|
|
|
|
Women, Culture, and International Relations, by Vivienne Jabri and Eleanor O’Gorman (eds.)
2. Feminism, Universalism, and the Ethics of International Politics
The argument of this chapter centers on the question of whether a feminist universalist account of moral judgment, which could be used to enable debate and justify critique and intervention across boundaries of state and culture, can be theoretically viable. This question has been of particular importance in feminist ethical theory because of the perceived difficulties of squaring the circle of a feminist politics that claims to speak for all women yet is faced with a global plurality of hierarchically ordered (in terms of wealth and power) cultures and value systems. It is important to note that the perception of difficulty here is principally located in the hearts and minds of white western feminists, who find themselves torn between a commitment to the universal scope of certain moral values on the one hand and the consciousness of an imperialist and slave–owning past and privileged present on the other. My argument begins with a brief summary of the dominant moral theoretical paradigms in debates over normative questions in the international context. I then move on to consider feminist critiques of those paradigms and the nature of much existing work in feminist ethical theory that relates to international political issues (work that relies on the notion of an “ethic of care” as a feminist standpoint for moral judgment). In particular, I focus on Sarah Ruddick’s work to exemplify a feminist ethics of war and politics of peace. 1
Within the literature on feminist moral and political theory there are certain standard criticisms of the kind of work exemplified by Ruddick, which I will summarize under the headings “moral imperialism” and “inadequate generalizability.” In the central section of the chapter, I turn to explore the work of a feminist ethical and political theorist, Seyla Benhabib, who claims to have found a way through the inadequacies of both mainstream accounts of moral judgment and the kind of feminist account we find in Ruddick. 2 Benhabib is concerned both to give adequate recognition to “concrete others” in her moral theory and to retain a universal basis as a condition of moral judgment. She argues strongly that there is a theoretically viable universalist account of moral and political judgment that does not fall into the traps of either moral imperialism or parochial particularity. She terms this account “interactive universalism.” By examining Benhabib’s claims, I argue, it becomes apparent that there are difficulties in sustaining the argument that interactive universalism evades the substitutionalism involved in Kantian accounts of moral judgment or the consequences of identifying right with one particular type of state and way of life. This fact draws attention to difficulties that are endemic in the problem/question that Benhabib sees herself as addressing and resolving, which is also the question with which this chapter opened. In the concluding section I argue that in order to take the notion of a feminist international ethics any further, it is necessary to return to question the question that sets up the debate on which this chapter is based and around which so much moral and political debate revolves. I suggest that the posing of the question reflects a concern with the epistemological status of moral claims, which in turn is grounded in a set of claims about truth, belief, power, and critique that turns out to be unsustainable. Instead, I argue that we would be better occupied in turning from the epistemology of moral claims, which has its modern roots in Kantian and utilitarian sources, to the phenomenology of those claims. In conclusion, I argue that there is a phenomenological promise in aspects of the moral theory of both Ruddick and Benhabib and that it is this promise that a feminist international ethics should concentrate on redeeming.
Feminist Challenges to Mainstream Moral Theory
There are three primary traditions of thinking about ethics and interstate relations/international politics in the modern (post–Wesphalian) era. The first of these, the Hobbesian positivist position that reflects the location of right and justice at the political level of the sovereign state, takes it as axiomatic that interstate relations are essentially amoral. According to this realist tradition, there are no grounds for effective moral judgment beyond the boundaries of states, and no state (nor, by implication, citizens of any state) has a right to pronounce on moral or political rights or obligations in relation to another state. The other two traditions are the Kantian tradition, which takes on the mantle of the older paradigm of Christian natural law and claims that there are universal, transcendentally legislative moral laws that precede and have priority over any account of the grounds of particular political authorities; and the utilitarian tradition, which argues that basic facts about the human condition and human motivation underwrite moral judgments regardless of their scope, whether intra– or interstate. 3 Both Kantians and utilitarians are willing to refer to universal principles (provided by the categorical imperative on the one hand and the utility principle on the other) to validate moral judgments in the international context. In recent years, the realist tradition has been reinforced by a communitarian turn in moral theory, which locates the grounds of moral judgment not in the state as a legal entity with sovereign power, but in the state as a nation–state, the representative of a particular “culture” or “way of life.” This leads in the case of theorists such as Michael Walzer to a stress on rights to self–determination of sovereign peoples and a predisposition to nonintervention as the appropriate stance of one state and its citizens in relation to other states and their citizens. 4
Crudely speaking, contemporary moral theory in international relations engages in a complex, highly sophisticated but repetitive set of dances between Kantian, utilitarian, and communitarian positions. Dances in the plural, because we have the war dance—discussions of just war theory—jus ad bellum and jus in bello; the rights dance—discussions of the plausibility, basis, and nature of human rights; and the justice dance—discussions of international distributive justice and the morality of aid. 5 For each of these dances, all the nuances offered by realist/communitarian, Kantian, and utilitarian moral paradigms have been and are being essayed. In essence, what preoccupies all of the dancers involved is a set of claims about the grounds of moral judgment and the practical political prescriptions to be derived from those grounds. If it is known that the source of moral value is the nation–state, then killing to defend it becomes a moral duty; if it is known that respect for individual human life is a categorical imperative, then it appears that there must be moral limits on killing in defense of the state. If it is known that all human beings have an inalienable right to bodily integrity, then both torture and female circumcision should be stopped; if values are derived from culture, then tradition determines the validity of such practices. If what counts is the greatest happiness of the greatest number, then there should be a massive transfer of resources North to South; if justice refers to entitlement, then you have a right to hang on to what you have. In each case, what powers the preoccupation with accounts of moral judgment is an equal preoccupation with how to prescribe for the state of the world; it is presumed that there is a deep and necessary connection between the validity of the former and the health of the latter.
