Week 8 Water Pollution Reading

Week 8 Water Pollution Reading

W8 Discussion – Discussion Session 7 Hi, welcome to this week discussion! What is due? Please choose one topic (see below) and post at least one reflection and two comments to your peers’ reflections. Why? This assignment is meant to assess your capacity to understand and reflect autonomously on the contents that you studied, and your capacity to engage with different opinions and views in a respectful and fruitful way, collaborating with your peers for an inclusive learning environment. How? Please write: 1) One post on the chosen prompt, 100 to 200 words 2) At least two comments on your peers’ posts, 50 to 100 words each. One of the comments can be your reply to a comment you received. Comments can be on any topic, not necessarily the prompt you have chosen. Please be sure that your posts are on topic, and your comments are respectful and constructive. See the rubric for details. IMPORTANT: This is a group discussion; be sure that you post in your group, not in the general discussion. Only if you post in your group your submission will be graded. PROMPTS 1) Explain the significance of the prisoner’s dilemma for understanding a problem of the contemporary world. 2) Theorists of the social contract rely on the fictitious scenario of the state of nature to develop their points. Do you think this is justified? Why? 3) Do you think the feminist criticism of Rawls’ theory of justice is convincing? Why? 4) Share your thoughts on any of the additional resources and how it relates to the topics of this week. Additional Reading： “The Pandemic Is a Prisoner’s Dilemma Game” (NYT article)： https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/20/health/virus-vaccine-game-theory.h tml?auth=login-google “John Locke and America’s cult for private property”, an article from The Nation https://www.thenation.com/article/society/california-private-property -locke/ My peers’ posts are below Canadian Journal of Philosophy ISSN: 0045-5091 (Print) 1911-0820 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcjp20 The Need for More than Justice ANNETTE C. BAIER To cite this article: ANNETTE C. BAIER (1987) The Need for More than Justice, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 17:sup1, 41-56, DOI: 10.1080/00455091.1987.10715928 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00455091.1987.10715928 Published online: 01 Jul 2013. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 347 View related articles Citing articles: 36 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rcjp20 CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY Supplementary Volume 13 The Need for More than Justice ANNETTE C. BAIER University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, P A 15213 U.S.A. In recent decades in North American social and moral philosophy, alongside the development and discussion of widely influential theories of justice, taken as Rawls takes it as the ‘first virtue of social institutions,’1 there has been a counter-movement gathering strength, one coming from some interesting sources. For some of the most outspoken of the diverse group who have in a variety of ways been challenging the assumed supremacy of justice among the moral and social virtues are members of those sections of society whom one might have expected to be especially aware of the supreme importance of justice, namely blacks and women. Those who have only recently won recog:pition of their equal rights, who have only recently seen the correction or partial correction of longstanding racist and sexist injustices to their race and sex, are among the philosophers now suggesting that justice is only one virtue among many, and one that may need the presence of the others in order to deliver its own undenied value. Among these philosophers of the philosophical counterculture, as it were – but an increasingly large counterculture – I include Alasdair Macintyre, 2 1 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Harvard University Press) 2 Alasdair Macintyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press) 41 Annette C. Baier Michael Stocker, 3 Lawrence Blum, 4 Michael Slote, 5 Laurence Thomas,6 Claudia Card/ Alison Jaggar, 8 Susan Wol£9 and a whole group of men and women, myself included, who have been influenced by the writings of Harvard educational psychologist Carol Gilligan, whose book In a Different Voice (Harvard 1982; hereafter D.V.) caused a considerable stir both in the popular press and, more slowly, in the philosophical journals.to Let me say quite clearly at this early point that there is little disagreement that justice is a social value of very great importance, and injustice an evil. Nor would those who have worked on theories of justice want to deny that other things matter besides justice. Rawls, for example, incorporates the value of freedom into his account of justice, so that denial of basic freedoms counts as injustice. Rawls also leaves room for a wider theory