Just Caring, Caring Justice

Just Caring, Caring Justice

JOHN W. DIENHART

T he relationship between care reasoning1 and rightsreasoning2 has been discussed in the business ethics andbusiness and society literature since the early 1980s. We

can organize these discussions by the level of analysis theyaddress. At the individual level, the major issues are three: whatis the specific nature of care and rights, do these different formsof reasoning exist, and if so, do they divide along gender lines.3 Atthe organizational level, a major issue is whether care reasoningcan be successfully used in a for-profit organization.4 Few havewritten about care and rights at the market level. Milton Fried-man’s (1962) argument that the social responsibility of business isto increase its profits5 assumes the fundamental justice of marketsand managers using rights reasoning to negotiate those markets.Some care theorists argue that all public policy should be driven bycare.6 Marilyn Friedman (1987) argues that public policy should beguided by concerns of care and rights.7

In this essay, I discuss care and rights reasoning at all threelevels of analysis. The paper is arranged around four questions.Question 2 is the thematic center of the paper.

1. To what extent are care and rights reasoning compatible?

2. Can we infer anything about human relationships from theway we reason about them?

3. Do the answers to questions 1 and 2 shed light on the widelydebated thesis that care reasoning is found almost exclusivelyin girls and women and that rights reasoning is found almostexclusively in boys and men?

© 2000 Center for Business Ethics at Bentley College. Published by Blackwell Publishers,350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK.

Business and Society Review 105:2 247–267

John W. Dienhart holds the Frank Shrontz Chair for Business Ethics and is the Director of theInternational Business Ethics Center at the Albers School of Business and Economics, SeattleUniversity.

4. Do the answers to the above three questions have implicationsfor moral theory?

I argue that the answer to question one is, and must be, that thetwo forms of reasoning are formally incompatible. This incompati-bility, however, may not have deep or far-reaching implications,since there are strong and weak ways in which care and rights rea-soning can be incompatible. Also, even if they are strongly incom-patible, this does not imply that the information we get from thesetwo forms of reasoning is also incompatible. I go on to argue thathow we reason about human relationships suggests that mostrelationships are based on rights and care. This implies that it isunlikely that rights and care would be divided between women andmen. I refer to empirical data that supports this transgender natureof rights and care. Finally, I argue that the answers to questions 1,2, and 3 have implications for moral theory, namely, they providereasons to support a structured ethical pluralism.

QUESTION 1: TO WHAT EXTENT ARE CARE ANDRIGHTS REASONING COMPATIBLE?

Care reasoning is one kind of partial reasoning and rights reason-ing is one kind of impartial reasoning.8 Partial reasoning takes intoaccount the special relationships a reasoner has to people who areaffected by a decision. Friends and family may get special treat-ment simply because they are friends and family. You may give aloan, raise, or contract to a relative or friend because that is whata caring relative or friend should do. Impartial reasoning, as theprefix suggests, is just the opposite: it ignores the special relation-ships a reasoner has to people who are affected by a decision. Afriend or family member should be given a loan, raise, or contract,only if that person satisfies impartial criteria.9 Since we cannotboth consider and not consider personal relationships, care andrights reasoning are formally incompatible.

The logical incompatibility between partial and impartial reason-ing is a strong and seemingly incontrovertible reason for assertingthat a person cannot reason in both ways. Gilligan uses the gestaltdrawing of the duck-rabbit to illustrate this incompatibility. A per-son can see one or the other, but not both.

248 BUSINESS AND SOCIETY REVIEW

Strong and Weak Incompatibility Between Careand Rights Reasoning

Care reasoning and rights reasoning can be incompatible in at leastthree ways. Starting with the strongest form of incompatibility andmoving to the weakest:

1. A person who uses care (rights) reasoning to understand onerelationship uses care (rights) reasoning to understand allrelationships.

2. A person who uses care (rights) reasoning to understand onerelationship will always use care (rights) reasoning to under-stand that relationship, but can use rights (care) reasoning tounderstand other relationships.

3. A person who uses care (rights) reasoning to understand onerelationship can also use rights (care) reasoning to under-stand that relationship, but not at the same time.