Kantian and utilitarian moral theoretical paradigms construct debates in moral theory across the range of what are accounted to be moral issues in contemporary “applied” philosophy. They also continue to be reference points for metatheoretical debates as to the nature and status of moral claims as such. Not surprisingly, therefore, these accounts of moral judgment have been the subject of feminist scrutiny in philosophy and moral and political theory. It is not possible to do justice to the range of feminist work on moral theory here; instead, I point to the most common criticism of the Kantian and utilitarian paradigms, which is subscribed to by feminist theorists as different as Ruddick and Benhabib and which turns up repeatedly in feminist readings of the moral theory canon. I then look briefly at the rather more ambivalent relation of feminist moral theory to communitarianism.
Benhabib has usefully summed up the problem with the predominant universalist moral theories as the problem of reliance on the “generalized other.” Essentially, Benhabib’s argument is that the predominant paradigms in moral theory rely on an account of human individuals as separate but fundamentally alike. On the basis of assuming human beings to be like Hobbesian mushrooms or Rawlsian individuals in the original position, claims about human motivation, rationality, and justice are asserted to be generalizable to all human beings regardless of context. Morality is seen to be based in what is shared, and what is shared is a set of abstract qualities or capacities, given in advance prior to and legislating for individual interrelation. Moreover, these abstract qualities or capacities turn out to characterize only certain, specific individuals (e.g., male, white, middle–class property owners). Thus, these approaches not only assume the fundamental separateness of individuals and falsify concrete differences between individuals but also universalize the value of certain qualities and the denigration of others on the basis of that falsification. 6
Benhabib cites Carol Gilligan as the feminist theorist who has done much to draw attention to both abstract individualism and the falsification of concrete difference in mainstream moral theory and accounts of moral reasoning. 7 It is certainly the case that Gilligan’s work in her seminal study, In a Different Voice, has provided the strongest inspiration for feminist moral theory in the 1980s and 1990s, both critical and constructive, as will be seen in relation to Ruddick’s work in this chapter. 8 Before we move on to look at Ruddick, however, it is important to note how the feminist critique of Kantian and utilitarian moral thought relates to that other dominant strand in moral theory, communitarianism. What immediately strikes the reader of standard feminist critiques of moral universalism is the family resemblance between such critiques and the arguments of communitarian thinkers such as A. MacIntyre and Walzer, who claim that moral judgment must be located in concrete practices, traditions, or communities. 9 The communitarian approach avoids the universalism of the other two dominant paradigms, allows for the essential importance of concrete difference, and recognizes the fundamental relationality of individual human existence. The problem for feminist critics with communitarianism is that it can be held to repeat the imperialist moves of Kantianism and utilitarianism at the level of the group, nation, or community as opposed to that of the human race as such. Such communitarian approaches essentialize the value of community, including the power relations between men and women institutionalized within the community, and are, it is argued, just as likely to silence the voice of women as concrete others as the universalist paradigms. 10 For feminist critics in the context of moral theory, difference within community has been a much stronger concern than difference between communities.
Care, Maternal Thinking, and the Ethics of War
In the preceding section, I provided a brief sketch of the concerns of mainstream moral theory and the ways in which it has been criticized by feminist theorists. In this section, I flesh out one example of a feminist ethics of war, which, I would argue, exemplifies the dominant feminist turn in the ethics of international politics: Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking. Ruddick’s argument in Maternal Thinking can be seen as following through the implications of what Gilligan refers to as an “ethic of care.” It involves a critique of traditional just war thinking—in both utilitarian and Kantian variants—as well as a positive characterization of how a different kind of moral judgment and political practice is possible in relation to war. There are essentially two stages to Ruddick’s argument. In the first stage she offers a phenomenology of what she terms “maternal thinking”; in the second stage she adapts Nancy Hartsock’s notion of “feminist standpoint” and reads off the implications of using maternal thinking as the feminist standpoint for making judgments about the ethics of war and the appropriate feminist response to war.
Maternal thinking, according to Ruddick, “is a discipline in attentive love,” a discipline that is rooted in the demands of a particular relation of care—that between mother and child—and that reflects a particular range of metaphysical attitudes, cognitive capacities, and virtues. 11 Ruddick is careful to insist that she is neither equating mothers with biological mothers nor presuming that actual mothers are all good at maternal thinking. In addition, although Ruddick’s examples of maternal practice are largely drawn from the United States, she implies that the demands of preservation, nurturance, and training, although they take culturally specific forms, are not culturally specific as such, so that there is a relevance in what she is discussing to that which transcends her own social and political context. This implication is confirmed by Ruddick’s use of the notion of “feminist standpoint” when she comes to apply the consequences of maternal thinking to the consideration of intra– and interstate violence. 12 The idea of a feminist standpoint derives from Hartsock’s appropriation of Marx’s analysis of capitalism as being based on the standpoint of the oppressed class. According to Hartsock, the exploitative character of capitalist relations of production becomes clear when understood from the vantage point of the proletariat. Similarly, the patriarchal character of relations of reproduction as well as production under capitalism is revealed from the standpoint of the women who bear the brunt of those relations. 13 Building on this notion, Ruddick argues that maternal thinking, located as it is in the marginalized and denigrated sphere of caring labor, provides a standpoint from which the absurdity of both strategic military and just war thinking becomes evident. Although Ruddick does not follow Hartsock in maintaining that the feminist standpoint provides a demonstrably universally valid ground for truth, she is making a claim for the potential of maternal thinking to illuminate the meaning of war from a critical perspective. 14
When maternal thinking takes upon itself the critical perspective of a feminist standpoint, it reveals a contradiction between mothering and war. Mothering begins in birth and promises life; military thinking justifies organized, deliberate deaths. A mother preserves the bodies, nurtures the psychic growth, and disciplines the conscience of children; although the military trains its soldiers to survive the situations it puts them in, it also deliberately endangers their bodies, minds, and consciences in the name of victory and abstract causes. 15
The analytic fictions of just war theory require a closure of moral issues final enough to justify killing and “enemies” abstract enough to be killable. In learning to welcome their own and their children’s changes, mothers become accustomed to open–ended, concrete reflection on intricate and unpredictable spirits. Maternal attentive love, restrained and clear sighted, is ill adapted to intrusive, let alone murderous judgments of others’ lives. 16