of the right, of which the theory of justice is just a part. Stilt he does claim that justice is the ‘first’ virtue of social institutions, and it is only that claim about priority that I think has been challenged. It is easy to exaggerate the dif- 3 Michael Stocker, ‘The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories,’ Journal of Philosophy 73, 14, 453-66, and ‘Agent and Other: Against Ethical Universalism,’ Australasian Journal of Philosophy 54, 206-20 4 Lawrence Blum, Friendship, Altruism and Morality (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1980) 5 Michael Slote, Goods and Virtues (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1983) 6 Laurence Thomas, ‘Love and Morality,’ in Epistemology and Sociobiology, James Fetzer, ed. (1985); and ‘Justice, Happiness and Self Knowledge,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy (March, 1986). Also ‘Beliefs and the Motivation to be Just,’ American Philosophical Quarterly 22 (4), 347-52 7 Claudia Card, ‘Mercy,’ Philosophical Review 81, 1, and ‘Gender and Moral Luck,’ forthcoming. 8 Alison Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature (London: Rowman and Allenheld 1983) 9 Susan Wolf, ‘Moral Saints,’ Journal of Philosophy 79 (August, 1982), 419-39 10 For a helpful survey article see Owen Flanagan and Kathryn Jackson, ‘Justice, Care & Gender: The Kohlberg-Gilligan Debate Revisited,’ Ethics 42 The Need for More than Justice ferences of view that exist, and I want to avoid that. The differences are as much in emphasis as in substance, or we can say that they are differences in tone of voice. But these differences do tend to make a difference in approaches to a wide range of topics not just in moral theory but in areas like medical ethics, where the discussion used to be conducted in terms of patients’ rights, of informed consent, and so on, but now tends to get conducted in an enlarged moral vocabulary, which draws on what Gilligan calls the ethics of care as well as that of justice. For ‘care’ is the new buzz-word. It is not, as Shakespeare’s Portia demanded, mercy that is to season justice, but a less authoritarian humanitarian supplement, a felt concern for the good of others and for community with them. The ‘cold jealous virtue of justice’ (Hume) is found to be too cold, and it is ‘warmer’ more communitarian virtues and social ideals that are being called in to supplement it. One might say that liberty and equality are being found inadequate without fraternity, except that ‘fraternity’ will be quite the wrong word, if as Gilligan initially suggested, it is women who perceive this value most easily. (‘Sorority’ will do no better, since it is too exclusive, and English has no gender-neuter word for the mutual concern of siblings.) She has since modified this claim, allowing that there are two perspectives on moral and social issues that we all tend to alternate between, and which are not always easy to combine, one of them what she called the justice perspective, the other the care perspective. It is increasingly obvious that there are many male philosophical spokespersons for the care perspective (Laurence Thomas, Lawrence Blum, Michael Stocker) so that it cannot be the prerogative of women. Nevertheless Gilligan still wants to claim that women are most unlikely to take only the justice perspective, as some men are claimed to, at least until some mid-life crisis jolts them into ‘bifocal’ moral vision (see D.V., ch. 6). Gilligan in her book did not offer any explanatory theory of why there should be any difference between female and male moral outlook, but she did tend to link the naturalness to women of the care perspective with their role as primary care-takers of young children, that is with their parental and specifically maternal role. She avoided the question of whether it is their biological or their social 43 Annette C. Baier parental role that is relevant, and some of those who dislike her book are worried precisely by this uncertainty. Some find it retrograde to hail as a special sort of moral wisdom an outlook that may be the product of the socially enforced restriction of women to domestic roles (and the reservation of such roles for them alone). For that might seem to play into the hands of those who still favor such restriction. (Marxists, presumably, will not find it so surprising that moral truths might depend for their initial clear voicing on the social oppression, and memory of it, of those who voice the truths.) Gilligan did in the first chapter of D.V. cite the theory of Nancy Chodorow (as presented in The Reproduction of Mothering [Berkeley 1978]) which traces what appears as gender differences in personality to early social development, in particular to the effects of the child’s primary caretaker being or not being of the same gender as the child. Later, both in ‘The Conquistador and the Dark Continent: Reflections on the Nature of Love’ (Daedalus [Summer 1984]), and ‘The Origins of Morality in Early Childhood’ (in