The following appeared in Volume 98, Number 2 (Spring, 1999) of the APA Newsletters

Developing models of moral agency that speak to the complexities of women’s moral experience was the theme of four papers I heard at the recent IAPH conference. All speakers were skeptical of the usefulness of mainstream ethical theories for developing a model of moral agency adequate to a feminist ethics. Two speakers (Dawn Rose and Claudia Card) explicitly devoted themselves to the thorny question of how to develop a model of women’s moral agency under circumstances of oppression (panel titled "Agency and Oppression"); for the others (Ranjoo Herr and Soren Reader), this was a background concern ("Moral Theory : Rights, Care, and Needs"). Despite similarities in theme, the four papers varied greatly in terms of methodological approach and their specific foci, which ranged from women’s autobiography, to women’s complicity with oppression, to autonomy, and to a focus on needs.

Dawn Rose’s paper, "The Reading of a Life: The Recovery of Moral Agency from Women’s Auto/biography," doesn’t provide a model of women’s moral agency so much as it sketches out a method that can be used to develop such a model. Take as a given: mainstream philosophical accounts of moral agency are inadequate to the task of understanding the experiences of oppressed persons. Where, then, are we to discover alternative conceptions of moral agency and moral values? Following the lead of black womanist ethicist, Katie G. Cannon, Rose suggests we turn to women’s biography and autobiography. From reading these texts we can gain an understanding of the values and virtues women have deemed important for their own lives.

In women’s autobiography the author/moral agent acts as a "god" who makes and remakes her life, presenting herself as she wants to be seen. In her role as author the woman is in control of her self-representations; she’s the one who draws connections and makes explanations across the various facets of her life. Rose sees women’s autobiography as revelatory because we discover within it the author’s understanding of her universe. As she observes, "from her content and order a value system may be derived; from her choices and responses, an ethic."

While women’s biography is also an important source for discovering an alternative ethic, the reader must be cautious with this literary form because the life has already been interpreted and the form has not been of the woman’s own choosing. When reading a biography, the ethicist/reader should proceed with suspicion since "perhaps only the barest facts may be ‘true.’"

In the second half of her paper Rose turns to Katie G. Cannon’s Black Womanist Ethics, which she sees as an example of a hermeneutically sensitive and methodologically responsible reading of literary texts. Cannon created a black womanist virtue ethic from African American women’s literature and biography. For example, drawing on the life and work of Zora Neale Hurston, Cannon identifies two virtues that are of central importance to black womanist ethics. These are maintaining "invisible dignity" in the face of gender and race based derision and discrimination and living with "quiet grace." What Rose finds significant in Cannon’s work is that Cannon locates a set of subversive virtues within African American women’s literature that lie outside the dominant culture and do not serve its ends. (Rose notes that practice of these virtues would not allow members of the dominant culture to achieve maximal success.) These virtues are particular, having meaning only in the lives of African Americans or other similarly oppressed persons.

Rose embraces Cannon’s work because it utilizes a responsible method for reading texts. A responsible method, she claims,

includes the courage to abandon the methods and paradigms developed and sustained by white male academia. At this stage good method is the search for method, the sensitive reading, the receptivity to patterns as they arise from the materials themselves, the willingness to shift from the universal to the particular, even the admission of ignorance.

Despite her clear admiration for Cannon’s work, Rose raises a question about Cannon’s method. Cannon investigates Zora Neale Hurston’s work and claims to find in it virtues that are specific, not just to Zora Neale Hurston, but to the entire black community. Rose finds this problematic. She voices the concern that Cannon lost sight of the uniqueness of various women’s lives. Ending her paper on a cautionary note, Rose reminds her audience that when reading women’s autobiography, we must attend to the uniquenesses of the woman’s life, of the text representing that life, and of the ethicist reading it. By attending to these uniquenesses, Rose believes we will develop a richer and more complex understanding of the various forms women’s moral agency can take.

While Rose raised questions about Cannon’s methodology, the question and answer session raised important questions about Rose’s own. IAPH participants were concerned that Rose too unproblematically accepted women’s autobiography as an ethical text. As one member of the audience pointed out, autobiography is a carefully crafted self-presentation that may or may not reflect the virtues by which the author actually lived. In reading autobiography as an ethics text, should the reader-ethicist be more concerned with the crafted presentation or the actual life? This important question was never satisfactorily answered. Another participant noted that there’s a difference between the values one applies in one’s life and those applicable in one’s life. Reading women’s autobiography may not give us a good sense of the latter. The question and answer session suggested that while women’s auto/biographical writings may be an important source for alternative ethical values, there are additional methodological questions that must be worked out before this approach to ethics can be fully embraced.

"One of the greatest evils threatening victims of oppression is the danger of becoming evil oneself." With this attention-getting line Claudia Card began her talk, "Women and Evil: Our Gray Zones." Drawing on the work of Primo Levi in The Drowned and the Saved, Card argues that women need to move beyond myths of female innocence in our relationships with each other and acknowledge ways in which women have been complicit with perpetrating oppression. By investigating the complexities of women’s relationships to evil, women will take a step towards confronting our responsibilities for "past and potential damage to victims." In this way, a "superficial feminism" can be avoided.

