verbal response to verbally sketched
moral dilemmas) were applied to female as well as male subjects, Gilligan reports,
is that the girls and women not only scored generally lower than the boys and men,
but tended to revert to the lower stage of the conventional level even after briefly
(usually in adolescence) attaining the postconventional level. Piaget’s finding that
girls were deficient in ‘the legal sense’ was confirmed.

These results led Gilligan to wonder if there might not be a quite different
pattern of development to be discerned, at least in female subjects. She therefore
conducted interviews designed to elicit not just how far advanced the subjects were
towards an appreciation of the nature and importance of Kantian autonomy, but
also to find out what the subjects themselves saw as progress or lack of it, what
conceptions of moral maturity they came to possess by the time they were adults.
She found that although the Kohlberg version of moral maturity as respect for
fellow persons, and for their rights as equals (rights including that of free
association), did seem shared by many young men, the women tended to speak in a
different voice about morality itself and about moral maturity. To quote Gilligan,
‘Since the reality of interconnexion is experienced by women as given rather than
freely contracted, they arrive at an understanding of life that reflects the limits of
autonomy and control. As a result, women’s development delineates the path not
only to a less violent life but also to a maturity realized by interdependence and
taking care’ (D.V., 172). She writes that there is evidence that ‘women perceive and
construe social reality differently from men, and that these differences center
around experiences of attachment and separation . . . because women’s sense of
integrity appears to be intertwined with an ethics of care, so that to see themselves
as women is to see themselves in a relationship of connexion, the major changes in
women’s lives would seem to involve changes in the understanding and activities
of care’ (D.V., 171). She contrasts this progressive understanding of care, from
merely pleasing others to helping and nurturing, with the sort of progression that is
involved in Kohlberg’s stages, a progression in the understanding, not of mutual
care, but of mutual respect, where this has its Kantian overtones of distance, even
of some fear for the respected, and where personal autonomy and independence,
rather than more satisfactory interdependence, are the paramount values.

This contrast, one cannot but feel, is one which Gilligan might have used the
Marxist language of alienation to make. For the main complaint about the Kantian
version of a society with its first virtue justice, constructed as respect for equal
rights to formal goods such as having contracts kept, due process, equal
opportunity including opportunity to participate in political activities leading to
policy and law-making, to basic liberties of speech, free association and assembly,
religious worship, is that none of these goods do much to ensure that the people
who have and mutually respect such rights will have any other relationships to one
another than the minimal relationship needed to keep such a ‘civil society’ going.
They may well be lonely, driven to suicide, apathetic about their work and about
participation in political processes, find their lives meaningless and have no wish to

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leave offspring to face the same meaningless existence. Their rights, and respect for
rights, are quite compatible with very great misery, and misery whose causes are
not just individual misfortunes and psychic sickness, but social and moral
impoverishment.

What Gilligan’s older male subjects complain of is precisely this sort of
alienation from some dimly glimpsed better possibility for human beings, some
richer sort of network of relationships. As one of Gilligan’s male subjects put it,
‘People have real emotional needs to be attached to something, and equality does
not give you attachment. Equality fractures society and places on every person the
burden of standing on his own two feet’ (D.V., 167). It is not just the difficulty of
self-reliance which is complained of, but its socially ‘fracturing’ effect. Whereas
the younger men, in their college years, had seen morality as a matter of reciprocal
non-interference, this old man begins to see it as reciprocal attachment. ‘Morality is
. . . essential . . . for creating the kind of environment, interaction between people,
that is a prerequisite to the fulfillment of individual goals. If you want other people
not to interfere with your pursuit of whatever you are into, you have to play the
game,’ says the spokesman for traditional liberalism (D.V., 98). But if what one is
‘into’ is interconnexion, interdependence rather than an individual autonomy that
may involve ‘detachment,’ such a version of morality will come to seem
inadequate. And Gilligan stresses that the interconnexion that her mature women
subjects, and some men, wanted to sustain was not merely freely chosen
interconnexion, nor interconnexion between equals, but also the sort of
interconnexion that can obtain between a child and her unchosen mother and father,
or between a child and her unchosen older and younger siblings, or indeed between
most workers and their unchosen fellow workers, or most citizens and their
unchosen fellow citizens.