Looking at these quotations, it is clear that Ruddick’s argument involves the rejection of abstract universalism and the embracing of concrete particularity as the proper ground for moral judgment. For Ruddick, both militarism and universalist moral theory share a commitment to the expendability of concrete lives in abstract causes, which maternal thinking is inherently opposed to. Ruddick claims that this means that the implication of maternal thinking is not just the rejection of war but the active embracing of peace politics, a fight against war that draws on the acknowledgment of responsibility and relationship and the specificity of need and obligations that are inherent in a proper understanding of the labor of caring. 17
Ruddick’s work provides one particularly influential example of feminist thinking about war and typifies an argument common in feminist literature in the 1980s: that women and/or feminists had a particular and peculiar relation to the moral assessment of war and to peace politics. 18 From the beginning, however, the work of Ruddick and of feminist theorists such as Gilligan and Hartsock, who privilege the ethic of care or the labor of care as a starting point for moral judgment, has come under criticism from other feminist theorists. Two related criticisms have been particularly common: first, the criticism that such work essentializes the standpoint of women, assuming sameness among women according to a particular model of the kind of work women are held, typically, to do; second, the criticism that the emphasis on concrete, particular relations and responsibilities as the context for moral judgment provides a ground for judgment that is inadequately generalizable and prevents the possibility of critical engagement beyond narrow, parochial levels of social interaction. The first objection is parallel to the charge of moral imperialism, which, as we saw earlier, feminists laid against both universalist and communitarian dominant moral paradigms. It is an objection with particularly acute resonances in the context of feminist politics both within multicultural states (for instance, the charges of white and middle–class dominance in the feminist movement in the United States) and among states (for example, in arguments between western and Third World feminists about the ethics and politics of indigenous cultural practices, nationalism, population control, and aid policy). 19 This criticism is one to which thinkers like Ruddick are sensitive and to which they have attempted to respond, generally by arguing for the strategic usefulness of the idea of a feminist standpoint as opposed to making claims for its absolute status. In becoming more tentative in the claims made for a feminist standpoint, however, theorists such as Ruddick who argue for the contextualist location of maternal thinking in a specific practice appear to fall into the hands of the other side of the coin of criticism, which is that an ethic of care offers only a parochial account of the conditions of judgment and therefore disables the possibility of critique across different particular contexts. This is a criticism made particularly powerfully by Benhabib in relation to Gilligan’s work:
The Mafia is an organization based on care and mutual responsibility toward members of one’s own clan or extended family, yet this morality of care is accompanied by a morality of injustice and contempt towards the lives, dignity and property of non–group members. Theorists of care must specify the criteria according to which such clans as the Mafia are to be considered “immoral” from the standpoint of a morality of care. 20
We saw earlier that Benhabib shared the common feminist critique of the generalized other of mainstream moral theory for reasons that echo the concern with concrete difference that can be seen to underlie objections to universalist moral theory and to feminist essentialism. Here, however, she turns against the notion that this implies a turn to a particularist feminist ethic of care. In the next section, I explore the extent to which Benhabib succeeds in articulating an alternative feminist moral theory that is neither imperialistic nor uncritically particularistic in its implications.
Interactive Universalism
Benhabib is a feminist theorist working, broadly speaking, within the tradition of contemporary Frankfurt School critical theory. As such she is preoccupied with the articulation of a theoretical position that enables and empowers critique of existing power relations—understood as the systematic exclusions of certain people from power for reasons of class, gender, or race. Benhabib’s concerns are located within the boundaries of the contemporary, liberal, democratic, multicultural state exemplified, as in Ruddick’s case, by the United States. Benhabib criticizes mainstream moral theory on the grounds that it universalizes a notion of the self (the generalized other), which is false or misleading on several counts. First, it assumes selves are separate and nonrelational; second, it assumes that selves are all essentially alike and excludes consideration of concrete difference; third, it identifies characteristics and capacities that are particular with universal truths. According to Benhabib, the kind of universalism involved here is “substitutionalist”; what is presented in the work of people like Rawls as a procedure in which the interests of others are central is in fact the generalization of one particular type of self–interest. 21 In Benhabib’s view, however, the ethic of care does not in itself present a viable way forward for thinking about moral judgment: to the extent that the ethic of care essentializes a particular account of care, it repeats the move of generalizing one pattern for all women; to the extent that care is seen as bounded by narrower contexts, it self–consciously restricts judgment to a concern with what is best for those who are like me or those with whom I have a direct, concrete interrelation/interaction. 22 Benhabib makes a related case against versions of communitarian theory that are essentially integrationist, that is, that emphasize the necessity of value consensus for the revival and perpetuation of community (she suggests that this applies to MacIntyre and Sandel but not to Walzer and Taylor). 23 Ultimately for Benhabib, traditional moral theory, integrationist communitarianism, and the feminist ethic of care are all inherently “substitutionalist” in the sense that they all rest moral judgment on commonality of identity and are incapable of taking radical otherness into account. This is a bad thing, Benhabib argues, both because it fails to reflect the inherent plurality of concrete others in the modern condition and because it risks preserving existing patterns of inequality of power, setting them in theoretical aspic rather than opening them to critical challenge.
In Critique, Norm, and Utopia; Situating the Self; and her most recent book on Arendt’s work, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, Benhabib displays a consistent commitment to formulating an account of moral and political judgment that is genuinely and universally inclusive of the others disingenuously excluded by substitutionalist moral universalisms and explicitly excluded by integrationist communitarianism and the ethic of care. The theory Benhabib has developed relies upon a procedural dialogical approach to accounting for the proper conditions of moral and political judgment. In constructing her theory of such judgment, Benhabib is philosophically most indebted to Habermas’s discourse ethics. 24 However, Benhabib is also critical of Habermas and uses the work of both Gilligan and Arendt as a corrective to what she sees as his mistaken assumption that certain questions remain outside of the scope of morality—a mistake, she argues, that derives from an overreliance on the notion of the generalized other in Jürgen Habermas’s account of what belongs to the sphere of morality per se. Let us go on to explore Benhabib’s adaptation of Habermas.