press), she develops this explanation. She postulates two evils that any infant may become aware of, the evil of detachment or isolation from others whose love one needs, and the evil of relative powerlessness and weakness. Two dimensions of moral development are thereby set – one aimed at achieving satisfying community with others, the other aiming at autonomy or equality of power. The relative predominance of one over the other development will depend both upon the relative salience of the two evils in early childhood, and on early and later reinforcement or discouragement in attempts made to guard against these two evils. This provides the germs of a theory about why, given current customs of childrearing, it should be mainly women who are not content with only the moral outlook that she calls the justice perspective, necessary though that was and is seen by them to have been to their hard won liberation from sexist oppression. They, like the blacks, used the language of rights and justice to change their own social position, but nevertheless see limitations in that language, according to Gilligan’s findings as a moral psychologist. She reports their discontent with the individualist more or less Kantian moral framework that dominates Western moral theory and which influenced moral psychologists such as Lawrence 44 The Need for More than Justice Kohlberg, 11 to whose conception of moral maturity she seeks an alternative. Since the target of Gilligan’s criticism is the dominant Kantian tradition, and since that has been the target also of moral philosophers as diverse in their own views as Bernard Williams, 12 Alasdair Macintyre, Philippa Foot, 13 Susan Wolf, Claudia Card, her book is of interest as much for its attempt to articulate an alternative to the Kantian justice perspective as for its implicit raising of the question of male bias in Western moral theory, especially liberaldemocratic theory. For whether the supposed blind spots of that outlook are due to male bias, or to non-parental bias, or to early traumas of powerlessness or to early resignation to ‘detachment’ from others, we need first to be persuaded that they are blind spots before we will have any interest in their cause and cure. Is justice blind to important social values, or at least only one-eyed? What is it that comes into view from the ‘care perspective’ that is not seen from the ‘justice perspective’? Gilligan’s position here is most easily described by contrasting it with that of Kohlberg, against which she developed it. Kohlberg, influenced by Piaget and the Kantian philosophical tradition as developed by John Rawls, developed a theory about typical moral development which saw it to progress from a pre-conventional level, where what is seen to matter is pleasing or not offending parental authority-figures, through a conventional level in which the child tries to fit in with a group, such as a school community, and conform to its standards and rules, to a post-conventional critical level, in which such conventional rules are subjected to tests, and where those tests are of a Utilitarian, or, eventually, a Kantian sort – namely ones that require respect for each person’s individual rational will, or autonomy, and conformity to any implicit social contract such 11 Lawrence Kohlberg, Essays in Moral Development, vols. I & II (New York: Harper and Row 1981, 1984) 12 Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985) 13 Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices (Berkeley: University of California Press 1978) 45 Annette C. Baier wills are deemed to have made, or to any hypothetical ones they would make if thinking clearly. What was found when Kohlberg’s questionnaires (mostly by verbal response to verbally sketched moral dilemmas) were applied to female as well as male subjects, Gilligan reports, is that the girls and women not only scored generally lower than the boys and men, but tended to revert to the lower stage of the conventional level even after briefly (usually in adolescence) attaining the post conventional level. Piaget’s finding that girls were deficient in ‘the legal sense’ was confirmed. These results led Gilligan to wonder if there might not be a quite different pattern of development to be discerned, at least in female subjects. She therefore conducted interviews designed to elicit not just how far advanced the subjects were towards an appreciation of the nature and importance of Kantian autonomy, but also to find out what the subjects themselves saw as progress or lack of it, what conceptions of moral maturity they came to possess by the time they were adults. She found that although the Kohlberg version of moral maturity as respect for fellow persons, and for their rights as equals (rights including that of free association), did seem shared by many young men, the women tended to speak in a different voice about morality itself and about moral maturity. To quote Gilligan, ‘Since the reality of interconnexion is experienced by women