A model of a decent community different from the liberal one is involved in
the version of moral maturity that Gilligan voices. It has in many ways more in
common with the older religion-linked versions of morality and a good society than
with the modern Western liberal idea. That perhaps is why some find it so
dangerous and retrograde. Yet it seems clear that it also has much in common with
what we call Hegelian versions of moral maturity and of social health and malaise,
both with Marxist versions and with so-called right-Hegelian views.

Let me try to summarize the main differences, as I see them, between on the
one hand Gilligan’s version of moral maturity and the sort of social structures that
would encourage, express and protect it, and on the other the orthodoxy she sees
herself to be challenging. I shall from now on be giving my own interpretation of
the significance of her challenges, not merely reporting them. The most obvious
point is the challenge to the individualism of the Western tradition, to the fairly
entrenched belief in the possibility and desirability of each person pursuing his own
good in his own way, constrained only by a minimal formal common good, namely
a working legal apparatus that enforces contracts and protects individuals from
undue interference by others. Gilligan reminds us that noninterference can,
especially for the relatively powerless, such as the very young, amount to neglect,
and even between equals can be isolating and alienating. On her less individualist
version of individuality, it becomes defined by responses to dependence and to
patterns of interconnexion, both chosen and unchosen. It is not something a person
has, and which she then chooses relationships to suit, but something that develops
out of a series of dependencies and interdependencies, and responses to them. This
conception of individuality is not flatly at odds with, say, Rawls’ Kantian one, but
there is at least a difference of tone of voice between speaking as Rawls does of
each of us having our own rational life plan, which a just society’s moral traffic
rules will allow us to follow, and which may or may not include close association
with other persons, and speaking as Gilligan does of a satisfactory life as involving
‘progress of affiliative relationship’ (D.V., 170) where ‘the concept of identity

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expands to include the experience of interconnexion’ (D.V., 173). Rawls can allow
that progress to Gilligan-style moral maturity may be a rational life plan, but not a
moral constraint on every life-pattern. The trouble is that it will not do just to say
‘let this version of morality be an optional extra. Let us agree on the essential
minimum, that is on justice and rights, and let whoever wants to go further and
cultivate this more demanding ideal of responsibility and care.’ For, first, it cannot
be satisfactorily cultivated without closer cooperation from others than respect for
rights and justice will ensure, and second, the encouragement of some to cultivate it
while others do not could easily lead to exploitation of those who do. It obviously
has suited some in most societies well enough that others take on the
responsibilities of care (for the sick, the helpless, the young) leaving them free to
pursue their own less altruistic goods. Volunteer forces of those who accept an ethic
of care, operating within a society where the power is exercised and the institutions
designed, redesigned, or maintained by those who accept a less communal ethic of
minimally constrained self-advancement, will not be the solution. The liberal
individualists may be able to ‘tolerate’ the more communally minded, if they keep
the liberals’ rules, but it is not so clear that the more communally minded can be
content with just those rules, nor be content to be tolerated and possibly exploited.

For the moral tradition which developed the concept of rights, autonomy and
justice is the same tradition that provided ‘justifications’ of the oppression of those
whom the primary right-holders depended on to do the sort of work they
themselves preferred not to do. The domestic work was left to women and slaves,
and the liberal morality for right-holders was surreptitiously supplemented by a
different set of demands made on domestic workers. As long as women could be
got to assume responsibility for the care of home and children, and to train their
children to continue the sexist system, the liberal morality could continue to be the
official morality, by turning its eyes away from the contribution made by those it
excluded. The long unnoticed moral proletariat were the domestic workers, mostly
female. Rights have usually been for the privileged. Talking about laws, and the
rights those laws recognize and protect, does not in itself ensure that the group of
legislators and rights-holders will not be restricted to some elite. Bills of rights
have usually been proclamations of the rights of some in-group, barons,
landowners, males, whites, non-foreigners. The ‘justice perspective,’ and the legal
sense that goes with it, are shadowed by their patriarchal past. What did Kant, the
great prophet of autonomy, say in his moral theory about women? He said they
were incapable of legislation, not fit to vote, that they needed the guidance of more
‘rational’ males.2 Autonomy was not for them, only for first-class, really rational
persons. It is ironic that Gilligan’s original findings in a way confirm Kant’s views
—it seems that autonomy really may not be for women. Many of them reject that
ideal (D.V., 48), and have been found not as good at making rules as are men. But
where Kant concludes—‘so much the worse for women,’ we can conclude—‘so
much the worse for the male fixation on the special skill of drafting legislation, for
the bureaucratic mentality of rule worship, and for the male exaggeration of the
importance of independence over mutual interdependence.’