Two key Habermasian insights are crucial to Benhabib’s account of the nature and conditions of moral and political judgment: First, Habermas claims that such judgments rest not on unitary, substantive identity but on the logic of communicative reason, which is essentially dialogical; second, Habermas claims that morality is a matter of establishing procedural principles for dialogue rather than one of determining specific outcomes. 25 For Habermas, the categorical imperative of morality is that what counts as moral principles are or would be the outcome of a free and fair discussion/
argument by all those who would be affected by the institutionalization of those principles; essentially what these principles institutionalize are the conditions for free and fair discussion that are implicit in the logic of communication itself. 26 This, argues Habermas, is a Kantian universalism that need not rely on transcendental reference points and is intrinsically democratic. For Benhabib, the centrality of the notion of dialogue promises a recognition of difference in moral judgment that is precluded by the theoretical paradigms she has rejected. At the same time, the emphasis on the procedural conditions for dialogue offers a universalist commitment to the right of all voices to be heard, which cuts against the exclusiveness that also characterizes the rejected paradigms. 27 But there are, Benhabib argues, problems with the ways in which Habermas thinks through the implications of his discourse ethics, largely because there remains a legacy of the “generalized other” at the level of Habermas’s account of actual moral discourse, which needs to be located purely at the level of the conditions for moral discourse. 28 This needs to be addressed if Habermas’s discourse ethics are to be genuinely interactive as opposed to substitutionalist in character.
Benhabib addresses the legacy of the generalized other in Habermas’s work when considering the debate between Gilligan and Kohlberg. In relation to this debate, Habermas had supported Kohlberg’s contention that the ethic of care dealt with evaluative issues that were not properly speaking moral issues, since they concerned particularistic and solidaristic questions about the quality of the good life rather than truly moral issues, which must pertain to establishing the parameters within which such debates may be conducted. 29 Morality involves essentially procedural principles of universal applicability; questions of the good life (which Habermas terms “ethics”) may be essentially and permanently contested but are irresolvable at the level of universal morality. According to Benhabib, in siding with Kohlberg in this debate, Habermas is misconceiving the nature of morality and eliding the distinction between conditions for moral discourse and the concerns of moral discourse. This elision is due to an unthinking identification of the moral subject with a set of interests and concerns that have characterized the generalized other in the tradition of moral theory. In this sense, Habermas is not doing justice to his own theory. My thesis is that Habermas and Kohlberg conflate the standpoint of a universalist morality with a narrow definition of the moral domain as being centered on “issues of justice.” These, however, are different matters. How we define the domain of the moral is a separate matter from the kinds of justificatory constraints we think moral judgments, principles, and maxims should be subject to. Universalism in moral theory operates at the level of specifying acceptable forms of the justification of moral principles, judgments, and maxims. 30
In essence, Benhabib accepts Habermas’s account of the procedural conditions on moral debate. However, in rethinking the question of what actual moral debate may entail, Benhabib is led to the conclusion that Habermas has paid insufficient attention to what those conditions mean for actual moral discourse, both in terms of who may be involved in it and how it may be conducted as well as what it may concern. Habermas has provided a way of theorizing moral universalism, but he has not fulfilled the promise of discourse ethics as “interactive” universalism. In making her argument for a genuinely interactive universalism, Benhabib makes some use of Gilligan’s work but considerably more of Arendt’s. Gilligan’s work, Benhabib argues, provides a corrective to the misconception of selves as generalized others (abstract, rational, individual beings) that is presumed even in Habermas’s account of the concerns of moral discourse. Gilligan insists on an account of the self as, in Benhabib’s words, “embodied and embedded,” inseparable from a whole range of contextual relations and particularities. This draws attention to the exclusivity of accounts of morality that do not include reference to issues of care and solidarity; more generally, however, what Gilligan reminds moral theorists of is that human beings are diverse and that those engaged in moral deliberation do not start from the same place but as concretely other from all others. 31 For interactive universalism, concrete difference is a starting point for “reflection and action.” It is in exploring how difference can be a starting point for reflection and action that Benhabib comes to use Arendt to flesh out her account of the nature of concrete others, of moral discourse, and of the conditions of moral judgment.
At first sight, it seems odd that Benhabib uses Arendt to help think through the characteristics of an interactive discourse ethics. In reflecting on the Eichmann trial, Arendt identified the capacity for moral judgment with a capacity for internal dialogue, nourished by thinking and located within the individual self–consciousness. 32 Indeed, Benhabib is explicitly critical of Arendt’s claim that moral deliberation is an essentially individual matter. 32 However, it is not on Arendt’s meditations on morality as such that Benhabib relies; instead it is on Arendt’s account of politics. Benhabib rejects some elements of Arendt’s agonistic conception of the political sphere and what she terms the “phenomenological essentialism” of Arendt’s separation of the political from the natural and social spheres. 34 However, Benhabib finds a more fruitful aspect of Arendt’s theory in her late work on Kant’s notion of reflective judgment. According to Benhabib, this work suggests a way in which moral reflection and action may be possible in the context of the irreducible plurality of selves. This involves Benhabib in adopting Arendt’s idea of an enlarged mentality in political judgment and extending it to the domain of morality as well as politics. For Arendt, political judgment involves judging without a determining principle in such a way that the standpoint of plural others is taken into account; it means “to think from the standpoint of every one else.” Arendt’s own account of the conditions of political judgment is complex and obscure, but for Benhabib it rests primarily on an imaginative, creative capacity for listening, which will be cultivated by encounters with difference in a discursive public sphere. The phenomenology of this capacity is explicated by Benhabib as involving the categories of natality, plurality, and narrativity, which are central to Arendt’s notions of political action and judgment. 35 Benhabib argues that this notion of enlarged mentality, a capacity to put oneself in the place of concrete others, is necessary to the idea of interactive universalism, in which respect for others is encapsulated in the simultaneous presence of universal procedural constraints on dialogue that ensure that everyone can speak on a free and equal basis (i.e., acknowledgment as a generalized other) and acknowledgment of concrete otherness (an embodied and embedded diversity and multiplicity of perspectives) that ensures that everyone can be heard. 36 Benhabib’s point is that moral judgment relies on a culture of commitment to understanding difference as well as universal principle. What distinguishes this notion of moral judgment from others of which she is critical, according to Benhabib, is that it does not presume sameness of identity as its condition.
