Reviewed by Simona Goi
Calvin College

In Rethinking Feminist Ethics: Care, Trust and Empathy, Daryl Koehn provides a thoughtful assessment of three strands of what she defines as "female" ethics: the ethics of care, trust, and empathy. This subset of feminist ethics is claimed to embody six traits lacking in traditional (i.e., Kantian) ethics: a relational conception of the self, a benevolent concern for the vulnerable, an insistence on the publicness of the private, a stress on the value of difference, an emphasis on imaginative discourse, and a concern with making a difference in the world. Koehn scrutinizes the claim that these three strands of female ethics actually do embody the positive features described above. "What guarantees that care, or trust will not prove manipulative or pathological? Are these activities self-regulative in some way? If not, could they be reconceived in some more defensible fashion?" (10) Koehn devotes an entire chapter to each ethic, drawing out the distinguishing features, identifying its main proponents, and providing a generous, yet stringent evaluation of its strengths and weaknesses. In engaging, lucid prose, she guides the reader through a dense thicket of arguments and counter-arguments, enriching her abstract objections with vividly concrete examples.

In the last two chapters, Koehn puts forth her own alternative, what she calls a "dialogical" ethic, through which she contends that we can avoid both appealing to the Archimedean point of view posited by typical masculine ethics as well as endorsing the pitfalls of emotivism and relativism typical of female ethics (100). She contends that female ethics are too quick to dismiss the usefulness of principled reasoning in opening up, as well as foreclosing, possibilities. In Koehn’s view, principles have the power "to set liberating limits," without requiring that we endorse the "God’s eye" point of view. Thus, she structures her dialogical ethics around four fundamental principles: all opinions may not be equally practically good (P1); never act unjustly (P2); abide by the laws one has agreed to obey or persuade them to change, or take advantage of a legal right of exit (P3); consider whether principles 1 through 3 apply in one’s own case (P4). For each principle, Koehn explains how it improves upon female ethics, as well as how it might be problematic in its own right, and she eventually concludes that it is possible to endorse principled reasoning while embracing the contestability of principles.

Koehn’s book is an elegant, insightful recasting of the ethics of care, trust, and empathy in the form of a principled yet contextual ethic. But does it involve a great deal of wishful thinking? Does she resolve the problem how to instantiate the common sense of the just and the distinction between good and bad opinions that are necessary to sustain her own principles (P1 and P2)? In the ethics of care, trust, and empathy such problems are sidestepped by positing care as the fundamental value, and by relying on the emotional component of relational bonds to provide the basis for judgment. From the perspective of care ethics, Koehn explains that "we must ‘feel with’ the other. There must be an affective component to our caring for another, a feeling of engagement… Our very selves are at stake when we care because we are working at creating a shared self, invented as we proceed" (26). For an empathic theorist, we must "experience someone else’s feelings and thoughts because we have attended to this party’s feelings and thoughts" (57). While the mechanisms to produce these particular dispositions are different in each of the two ethics (in the former they are rooted in the experience of being cared for as children, in the latter they require the process of "figuration"), the fact remains that a change in disposition, and a consequent refashioning of the self, is required of the adherents to these ethical frameworks. The parties to the ethical dilemma (the care-giver and the care-receiver, or the trustor and the trustee) come to an agreement by fashioning a common self. But Koehn rejects this complete openness of the self as insufficient to guarantee the preservation of individuality and the well-being of vulnerable populations. She skillfully points out the potential for dysfunctional, manipulative and oppressive relationships intrinsic in these emotional bonds, and she argues that principled reasoning is needed to prevent their degeneration into despotic and unhealthy structures of domination.

Koehn’s answer to the problem of reconciling principles with relational sensibilities is to establish a dialogical ethic in which active listening is "a precondition for ethical discourse and the good life" (102). Yet, while her reading of Plato’s Crito provides original and stimulating insights into the requirements for an ethic based on discourse, the general framework reinstates the traits of an individualistic, autonomous agency, rather than addressing the broader question of how that ethic is shaped (and can shape) the socio-political structures which constitute the background for human action. For instance, under the revisions to female ethics required by Koehn’s Principle 4 (146), we find a requirement for integrity in moral choices that pays no heed to the different constraints and opportunities which shape each agent, to the tensions that often make a reflective, thoughtful judgment virtually impossible. How does the positionality of two agents affect the degree of integrity that Koehn’s dialogical ethic should expect of them? Moreover, if we were to engage a person in moral discourse, how could he or she be affected by pressures from different sources? In other words, how can we insure that the parties to the dialogue do not use the conversation as an opportunity to manipulate each other through verbal and non-verbal, explicit and implicit, conscious and unconscious means? Or, if we accept as inevitable the equation of discourse with manipulation (after all, what is an argument if not an attempt to manipulate someone into agreement?), how can we insure a fair and equal access to the resources for effective argumentation? Who would be the arbiter of fairness and equal access to the discursive space?