It is however also true that the moral theories that made the concept of a
person’s rights central were not just the instruments for excluding some persons,
but also the instruments used by those who demanded that more and more persons
be included in the favored group. Abolitionists, reformers, women, used the
language of rights to assert their claims to inclusion in the group of full members of
a community. The tradition of liberal moral theory has in fact developed so as to
include the women it had for so long excluded, to include the poor as well as rich,
blacks and whites, and so on. Women like Mary Wollstonecraft used the male
moral theories to good purpose. So we should not be wholly ungrateful for those

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male moral theories, for all their objectionable earlier content. They were
undoubtedly patriarchal, but they also contained the seeds of the challenge, or
antidote, to this patriarchal poison.

But when we transcend the values of the Kantians, we should not forget the
facts of history—that those values were the values of the oppressors of women.
The Christian church, whose version of the moral law Aquinas codified, in his very
legalistic moral theory, still insists on the maleness of the God it worships, and
jealously reserves for males all the most powerful positions in its hierarchy. Its
patriarchical prejudice is open and avowed. In the secular moral theories of men,
the sexist patriarchal prejudice is today often less open, not as blatant as it is in
Aquinas, in the later natural law tradition, and in Kant and Hegel, but is often still
there. No moral theorist today would say that women are unfit to vote, to make
laws, or to rule a nation without powerful male advisors (as most queens had), but
the old doctrines die hard. In one of the best male theories we have, John Rawls’s
theory, a key role is played by the idea of the ‘head of a household.’ It is heads of
households who are to deliberate behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ of historical details,
and of details of their own special situation, to arrive at the ‘just’ constitution for a
society. Now of course Rawls does not think or say that these ‘heads’ are fathers
rather than mothers. But if we have really given up the age-old myth of women
needing, as Grotius put it, to be under the ‘eye’ of a more ‘rational’ male protector
and master, then how do families come to have any one ‘head,’ except by the death
or desertion of one parent? They will either be two-headed, or headless. Traces of
the old patriarchal poison still remain in even the best contemporary moral
theorizing. Few may actually say that women’s place is in the home, but there is
much muttering, when unemployment figures rise, about how the relatively recent
flood of women into the work force complicates the problem, as if it would be a
good thing if women just went back home whenever unemployment rises, to leave
the available jobs for the men. We still do not really have a wide acceptance of the
equal rights of women to employment outside the home. Nor do we have wide
acceptance of the equal duty of men to perform those domestic tasks which in no
way depend on special female anatomy, namely cooking, cleaning, and the care of
weaned children. All sorts of stories (maybe true stories), about children’s need for
one ‘primary’ parent, who must be the mother if the mother breast-feeds the child,
shore up the unequal division of domestic responsibility between mothers and
fathers, wives and husbands. If we are really to transvalue the values of our
patriarchal past, we need to rethink all of those assumptions, really test those
psychological theories. And how will men ever develop an understanding of the
‘ethics of care’ if they continue to be shielded or kept from that experience of
caring for a dependent child, which complements the experience we all have had of
being cared for as dependent children? These experiences form the natural
background for the development of moral maturity as Gilligan’s women saw it.