To what extent has Benhabib’s account of interactive universalism addressed the dilemma of how to give an account of moral judgment that evades the charges of both imperialism and parochialism? There are two principal ways in which it may be argued that Benhabib has not satisfactorily dealt with this dilemma. The first way focuses on a charge of idealism, in which it could be argued that the conditions required for moral judgment by Benhabib are simply not available, and any attempt to institutionalize them in the world as it stands would involve a corruption of what a genuinely interactive universalism demands. In itself, this line of criticism does not imply that Benhabib’s account is theoretically unviable, only that it has a utopian dimension, a charge to which Benhabib would happily plead guilty. 37 The second line of criticism of Benhabib argues that her theory fails to live up to its own pretensions to be a genuinely interactive universalism. This is a more fundamental problem than that of utopianism, since it suggests that in addition to being unrealizable, interactive universalism is theoretically unsustainable. On what grounds can it be argued that Benhabib’s claims fail at the level of the theory itself? The answer to this lies in the nature of the procedural conditions on moral discourse that provide the context within which enlarged mentality—“thinking from the standpoint of everyone else”—operates.
For the defender of communicative ethics, even more than for the liberal theorist, Benhabib’s ethical position involves a strong commitment to the norms of universal moral respect and egalitarian reciprocity. Is such a commitment also compatible with the consequences of pluralism, tolerance, and experimentation advocated above? Not always, and in instances where there is a clash between the metanorms of communicative ethics and the specific norms of a moral way of life, the latter must be subordinated to the former. 38
Although interactive universalism claims to start from difference, this is only partly true, as Benhabib acknowledges. There are in fact clear constraints on the range of differences that Benhabib’s enlarged mentality is capable of encompassing in the process of judgment. Some things are always already judged to be wrong on the grounds of “the meta–norms of communicative ethics,” fundamentalist religious convictions being the example Benhabib herself cites. 39 In certain cases procedural conditions clash with possible substantive outcomes of debate; in these cases the generalized other takes priority over the concrete other. This casts doubt on Benhabib’s claim to be able to avoid substitutionalism altogether in her theory. In practice it appears that selves must be understood as essentially the same in some respects for moral judgment to be possible. The procedure puts constraints on the range of plural selves that may be encountered in moral discourse. This poses a distinct problem for any feminist ethics that is looking, if only in principle, for a nonexclusivist approach to moral issues in the context of international politics. More important, however, it draws attention to the way in which in Benhabib’s argument, as more explicitly in Ruddick’s, an account of the conditions of moral judgment is inseparable from certain substantive moral claims. Benhabib’s emphasis on procedure, following that of Habermas, is not dictated by uncertainties about moral fundamentals but by a conviction that these fundamentals must be in some way universally and rationally demonstrable. To castigate Benhabib for failing to sustain her own claims for theoretical inclusiveness misses a more interesting question: Why is the grounding of theoretical inclusiveness so important in Benhabib’s moral theory? Why is it that Benhabib focuses so much not just on what she has to say about moral fundamentals and the nature of moral judgment but on the question of the right to make these claims in the first place?
From Moral Epistemology to Moral Phenomenology
The task of moral theory since Kant has been one of articulating and then applying the grounds of moral certainty. The point of application is understood as the point of prescription in which the moral doctor needs to rely on moral science to diagnose and provide the cure for moral complaints. Insofar as feminist ethics has become caught up in the issue of whether there are universal grounds for moral judgment, it shares the assumption that the epistemological status of moral claims makes a difference to the possibility of diagnosis, prescription, and therefore cure. It is rarely the substantive nature of the moral judgments that is in doubt; the question is not about what moral theorists think but about whether they have the right to think it—whether, as it were, they have the authority to practice as moral doctors. I now go on to argue that the reasons feminist ethicists remain preoccupied with issues of moral epistemology to the extent that they are reflect a nexus of questionable assumptions about truth, power, belief, and critique. Once these assumptions are put into question, there emerges the possibility of thinking more clearly about the conditions of both moral judgment and moral dialogue. This new approach, which is already present in some feminist and communitarian work, abandons the theoretical ambition to establish the “right” or “authority” to moral practice. In place of this ambition, it puts the more modest goal of a moral phenomenology. In the light of this, I argue in conclusion that it is possible to work with the phenomenological aspects of both Ruddick’s and Benhabib’s moral theory while leaving aside questions of epistemological justification associated with both the idea of a “feminist standpoint” and communicative rationality.