According to Levi, there are three characteristics of inhabitants of the gray zone. Such inhabitants are victims of evil, implicated in perpetrating some of the same or similar evils on persons who are already victims themselves. They also face extraordinary stress: frequently they have lost everything and everyone they have. Finally, they face the threat of imminent and horrible death. What’s key to this account is that inhabitants of the gray zone lack the discretion of the perpetrators of oppression. They inhabit these gray zones because their survival is at stake if they don’t comply with the demands placed on them. Inhabitants of the gray zone play an ambiguous role in history. They are in the gray zone because they must choose between acceding to the demands placed on them that harm others and being harmed themselves. Unlike perpetrators of oppression, inhabitants of the gray zone lack the power to walk away. As a result of this lack of choice, both Card and Levi believe that their transgressions cannot be held to be of the same order as those of the perpetrators.

Card reads Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology as a text that explores some of women’s gray zones. Daly documents Chinese women’s complicity with foot binding and African women’s complicity in perpetrating genital mutilation to ensure the marriageability of their daughters. Taking her lead from Daly, Card refuses to hold these women accountable for their actions; she refuses to judge them. As became clear in the discussion, Card wants to distinguish between judging the inhabitants of the gray zone and judging their actions. The actions these women committed were wrong. When it comes to judging the agent, however, she agrees with Levi: we must ask who is doing the judging. For example, Mary Daly would not be in a good position to judge the mothers she describes because as an outsider, it would be too easy to underestimate the pressure these women faced and judge them harshly. That does not imply that Card’s analysis of the gray zone requires that judgment be withheld altogether. Card suggests that the daughters may be in a position to judge; they share their mothers’ culture, have had similar experiences, and must live with the effects of their mother’s actions. Finally, Card notes that there are many shades of gray, and judgment shouldn’t always be withheld. For example, those who aren’t in a gray zone—in these examples, the men of the culture—can be judged.

Taking as her starting point the belief that the relation between care and autonomy isn’t yet a settled matter, Ranjoo Herr returns to the "original" debate between care and autonomy in her paper, "The Concept of Autonomy and Care Ethics. " Herr examines the deontological account of autonomy laid out by Rawls and three aspects of his account that care ethicists have found problematic: exclusion of contingency, adherence to universal moral principles, and an individualistic and egoistic conception of self. Her ultimate goal is to see if the care ethic critique is plausible and, if so, whether an alternative conception of autonomy can be found that’s compatible with care ethics.

Herr’s investigation proves fruitful for understanding Rawls. She identifies three aspects of Rawlsian autonomy that need to be rethought in light of the care critique. Namely, it should view contingency as a possible source for autonomy rather than an impediment; it should recognize personal as well as moral autonomy; and its conception of the self should be compatible with the diversity of concrete situations in which real persons find themselves. Surprisingly, however, Herr’s paper concludes by arguing that care ethics cannot accommodate a conception of autonomy. Her reasoning? Care ethics entails a "’categorical’ moral obligation to form and maintain caring relations, which emanates from the ‘fundamental reality’ of relatedness." On her understanding of care ethics, any and all attempts to distance oneself from caring relationships are moral failings and cannot, as such, be the object of autonomous moral choice. Herr finds this to be an unacceptable implication of care ethics. As explained in discussion, she wants to leave open the possibility that a woman who has been severely abused can make the autonomous, moral choice to distance herself from relationships with others and live on her own.

While most, if not all, feminist ethicists would be sympathetic to Herr’s concern, her discussion of autonomy and care ethics seems to end on an unnecessarily pessimistic note. The account of care ethics Herr develops is primarily indebted to Nel Noddings. This account of care ethics does seem to promote the obligation to care for others as the one, fundamental driving principle of the theory. My question is this: is this the only, best, or predominant understanding of care ethics? As readers of In a Different Voice will recall, even care ethics foremother Carol Gilligan didn’t maintain that a care agent’s obligation to form and maintain caring relations was categorical. Gilligan saw stage three, advanced moral reasoning as trying to strike a balance between caring for the self and for others. With this dual obligation there arises the possibility that these two obligations will come into conflict and the care agent will need to choose between them—and thereby exercise her autonomy.

Despite these reservations, Herr’s paper did point to some interesting and important questions. For one, the question of what model of autonomy feminist ethicists should embrace has not yet been settled. Herr’s use of care ethics to rethink Rawlsian autonomy is interesting in light of this fact. Secondly, as became clear in discussion, Herr takes an unusual approach to the question of the possible reconciliation of autonomy and care. While the predominant approach to reconciling them has entailed making room for autonomy within care ethics, Herr wants to argue that whether or not one adopts a care approach must itself be a matter of autonomous choice. In effect, she wants to argue for the priority of autonomy over care. To make such an argument would indeed put the care/autonomy discussion on a new and different track.