Exploitation aside, why would women, once liberated, not be content to have
their version of morality merely tolerated? Why should they not see themselves as
voluntarily, for their own reasons, taking on more than the liberal rules demand,
while having no quarrel with the content of those rules themselves, nor with their
remaining the only ones that are expected to be generally obeyed? To see why, we
need to move on to three more differences between the Kantian liberals (usually
contractarians) and their critics. These concern the relative weight put on
relationships between equals, and the relative weight put on freedom of choice, and
on the authority of intellect over emotions. It is a typical feature of the dominant
moral theories and traditions, since Kant, or perhaps since Hobbes, that
relationships between equals or those who are deemed equal in some important
sense, have been the relations that morality is concerned primarily to regulate.
Relationships between those who are clearly unequal in power, such as parents and
children, earlier and later generations in relation to one another, states and citizens,

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doctors and patients, the well and the ill, large states and small states, have had to
be shunted to the bottom of the agenda, and then dealt with by some sort of
‘promotion’ of the weaker so that an appearance of virtual equality is achieved.
Citizens collectively become equal to states, children are treated as adults-to-be, the
ill and dying are treated as continuers of their earlier more potent selves, so that
their ‘rights’ could be seen as the rights of equals. This pretence of an equality that
is in fact absent may often lead to desirable protection of the weaker, or more
dependent. But it somewhat masks the question of what our moral relationships are
to those who are our superiors or our inferiors in power. A more realistic
acceptance of the fact that we begin as helpless children, that at almost every point
of our lives we deal with both the more and the less helpless, that equality of power
and interdependency, between two persons or groups, is rare and hard to recognize
when it does occur, might lead us to a more direct approach to questions
concerning the design of institutions structuring these relationships between
unequals (families, schools, hospitals, armies) and of the morality of our dealings
with the more and the less powerful. One reason why those who agree with the
Gilligan version of what morality is about will not want to agree that the liberals’
rules are a good minimal set, the only ones we need pressure everyone to obey, is
that these rules do little to protect the young or the dying or the starving or any of
the relatively powerless against neglect, or to ensure an education that will form
persons to be capable of conforming to an ethics of care and responsibility. Put
baldly, and in a way Gilligan certainly has not put it, the liberal morality, if
unsupplemented, may unfit people to be anything other than what its justifying
theories suppose them to be, ones who have no interest in each others’ interests.
Yet some must take an interest in the next generation’s interests. Women’s
traditional work, of caring for the less powerful, especially for the young, is
obviously socially vital. One cannot regard any version of morality that does not
ensure that it gets well done as an adequate ‘minimal morality,’ any more than we
could so regard one that left any concern for more distant future generations an
optional extra. A moral theory, it can plausibly be claimed, cannot regard concern
for new and future persons as an optional charity left for those with a taste for it. If
the morality the theory endorses is to sustain itself, it must provide for its own
continuers, not just take out a loan on a carefully encouraged maternal instinct or
on the enthusiasm of a self-selected group of environmentalists, who make it their
business or hobby to be concerned with what we are doing to mother earth.

The recognition of the importance for all parties of relations between those
who are and cannot but be unequal, both of these relations in themselves and for
their effect on personality formation and so on other relationships, goes along with
a recognition of the plain fact that not all morally important relationships can or
should be freely chosen. So far I have discussed three reasons women have not to
be content to pursue their own values within the framework of the liberal morality.
The first was its dubious record. The second was its inattention to relations of
inequality or its pretence of equality. The third reason is its exaggeration of the
scope of choice, or its inattention to unchosen relations. Showing up the partial
myth of equality among actual members of a community, and of the undesirability
of trying to pretend that we are treating all of them as equals, tends to go along
with an exposure of the companion myth that moral obligations arise from freely
chosen associations between such equals. Vulnerable future generations do not
choose their dependence on earlier generations. The unequal infant does not choose
its place in a family or nation, nor is it treated as free to do as it likes until some
association is freely entered into. Nor do its parents always choose their parental
role, or freely assume their parental responsibilities any more than we choose our
power to affect the conditions in which later generations will live. Gilligan’s
attention to the version of morality and moral maturity found in women, many of
whom had faced a choice of whether or not to have an abortion, and who had at

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some point become mothers, is attention to the perceived inadequacy of the
language of rights to help in such choices or to guide them in their parental role. It
would not be much of an exaggeration to call the Gilligan ‘different voice’ the
voice of the potential parents. The emphasis on care goes with a recognition of the
often unchosen nature of the responsibilities of those who give care, both of
children who care for their aged or infirm parents, and of parents who care for the
children they in fact have. Contract soon ceases to seem the paradigm source of
moral obligation once we attend to parental responsibility, and justice as a virtue of
social institutions will come to seem at best only first equal with the virtue,
whatever its name, that ensures that each new generation is made appropriately
welcome and prepared for their adult lives.

