Carol Gilligan: What Gender Does to Moral Philosophy

Abstract

Sandra Laugier aims at acknowledging the philosophical importance of Carol Gilligan’s work. She shows that the central point of this work, which she first established in In a Different Voice and pursues today in recent works such as Why Patriarchy Persists, is the idea of a “feminine morality” which, as Laugier maintains, is first and foremost feminist. By proposing to valorize moral values such as caring, attention to others, and solicitude, the ethics of care has contributed to modifying the dominant conception of ethics and has profoundly changed how we understand ethics. It has introduced ethical stakes into politics, weakening theories of justice by critiquing them, and Joan Tronto has emphasized the social and political stakes of care work. Laugier’s aim is to describe Gilligan’s ethics as political as such and not a first stage of the politics of care. The ethics of care draws our attention to the ordinary, to what we are unable to see because it is right before our eyes. It is an ethics that gives voice and attention to humans who are undervalued precisely because they perform unnoticed, invisible tasks, and take care of basic needs. And these humans are usually women, and often non-white women. Thus, the ethics of care constitutes a radical challenge to dominant moral philosophy. The “voice” Gilligan discovers is the ordinary voice of women. Gilligan’s work has also been undervalued within feminist theory for its alleged essentialism: its controversial claim that women share a “different” moral sensibility. But beyond this controversy, Laugier emphasises the fact that Gilligan’s work explicitly, and perhaps for the first time, marks the need to bring women’s voices into ordinary human conversation. Forty years later, what remains of this different voice is not only its promotion of an ethics of attention, but a starting point for an epistemology of ethics: the revelation that moral philosophy—the heart of the discipline—is not only historically the work of men, but is, in its very concepts, a patriarchal form of thought. Laugier’s final step is to claim that the very definition of ethics in philosophy is achieved by means of the exclusion of an entire domain and of a group of people whose contribution is essential to life and to the survival of society.