In "Moral Concerns, Needs, and Care," a clear, well-organized talk given without written text, Soran Reader challenged contemporary moral theory, arguing that it is useless for explaining, describing, justifying, and motivating moral action. To illustrate her point, she presented the example of rescuing a baby lying in the middle of the street. Her claim is that moral theory adds nothing to our immediate understanding of why this action should be undertaken. This baby needs help and so we respond to its need. Reader’s talk was a work in progress, in which she attempted to develop the implications of this example. Her aim was to work out a needs-based conception of moral agency that would serve as an alternative to contemporary moral theory.

Reader argues that the moral agent seeks the well-being of the moral patient; that is, she seeks to meet his/her needs. Reader notes that not everyone or everything can have needs. For example, desks don’t have needs. This focus on needs serves to delimit the domain of the moral to those things that are alive and have a good of their own, i.e. that can flourish. A being in need is one that is some distance away from flourishing.

Reader sees a number of advantages to this model. Needs are scientifically knowable. If the domain of the moral can be equated to that of needs, then the moral is knowable. This makes it easier to transmit moral values to children. And she sees this approach as acknowledging the contingency of the moral life. Our actual moral experience is that we do not determine our moral worlds; we encounter them, more or less by chance. Her model fits this fact of the moral life. While she acknowledges that on the surface this approach may make it seem as if the agent has less autonomy, she thinks it actually allows for more. The task of the agent is to deal well with the world she finds in front of herself.

Anticipating her audience, Reader distinguished her needs approach from that of care ethics. Both share a frustration with "malestream" moral theory. However, while care ethics emphasizes the caring attitude and has a strong affective dimension, Reader doesn’t see this as necessary for good moral agency. For example, while reciprocity or intersubjective engagement is necessary for care ethics, Reader wants to underscore that it isn’t necessary for her needs based approach. On her model it is possible to think of oneself as meeting the needs of an amoeba or a fetus; Reader does not think this would be possible for care ethics, which she sees as more of a "personist" moral theory.

Reader also contrasts her approach to rules based moral theories. She doesn’t think rules are necessary for action (think of the baby example) nor can moral actions be explained in terms of rules. In short, she questions whether moral theory, in particular rule based moral theory, actually increases moral understanding and whether it helps us resolve conflict. She doesn’t think so. The only role she sees moral theory playing is a descriptive, anthropological role, which is a more modest role than is typically claimed for it.

Reader did an excellent job of thinking on her feet and responding to questions from the audience. For example, the observation was made that needs are a more problematic category than she admitted. As this interlocutor pointed out, needs aren’t simply given but are, at least in part, socially constructed. For example, given male socialization, men may feel a "need" to dominate women. Given this possibility, her interlocutor continued, Reader must address the question of what needs should be considered legitimate. Reader responded that the requirements of flourishing are the needs that are legitimate and must be met. While this clarification helps delimit the moral domain, to be a fully satisfactory response Reader will need to discuss in more detail what her account of flourishing entails.

Another concern raised by her account, to my mind, is its possible parochialism. Reader sees an individual’s moral world as fixed by her own life history. On her descriptive account of morality, the moral needs that the agent addresses are those that she directly encounters. While this seems like a good descriptive account of what most of us do most of the time, I still find it troubling. It brings to mind a criticism made of Nel Noddings’s version of care ethics. On Noddings’s model, the moral agent is enmeshed in concentric circles of care, with lesser obligations to care for those who are further away. As Claudia Card aptly points out, persons who are geographically distant from an agent may nonetheless be strongly affected by that person’s actions. (The example she had in mind was that the actions of first world persons may have a major impact on persons in less developed countries.) To adopt Reader’s needs based approach seems to fall into the same trap as Noddings’s care ethics—that our sense of moral obligation does not extend as far as the implications of our actions. I find this highly problematic. So while I am sympathetic to the concerns Reader raises vis-à-vis traditional moral theory, and the alternative approach she lays out, I am not as sanguine as she at relinquishing the normative project of moral theory in favor of a descriptive approach. No matter how flawed contemporary normative moral theories may be, using moral theory as an avenue to extend our range of moral concern seems to me to be too important a project to give up so easily.

These papers provide a number of suggestions for how to develop a feminist model of moral agency. The ethicist must be willing to rethink traditional philosophical concepts and categories; this may require looking for inspiration and guidance in areas that fall outside the usual purview of philosophy (African American women’s literature and biography, for example). In this attempt to develop an alternative conception of agency, we should be careful not to throw out traditional concepts, like autonomy, that may prove useful. These concepts may need to be rethought, but they can be fruitful for evaluating the strengths and shortcomings of proposed models of ethics. We must attend to the variety of circumstances in which women live if we wish to develop a rich and multi-layered understanding of agency, and we must be careful not to universalize virtues exercised by some women under specific circumstances to all women in all circumstances. Finally, if we are to develop a model that doesn’t obfuscate women’s complex relations to agency, we must be courageous enough to examine the ways in which women have not only been the "innocent victims" of oppression but have also been perpetrators of oppression. This last suggestion may be the most challenging and the most important one to keep in mind.