This all constitutes a belated reminder to Western moral theorists of a fact they
have always known, that as Adam Ferguson, and David Hume before him
emphasized, we are born into families, and the first society we belong to, one that
fits or misfits us for later ones, is the small society of parents (or some sort of
child-attendants) and children, exhibiting as it may both relationships of near
equality and of inequality in power. This simple reminder, with the fairly
considerable implications it can have for the plausibility of contractarian moral
theory, is at the same time a reminder of the role of human emotions as much as
human reason and will in moral development as it actually comes about. The fourth
feature of the Gilligan challenge to liberal orthodoxy is a challenge to its typical
rationalism, or intellectualism, to its assumption that we need not worry what
passions persons have, as long as their rational wills can control them. This Kantian
picture of a controlling reason dictating to possibly unruly passions also tends to
seem less useful when we are led to consider what sort of person we need to fill the
role of parent, or indeed want in any close relationship. It might be important for
father figures to have rational control over their violent urges to beat to death the
children whose screams enrage them, but more than control of such nasty passions
seems needed in the mother or primary parent, or parent-substitute, by most
psychological theories. They need to love their children, not just to control their
irritation. So the emphasis in Kantian theories on rational control of emotions,
rather than on cultivating desirable forms of emotion, is challenged by Gilligan,
along with the challenge to the assumption of the centrality of autonomy, or
relations between equals, and of freely chosen relations.

The same set of challenges to ‘orthodox’ liberal oral theory has come not just
from Gilligan and other women, who are reminding other moral theorists of the
role of the family as a social institution and as an influence on the other
relationships people want to or are capable of sustaining, but also, as I noted at the
start, from an otherwise fairly diverse group of men, ranging from those influenced
by both Hegelian and Christian traditions (MacIntyre) to all varieties of other
backgrounds. From this group I want to draw attention to the work of one
philosopher in particular, namely Laurence Thomas, the author of a fairly
remarkable article3 in which he finds sexism to be a more intractable social evil
than racism.… Thomas makes a strong case for the importance of supplementing a
concern for justice and respect for rights with an emphasis on equally needed
virtues, and on virtues seen as appropriate emotional as well as rational capacities.
Like Gilligan (and unlike MacIntyre) Thomas gives a lot of attention to the
childhood beginnings of moral and social capacities, to the role of parental love in
making that possible, and to the emotional as well as the cognitive development we
have reason to think both possible and desirable in human persons.

It is clear, I think, that the best moral theory has to be a cooperative product of
women and men, has to harmonize justice and care. The morality it theorizes about
is after all for all persons, for men and for women, and will need their combined
insights. As Gilligan said (D.V., 174), what we need now is a ‘marriage’ of the old
male and the newly articulated female insights. If she is right about the special

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moral aptitudes of women, it will most likely be the women who propose the
marriage, since they are the ones with moral natural empathy, with the better
diplomatic skills, the ones more likely to shoulder responsibility and take moral
initiative, and the ones who find it easiest to empathize and care about how the
other party feels. Then, once there is this union of male and female moral wisdom,
we maybe can teach each other the moral skills each gender currently lacks, so that
the gender difference in moral outlook that Gilligan found will slowly become less
marked.

NOTES

1. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Harvard University Press).

2. Immanuel Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, sec. 46.

3. Laurence Thomas, ‘Sexism and Racism: Some Conceptual Differences,’ Ethics 90 (1980),
239–50; republished in Philosophy, Sex and Language, Vetterling-Braggin, ed. (Totowa, NJ:
Littlefield Adams 1980).

Annette C. Baier, “The Need for More Than Justice,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy,
supplementary vol. 13 (1988): 41–56. Published by University of Calgary Press. Reprinted with
permission of University of Calgary Press.