In his Oxford Amnesty Lecture “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality,” Rorty puts forward a critique of the idea, which has been central to modern moral theory, that it is possible to “claim to know something which, though not itself a moral intuition, can correct moral intuitions.” 40 Rorty’s purpose is to argue against the notion that there is any point in the pursuit of true grounds for moral claims. He suggests instead that the cultivation of particular kinds of moral sentiment is a more productive road for those wanting to establish a culture of international human rights. 41 Although both Ruddick and Benhabib are critical of the bold claims of mainstream moral theory, it is clear nevertheless from the characterization of their arguments that they are both still engaged, to some extent at least, in playing the game of moral metatheory, that is, that of providing validation at a metalevel of specific claims. When Ruddick invokes the idea of a feminist standpoint and Benhabib invokes the notion of communicative rationality as a condition for moral judgment and moral prescription, they are establishing these grounds as guarantees of the critical power of what they have to say. The purpose of the argument is to provide an additional rationale in order to secure the status of specific outcomes of the argument. It is no surprise to Ruddick that the labor of care underwrites a feminist peace politics, or to Benhabib that the logic of communicative rationality stands in the way of dialogue with religious fundamentalists. But these claims are more than the articulation of a set of moral intuitions; they are understood as giving their conclusions a necessity they would not otherwise have. According to Rorty, both Ruddick and Benhabib are on a wild goose chase both because there are no guarantees of the validity of moral judgments that are discoverable (all such guarantees are essentially contestable and the arguments can never be settled by reason but only by reference to shared cultural norms) and because, even if such guarantees could be discovered, there can be no guarantee of their practical effects. 42 I am less concerned with the question of whether or not it is possible to make claims about either a feminist standpoint or communicative rationality as a ground for a feminist ethics and more concerned with the question of why for Ruddick and Benhabib moral theory remains entangled with an essentially epistemological project. It is in relation to this question that we encounter the nexus of assumptions about truth, power, belief, and critique referred to at the beginning of this section.
What is the reason for the connection made between morality and epistemological validation in the work of both Ruddick and Benhabib? In my view, the reason for this connection is that in moral theory there remains a commitment to the notion that truth (that which can be known with certainty) is characterized by a particular set of features: First, truth is understood to be inherently nonoppressive; second, truth is understood to be inherently persuasive; and third, truth is understood to be essential to critique. The appeal of pursuing the goal of establishing true grounds for moral claims is immediately apparent. If truth does not exclude or oppress and I can identify the conditions for moral truth, then my claims are both benign and universal in scope. If truth is persuasive and I can identify the conditions of moral truth, then all people will come to affirm my claims from their own points of view. If truth is necessary to critique and I can identify the conditions of moral truth, then critique of other moral values and practices becomes possible. All of these concerns relate to the concerns of feminist ethics identified at the beginning of this chapter as underlying the debate about feminist universalism in ethics. It is clear that the value given to truth in relation to morality is not in any sense for its own sake but for the implications that truth is seen to have. It seems to me, however, that none of the implications I have outlined necessarily follows, regardless of whether there actually are true grounds for moral claims.
In the case of the relationship of truth to power, as Foucault has demonstrated, the truth value of a claim has no necessary connection to its effects; it may sustain domination or reinforce resistance, depending on the play of forces within a specific context. However, one does not have to adopt a Foucauldian emphasis on disciplinary power to recognize that truth, exclusion, and oppression may go together. Benhabib may be right to exclude fundamentalists as participants in moral discourse, but this is nevertheless an exercise of power in the crudest juridical sense, one that marks the limits of liberal toleration and is straightforwardly exclusive. Truth cannot be divorced from politics, and yet this is precisely what is maintained in the bid to establish the parameters of moral dialogue. Ruddick’s argument is obviously rather different; she makes claims for maternal thinking as a subjugated knowledge and acknowledges the feminist standpoint as a perspective that cannot be given an absolute status. Nevertheless, she does claim that this perspective provides a privileged insight into the immorality and absurdity of militarism and that its divorce from power is precisely what grounds the significance of its insights. Maternal thinking is argued to be inherently nonoppressive because it is the standpoint of the oppressed; yet it is quite clear that maternal thinking generates effects of power, in the sense that it sets up a standard of consistency with maternal thinking that privileges some actions and ways of life and condemns others. In addition, as noted above, the practice of care on which maternal thinking is based is drawn from a culturally specific context that as a site of oppression is only one among others and that may itself be argued to depend on oppressive relations. This lays the claims for maternal thinking open to the charge that it essentializes one experience of mothering as the standard for all and fails to draw attention to conditions of oppression that have made mothering in Ruddick’s sense possible. 43
The argument that truth is inherently persuasive is particularly dubious in the context of moral claims—partly because the lack of agreed moral truths makes it difficult to test—but also, as Rorty points out, because moral commitment appears to be more closely linked to the guts of moral sentiment and prejudice than to the capacity for rational analysis. 44 At the very least, it appears that rational argument from true premises radically underdetermines moral values and principles. If the point of Ruddick’s and Benhabib’s characterizations of the grounds for moral judgment was to add persuasive force to a particular understanding of the ethics of war or the fundamental principles of morality, then it is not clear that this has succeeded. In fact, by claiming the epistemological high ground, both thinkers might be seen as having distracted attention from their substantive claims by drawing critics into the game of contesting that ground.
The relation of truth to critique is a complex one; it is crucial to both Ruddick and Benhabib that critique comes from somewhere, a somewhere that is itself secured. However, as is evident in the case of both thinkers, the ground from which they criticize is not secure; it is profoundly vulnerable and contestable. What is not clear is whether this necessarily invalidates the critical work being done. I have argued elsewhere that theoretical critique in the Kantian tradition (in which I would include both standpoint theory and interactive universalism), in spite of its commitment to securing the ground of critique, is in fact characterized by the difficulties involved in securing that ground. 45 This means that critics claiming a secure ground for critique are misconceiving the logic of the critical theoretical practice in which they are engaged. This logic, I would argue, depends on the vulnerability rather than the certainty of claims to authority, since critique involves perpetually putting the grounds of right into question. However, even if the link between secure ground and critique were established, it is clear that the link between theoretical critique and practical critique can also be questioned. Ruddick links the theoretical standpoint of maternal thinking to a practice of peace politics; Benhabib links the theory of communicative rationality to the practice of liberal discursive democracy. Yet there is no evidence that those engaged in peace politics or democratic politics have felt the necessity to ground that practice in epistemological security.
