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GENDER AND MORAL LUCK Problem Gilligan vs Wollenstonecraf The rosy view vs the skeptical view Consequences for

justice and care of each of the positions Answer Attachment to individuals is not enough to yield caring as a virtue (and on the other hand, the danger of ill-founded personal attachments impeding us from recognizing the ethical value of others) An ethic of attachment is not an ethic of care, any more than an ethic of principle such as utilitarianism is one of justice To sustain the view that the capacity for love, like the sense of justice, is part of character, we need an understanding of this capacity comparable in sophistication to Kants understanding of the capacity for acting on principle Deontological ethics --- relatively formal, impersonal relationships as paradigmatic for moral theory, applying their metaphors and concepts to other relationships as well . The informal and personal relationships salient in womens lives raise issues of the ethics of attachment that are not reducible to the issues of control --- acknowledging this does not imply that women have more or better knowledge of the ethics of such relationships; what women clearly have had is more than our share of the responsibility for maintaining these kinds of relationships and less than our share of the responsibilities of participating in and defining formal institutions Informal and personal relationships are like basic institutions in possessing the three major features Personal relationships are at least as important to our starting places in life as the institutions constituting the basic structure The effect of such relationships on self-esteem Like the relationships defined by basic rights, informal personal relationships involve special responsibilities in a different sense from that in formal relationships Basic informal and personal relationships should therefore also be recognized as belonging to the basic structure of society (in what way? How would that influence society?) this is where she invokes friendship normally outside the domain of ethical thinking- as to criticize the position that altruistic emotions are particularistic and do not have the generality or universality required by morality. The point she first addresses and the exploration of which leads her to formulate this certain solution/position is that of character development under oppressive practices Her interpretation of Gilligan is that the responsibilities of different kinds of relationships yield different ethical preoccupations, methods, priorities, even concepts; that justice and care should not be an honorific language glorifying results of oppressive practices since the question arises whether righting these errors reveals virtues and values wrongly overlooked in patriarchal ethics. She criticizes in Gilligan her blindness to the presence of something other in justice and care such as an oppressive relationship skewing both perspectives. Womens political options in misogynist environments complicate the assessment of womens moral responses and she applies the same grid both to Gilligan and the misogynist views of Freud or Kant for example in trying to dislodge the complicated problem of the relationship between men, women, affiliation and independence.

Here I do not understand very well the stake of the argument. First and foremost, the prejudices she tries to dislodge about womens inability for independence are excellent in responding deeply sexist arguments. At the same time is she on the side of claiming the model of independence(=to be like men, so not equality as difference) for all women as superior? Probably not, but there is a certain danger when one stresses as defining womens experiences mostly the experiences of subordination and the helpless image. (I suppose that this is the reason why I have found her listed under radical feminists). To come back to subordination and helplessness, for all the truth of these arguments, I think there is a danger of essentializing in such positions and of overlooking or denying women agency- s it is in essentializing care as a specifically feminine virtue. This is one side of her argument. The other side of the argument has more of the conceptual stake. And if it were to judge her solely according to that she does not appear radical to me, but merely sensible. I find her arguments for recognizing basic informal and personal relationships as belonging to the basic structure of society very enlightening in the deconstruction of how one paradigm in moral theory has prevailed. Her point - the call for a sound ethic of personal and informal relationships to regulate the deep confusions that permit such situations arising as women assuming caretaking responsibilities as a debt of gratitude for benefactors who abuse. A misplaced gratitude is and cannot be a virtue. Sometimes I get the impression that she shifts from vice to virtue my investigation suggests that some of our vices are genderrelated because of a history of sex oppression. This is sensible but there seems to be quite a large step from this to a misplaced gratitude is not a virtue, therefore womens care is not a virtue. But what she probably means is - care is not a virtue in the context in which it is gender-related? Why is this ethic needed? Because that certain kinds of unjust treatment might block one's ability to identify accurately and articulate clearly the grievances one has. Systematic oppression may do damage not only to people's material well-being, but to their moral character. Moral damage is particularly likely to involve relative incapacitation of an agent's ability to respond in direct and finely-tuned ways to mistreatment. In fact I guess she attempts to break a circle of vice. strength of the argument -specificity- A view of the moral luck of the sexes more specific and less romantic than the view that justice and care are gender-related. significance of the argument what difference does it make? = providing women with an idiom such as the Kantian one in sophistication for resisting and assessing unfair relationships/positions as a source of emancipation and putting forth a more coherent moral theory. She is skeptical of using the institution of motherhood as a source of paradigms for ethical theory. And she claims the need for going from the language of ''mothering'' to some extent in elaborating revolutionary parenting which is taken from bell hooks ''Childrearing is a responsibility that can be shared with other childrearers, with people who do not live with children. This form of parenting is revolutionary in this society because it takes place in opposition to the idea that parents, especially mothers, should be the only childrearers. Many people raised in black communities experienced this type of community-based child care''- she sees this revolution as offering an alternative to mothering as a social institution. She is against philosophers who urge an extension of

mothering values to more public realms of activity. Instead, she urges an extension of ethical values/concepts to include the sphere of informal and personal relationships which would allow women not to be taken advantage of inside a relationship (and an unromantic view of love is part of her undertaking is it a sort of must for women fighthing for themselves?). What I feel should be enlarged upon on Tueday is exactly the argument about moral luck and the problems it triggers because in this text it is not more explicit, except for the mention that social practices have made such aspects of our identities the bearers of fortune. In the end, two quotes about her opinions on mothering to maybe make more explicit the argument It is time to consider how much of the ''love'' that children are said to need is no more love than spousal attachments have been. Children do need stable intimate bonds with adults. But they also need supervision, education, health care, and a variety of relationships with people of a variety of ages. What the State tends to enforce in motherhood is the child's access to its mother, which guarantees none of these things, and the mother's answerability for her child's waywardness, which gives her a motive for constant supervision, thereby removing certain burdens from others but easily also endangering the well-being of her child if she is ill supplied with resources. Lacking adequate social or material resources, many a parent resorts to violent discipline in such situations, which the State has been reluctant to prevent or even acknowledge. This is what it has meant, legally, for a child to be a mother's ''own'': her own is the child who has legal rights of access to her and for whose waywardness she becomes answerable, although she is largely left to her own devices for carrying out the entailed responsibilities. Others I have known, however, attempt to undermine the assumption that parental responsibility should be concentrated in one or two people who have the power of a child's happiness and unhappiness in their hands for nearly two decades. Children raised without such models of the concentration of power may be less likely to reproduce patriarchal and other oppressive social relationships. The ''revolutionary parenting'' that bell hooks describes (1984) dilutes the power of individual parents. Although children retain special affectional ties to their ''bloodmothers,'' accountability for children's waywardness is more widely distributed. With many caretakers (such as ''othermothers''), there is less pressure to make any one of them constantly accessible to a child and more pressure to make everyone somewhat accessible. With many caretakers, it is less likely that any of them will get away with prolonged abuse, or even be tempted to perpetrate it.

Against Marriage and Motherhood, Claudia Card Hypatia vol. 11, no. 3 (Summer 1996)

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