as given rather than freely contracted, they arrive at an understanding of life that reflects the limits of autonomy and control. As a result, women’s development delineates the path not only to a less violent life but also to a maturity realized by interdependence and taking care’ (D.V., 172). She writes that there is evidence that ‘women perceive and construe social reality differently from men, and that these differences center around experiences of attachment and separation … because women’s sense of integrity appears to be intertwined with an ethics of care, so that to see themselves as women is to see themselves in a relationship of connexion, the major changes in women’s lives would seem to involve changes in the understanding and activities of care’ (D.V., 171). She contrasts this progressive understanding of care, from merely pleasing others to helping and nurturing, with the sort of progression that is involved in Kohlberg’s stages, a progression in the understanding, not of mutual care, but of mutual respect, where this has its Kantian overtones of distance, 46 The Need for More than Justice even of some fear for the respected, and where personal autonomy and independence, rather than more satisfactory interdependence, are the paramount values. This contrast, one cannot but feel, is one which Gilligan might have used the Marxist language of alienation to make. For the main complaint about the Kantian version of a society with its first virtue justice, construed as respect for equal rights to formal goods such as having contracts kept, due process, equal opportunity including opportunity to participate in political activities leading to policy and law-making, to basic liberties of speech, free association and assembly, religious worship, is that none of these goods do much to ensure that the people who have and mutually respect such rights will have any other relationships to one another than the minimal relationship needed to keep such a ‘civil society’ going. They may well be lonely, driven to suicide, apathetic about their work and about participation in political processes, find their lives meaningless and have no wish to leave offspring to face the same meaningless existence. Their rights, and respect for rights, are quite compatible with very great misery, and misery whose causes are not just individual misfortunes and psychic sickness, but social and moral impoverishment. What Gilligan’s older male subjects complain of is precisely this sort of alienation from some dimly glimpsed better possibility for human beings, some richer sort of network of relationships. As one of Gilligan’s male subjects put it, ‘People have real emotional needs to be attached to something, and equality does not give you attachment. Equality fractures society and places on every person the burden of standing on his own two feet’ (D.V., 167). It is not just the difficulty of self reliance which is complained of, but its socially ‘fracturing’ effect. Whereas the younger men, in their college years, had seen morality as a matter of reciprocal non-interference, this older man begins to see it as reciprocal attachment. ‘Morality is … essential … for creating the kind of environment, interaction between people, that is a prerequisite to the fulfillment of individual goals. If you want other people not to interfere with your pursuit of whatever you are into, you have to play the game,’ says the spokesman for traditional liberalism (D.V. 98). But if what one is ‘into’ is interconnexion, interdependence rather than an individual autonomy that 47 Annette C. Baier may involve ‘detachment,’ such a version of morality will come to seem inadequate. And Gilligan stresses that the interconnexion that her mature women subjects, and some men, wanted to sustain was not merely freely chosen interconnexion, nor interconnexion between equals, but also the sort of interconnexion that can obtain between a child and her unchosen mother and father, or between a child and her unchosen older and younger siblings, or indeed between most workers and their unchosen fellow workers, or most citizens and their unchosen fellow citizens. A model of a decent community different from the liberal one is involved in the version of moral maturity that Gilligan voices. It has in many ways more in common with the older religion-linked versions of morality and a good society than with the modern Western liberal ideal. That perhaps is why some find it so dangerous and retrograde. Yet it seems clear that it also has much in common with what we can call Hegelian versions of moral maturity and of social health and malaise, both with Marxist versions and with so-called right-Hegelian views. Let me try to summarize the main differences, as I see them, between on the one hand Gilligan’s version of moral maturity and the sort of social structures that would encourage, express and protect it, and on the other the orthodoxy she sees herself to be challenging. I shall from now on be giving my ow…