The implication of the above argument is that moral theory’s preoccupation with metatheoretical epistemological questions is a mistake and that feminist moral theory that shares these preoccupations is also mistaken. This is not because there are no such things as moral truths or because rational argument has no place in moral discussion, but because the epistemological focus of such moral theory sets up a chain of red herrings that fuels an irresolvable philosophical debate but does little to enhance an understanding of what is at stake in the realm of moral judgment and prescription. As long as claims are made to a truth that works against power, persuades, and enables critique, there will be a permanent set of counterclaims that point out the interrelation of truth and power, the lack of subjective agreement, and the uncertainty of the grounds of critique. The dance identified above as characteristic of Kantian, utilitarian, and communitarian moral theory will simply be indefinitely repeated. The question with which this chapter began was the “question of whether a feminist universalist account of moral judgment, which could be used to enable debate and justify critique and intervention across boundaries of state and culture, can be theoretically viable.” What I have tried to demonstrate is that this is an unhelpful question because it keeps feminist moral theory trapped in the same patterns as much mainstream moral theory, with little progress made in relation to the reasons why the question of moral universalism was of interest to feminists in the first place. What then would be a more helpful question?
In order to identify a more helpful question for feminist moral theory to engage with, we have to return to the reasons why the question of feminist universalism was posed. At the beginning of this chapter, I suggested that at the heart of the debate over universalism for feminist ethics at the level of international politics is the problem of squaring a feminist commitment to judging and acting on behalf of all women with the fact that women’s assessments of what is morally right to do do not coincide—taking into account a global context in which “difference” is not present horizontally as a diversity of equally weighted perspectives but is constructed by and mapped onto massive power differentials. I also suggested that this problem is acute for white western feminists, who are torn between commitment to certain moral values on the one hand and to the democracy implicit in feminist politics on the other. Feminist, universalist ethics appeared to allow for moral debate as such by providing cross–cultural reference points and, more important, for the possibility of moral intervention and critique without guilt. I have argued that feminist universalism not only does not but cannot live up to its promise but that still leaves unresolved the problems posed by difference and hierarchy to morality. So where do we go from here?
My suggestion for the way forward for a feminist international ethics is that a new version of the “how is moral debate possible” question should be asked. In this version, rather than asking the question of whether there are epistemologically valid grounds for moral judgment, feminist theory would focus on examining the actual conditions of moral judgments in different contexts and in the context of difference. This entails a turn from moral epistemology to moral phenomenology. What I am suggesting has been a feature of some recent moral theory of both a feminist and communitarian kind, but the preoccupation with the issue of universalism, plus a rather narrow focus on the meaning of context, has tended to distract attention from what phenomenology can offer moral theory. The strength of Ruddick’s and Benhabib’s work lies in the extent to which they enhance the understanding of what morality involves, even though neither of them by any means exhausts the issue. Ruddick’s notion of maternal thinking as inseparable from maternal practice and Benhabib’s notion of moral judgment as inseparable from certain psychological capacities and political conditions represent a small step toward the comprehension of the material, political, and affective conditions in which morality is always enmeshed. Different sorts of moral claims will be linked to different kinds of enmeshment, and the work of phenomenology explores how and why this is the case and draws attention to the moral possibilities in any given nexus of conditions. The international system and the global economy—the multiplicity of ways in which individual lives are internationally or globally mediated—constitute the actual conditions of international or global morality. Moral theorists need to focus on understanding what the implications of those conditions might be for moral debate and the prospects for moral agreement or disagreement. This phenomenological work does not pretend to definitively answer questions of right and wrong; it seeks instead to give participants in moral debates as deep an understanding as possible of what they share and what differentiates them from each other. By beginning to explore material, political, and affective conditions that underlie different moral orientations, both Ruddick and Benhabib draw attention to how moral debate may be extended and deepened within an international context.
A consequence of this phenomenological focus is that feminists in general, and white western feminists in particular, will be obliged to cease to see the fact that values clash in a highly unequal political context as being something that has to be or can be neutralized prior to moral debate. Seeking to establish guarantees for moral claims closes off debate because it suggests that there is a point at which accountability of moral actors, particularly more powerful actors, ends. By accountability I mean literally acknowledging all the implications involved in a moral stance without the shortcut of an appeal to a higher ground. If the justificatory conditions for a claim are seen to both necessitate the rightness of the claim and neutralize its negative implications for others, then this implies that there is a point at which moral judgment or intervention would not be risky and might not fail. But I would suggest that this is precisely what characterizes moral judgment and moral intervention, most especially in an international context. A phenomenology of moral judgment demonstrates that it is not the case that you need a ground of right from which to speak in order to speak in moral debate. There is, however, a very complex set of conditions that determines the extent to which moral voices may be heard. This is not to suggest that the actuality of difference and hierarchy does not pose problems for moral debate, critique, and intervention; but these problems do not make debate either impossible or useless, although they render it always difficult and sometimes ugly. Instead of relying on guaranteed authority, if feminists want to address the problem of cross–cultural moral dialogue, we need to self–consciously acknowledge and be open to the vulnerability of any moral claim in theory and in practice and recognize that there are costs that have to be counted in any kind of committed intervention in the world. The more powerful an individual feminist is as an actor, the more necessary it is to recognize and open to further challenge the effects of power entailed by particular moral judgments and their practical implications. To strive for epistemological security, as if that somehow takes priority over all the other kinds of securities that so many women in the world lack, is to misunderstand the nature of moral engagement in an imperfect world.
Endnotes
Note 1: There has been a great deal of feminist work on international ethical issues, particularly on the ethics of war and global environmental ethics. I use Ruddick’s work partly because it is a particularly well known and influential example, partly because Ruddick draws on the ideas of a feminist “ethic of care” and the notion of a “feminist standpoint,” both of which have been frequently used in the literature as a means of criticizing mainstream moral theory. I will be focusing on Ruddick, Maternal Thinking. For other examples of feminist international ethics, see Warren and Cady, Hypatia Special Issue; and Harris and King, Rocking the Ship of State. Back.
Note 2: Although Benhabib is not specifically concerned with international relations, her work does focus precisely on the question with which this paper opens and provides a possible way forward for feminist international ethics, which has tended to remain dominated by the “ethic of care,” “feminist standpoint” approach, even when it recognizes its limitations. I will be focusing mainly on Benhabib’s collection of essays Situating the Self. Back.