In spite of her critical observation that "female ethics… treat the self as remarkably free of any political or institutional influence" (141), Koehn herself does no better when it comes to dealing with these influences on the discursive process. Her concrete examples present us with ethical dilemmas that are abstracted from the social, political, and discursive structures that constitute those dilemmas. The opinions of parties to a dilemma are given as objective and absolute, without consideration for how these opinions might be shaped by external expectations, social conventions and cultural morae. These questions are particularly pressing when we consider the political dimension of this ethic, a dimension in which disagreements as to the meaning of the principles that should regulate discourse have weighty practical consequences. Koehn’s solution (the option of exiting the community whose principles a party rejects) is no solution at all for those who do not have the means (physical, financial, emotional) to go anywhere. Moreover, we ought to consider how exit from one community almost inevitably involves entering another, be it a country, a neighborhood, a school, or a workplace.

A richer answer to this question must take into account the specific constraints posited by existing institutions and practices, and explore how care (and trust and empathy) is itself a practice among others. This approach grounds ethics not in how we "feel" toward another, nor in a merely discursive exchange, but in a set of practices that are indispensable to the sustenance of human life and that recognize the relational nature of agents. This view is put forth by Joan Tronto, who is well aware that "as a disposition or an emotion, care is easy to sentimentalize and to privatize" (Tronto 1993,118). Instead, Tronto suggests that "to call care a practice implies that it involves both thought and action, that thought and action are interrelated, and that they are directed toward some end" (Tronto 1993, 108). Caring as a practice is closer to the meaning of "taking care of someone," a proposition that—unlike Nel Nodding’s notion of care—focuses on a series of practical ends (feeding them, sheltering them, educating them, etc.) rather than on the affective relationship (Noddings 1986).

This shift in emphasis from disposition to practice preserves the relational dimension, albeit in a revised form. In fact, the establishment of practical models of care can eventually lead to a new construction of expectations, a new conception of responsibilities, and therefore to a reframing of relationships. In this respect, framing feminist ethics and politics as a set of practices avoids the fallacy of seeing socially constructed modes of reasoning (such as the typically masculine, principled, rational-choice reasoning) as simply dismissible by fiat. Instead, it acknowledges that a change in the modes of care can lead to a substantive reframing of the self via the gradual and evolving recasting of relationships through the tackling of concrete issues.

This revision of care ethics also bridges the gap between ethical and political theory, while providing a context in which to incorporate Koehn’s dialogical emphasis. As it is, her proposed solution fails to acknowledge that dialogue is always already embedded in specific practices and institutions that both enable and constrain it. These institutions shape what speakers and listeners consider acceptable as "reasons" for an action; these practices provide the parameters within which thought "finds itself compelled by thinking to take this or that stand because it grasps that it will not be satisfied by adopting an alternative position" (101). This "satisfaction" of thought does not correspond to a universal standard, but is a contingent, contextual occurrence. Even a supposedly "open" and "active" listener like Socrates listens from within a particular historical, cultural and linguistic context that provides him with standards for what count as "reasons" in an argument.

In this regard, and writing as a political theorist, I wish Koehn had paid greater heed to the tradition of democratic theory dealing with the complex question of communicative action. The work of Jürgen Habermas and the analysis of this work by feminist thinkers such as Nancy Fraser are germane to Koehn’s own position and would provide engaging partners in this conversation over a feminist dialogical ethic (Habermas 1984, Habermas 1990, Fraser 1989). Nevertheless, Koehn’s book remains an important contribution to the scholarship in feminist ethics. Her analysis is most helpful in pointing out the general structure as well as the more subtle nuances in each of the three frameworks she considers. Her dialogical alternative to female ethics is a promising start for a constructive conversation on the possibility of a new feminist ethic.

Works Cited

Fraser, Nancy. 1989. Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Habermas, Jürgen. 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action. Boston: Beacon Press.

______________. 1990. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press.

Noddings, Nel. 1986. Caring : A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkeley: University of California Press.