Note 3: For overviews of the Kantian and utilitarian traditions in international ethics, see chapters by Donaldson, “Kant’s Global Rationalism,” and Ellis, “Utilitarianism and International Ethics,” in Nardin and Mapel, Traditions of International Ethics; and Brown’s chapter on cosmopolitan normative theory, in Brown, International Relations Theory. Back.
Note 4: Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars has undoubtedly been the most influential text in relation to the ethics of war in recent times. Walzer draws on a mixture of sources, including Mill’s classic defense of self–determination. Although Walzer does not outlaw international intervention in all cases, he does set up strong presumptions against it (see Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, pp. 86–108). Back.
Note 5: Examples in relation to war might be Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, versus Holmes, On War and Morality; on rights, see Renteln, International Human Rights, versus Howard, Human Rights and the Search for Community; on justice, see Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” versus O’Neill, “Transnational Justice,” and so on. Back.
Note 6: Benhabib, Situating the Self, pp. 148–170. Back.
Note 8: In Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking she pays tribute to the notion of a feminist “ethic of care” and links her argument to that of Gilligan (Ruddick, Maternal Thinking, pp. 94–95, 182–183). Gilligan, a social psychologist who had been working on the question of moral development, took issue with the measures for moral development constructed by Kohlberg. Essentially, Gilligan’s argument in In a Different Voice is that women tend to display different patterns of moral reasoning from men, ones that derive from an orientation to the specific patterns of responsibility associated with particular relationships and contexts. Gilligan claims that this moral voice has been denigrated in traditional conceptions of what counts as moral reasoning, which, she argues, have been dominated by the more abstract, impartial, and universalistic “ethic of justice.” In this early work, Gilligan did not claim any superiority for the care orientation, but she did argue that it should be given an equal place with the ethic of justice in accounts of moral maturity. A large literature on Gilligan’s work and the ethic of care has since developed (e.g., Larrabee, An Ethic of Care; Tronto, Moral Boundaries; Bubeck, Care, Gender, and Justice). Back.
Note 9: I am thinking here of MacIntyre, After Virtue; and Walzer, Spheres of Justice. Okin provides one example of a feminist critique of Walzer (Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family). Benhabib distinguishes between “integrationist” (MacIntyre) and “participationist” (Walzer) versions of communitarianism, and she associates the charge of conservatism and lack of attention to plurality with the former (see below). Back.
Note 10: Benhabib, Situating the Self, p. 74. Back.
Note 11: Ruddick, Maternal Thinking, p. 123. Back.
Note 12: Ibid., pp. 129–135. Back.
Note 13: Hartsock, “The Feminist Standpoint.” Back.
Note 14: Ruddick, Maternal Thinking, p. 135. Back.
Note 17: Ibid., pp. 141–159. Back.
Note 18: Obviously, feminist involvement in the antinuclear movement in the 1980s is important here (see Cohn, “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals”; Harris and King, Rocking the Ship of State; Warren and Cady, Hypatia Special Issue). Back.
Note 19: There is a huge literature in and around all these issues. See Nicholson, Feminism/Postmodernism; Hirsch and Fox–Keller, Conflicts in Feminism; Gunew, A Reader in Feminist Knowledge; Marchand and Parpart, Feminism/Postmodernism/Development; Mohanty, Russo, and Torres, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism; articles in Grant and Newland, Gender and International Relations; Newland, “The Sources of Gender Bias in International Relations Theory”; Moser, “Gender Planning in the Third World”; and Goetz, “Feminism and the Claim to Know.” Back.
Note 20: Benhabib, Situating the Self, p. 187. Back.
Note 21: Ibid., pp. 152–153. Back.
Note 24: In her first book, Critique, Norm, and Utopia, Benhabib argued that Habermas’s communicative or discourse ethics provided a way through for the critical theory tradition, which has its roots in the work of Kant, Hegel, and Marx. The essays in Situating the Self set Habermas’s critical theory against various alternatives and argue, overall, for some modifications to Habermas’s ideas, particularly in the light of Arendt’s work (see below); but they nevertheless continue to see Habermas as the best hope for a contemporary critical ethical and political theory. In the book on Arendt, Benhabib continues to utilize the perspective of Habermas’s critical theory in her critique of what she terms Arendt’s “phenomenological essentialism” and as a corrective to Arendt’s monological view of ethics and overly agonistic model of politics. Back.
Note 25: For a thorough discussion of debates over communicative or discourse ethics, see Benhabib and Dallmyr, The Communicative Ethics Controversy. Back.
Note 26: Habermas, “Discourse Ethics,” pp. 71–73. Back.
Note 27: Benhabib, Situating the Self, pp. 105–106. Back.
Note 29: Ibid., pp. 182–185. Back.
Note 31: Ibid., pp. 158–161. Back.
Note 32: Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” p. 8. Back.
Note 33: Benhabib, Situating the Self, p. 141. Back.
Note 34: Ibid., pp. 90–95; Benhabib, Reluctant Modernism, pp. 123–141. Back.
Note 35: Benhabib, Situating the Self, pp. 124–133. Back.
Note 36: Ibid., pp. 137–141, 187–190. Back.
Note 40: Rorty, “Human Rights,” p. 118. Back.
Note 42: Ibid., pp. 116–117. Back.
Note 43: It should be noted that Ruddick is aware of these arguments and in general is much more tentative in her claims to a feminist standpoint than Hartsock. Nevertheless, in invoking the notion of standpoint, Ruddick is continuing to be caught up in the theoretical preoccupation with justifying the exclusions that are effected by her theory. Even as she accounts for ways in which mothers have colluded with militarism, she is also engaged in establishing her right to say that such mothers are wrong. Back.
Note 44: Rorty, “Human Rights,” pp. 124–125. Back.
Note 45: Hutchings, Kant, Critique, and Politics. Back.
Email this citation