Gilligan rejects, at least implicitly, the first two and strongestforms of incompatibility. For example, she notes that feminists inthe late 19th and early 20th centuries were able to work effectivelywith rights and care reasoning.10 Gilligan also cites interview datathat reveals that “the concept of rights remains in tension with anethic of care.”11 In a more global assessment, Gilligan says that inmid-life, care reasoners can begin to see the importance of rights intheir ongoing relationships and that rights reasoners can begin tosee the importance of care in their ongoing relationships.12 This

JOHN W. DIENHART 249

FIGURE 1

implies that at most the third and weakest proposition is true: wecan understand a relationship using care and rights, but we cannotdo so at the same time.

The duck-rabbit drawing, which Gilligan uses to express therelationship between care and rights, fits with the view that the twostrongest forms of incompatibility do not hold. In these gestaltdrawings, we can see one figure, and when we switch our frame ofreference, often by conscious effort, we can see the other. If aperson could see only one figure, that person would not under-stand a central point made by gestalt figures, that how we seethings depends on context. Further, a person who can see bothfigures has more information, and more pertinent information,about the drawing than a person who can see only one of the fig-ures. The fact that we cannot see both figures at the same timedoes not preclude us from getting information, serially, that givesus a better understanding of the whole drawing.

QUESTION 2: CAN WE INFER ANYTHINGABOUT HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS FROM THE WAY WE

REASON ABOUT THEM?

For the purposes of this paper I will assume a “modest realism.” Idefine modest realism as the view that when our reasoning helps uswork in the world to produce expected ends, there are structuralsimilarities between our reasoning and the world. For example,using count nouns for sheep and mass terms for the water theydrink helps us deal differently, and successfully, with each. Thissuccess suggests that sheep, unlike water, are discrete entities.

To use modest realism to infer anything about relationshipsfrom how we think about them, we need to examine how we thinkabout them. The weak incompatibility of care and rights reasoning,above, shows only how we can think about relationships, not howwe do think about relationships. For example, if our relationshipsdivided neatly between those based only on care and those basedonly on rights, then our ability to switch perspectives would neverneed to be used. Going back to the duck-rabbit example, imaginethe world without such ambiguous figures, but that our perceptualabilities remain the same. In this case, we would be able to switchvisual perspectives, but never have occasion to do so.


The business ethics literature has many examples of individualswhose conflicts are explained using care and rights reasoning.Consider a case cited by Dennis Collins.13 A mid-level manager(Mgr/F) receives confidential information that one of his friends(Loff/F) in the same company will be laid off. Mgr/F also knows thatLoff/F is closing on a house before the lay-offs will be announced.From the context of the formal business relationship, determinedby rights and duties, Mgr/F should not tell Loff/F. From the con-text of friendship, determined by care and responsibility, Mgr/Fshould tell Loff/F. It seems we have one relationship that has careand rights features, and that we need both forms of reasoning tounderstand the dilemma.

One way to escape the conclusion that there is one relationshipwith aspects amenable to care and to rights reasoning is to say thatthe manager has two separate relationships with the same person:one based only on care and one based only on rights. On this analy-sis, the conflict is between two relationships, not between differentaspects of the same relationship. How can we tell if there is onerelationship or two? One path we can follow is to examine how weindividuate relationships. Another path is to examine whether ornot it is likely we could have a relationship based only on care or onrights. As we will see, the first path leads to the second.

Individuating Relationships

There are at least two ways we can individuate relationships: by thepersons involved or by the principles guiding the relationships. Ifwe individuate relationships by the persons who have them, Mgr/Fand Loff/F have one relationship with care and rights features. Ifwe individuate relationships in terms of the principles that guidethem, and the business relationship is based only on rights and thefriendship is based only on care, then these two people have tworelationships with each other. In an intriguing article, MarilynFriedman argues for a point of view that implies that individuatingrelationships on the basis of care and rights will not succeed.


Just Caring and Caring Justice

Marilyn Friedman argues that we need considerations of care toguide us in situations in which justice is a major concern and thatwe need considerations of justice to guide us in situations in whichcare is a major concern. In other words, for justice to be just, itmust be caring, and for care to be caring, it must be just. It is thelatter issue on which she spends the most time, but, as we will see,her comments about integrating justice into care have ramifica-tions for how we might integrate care into justice.

She first reminds us that justice and fairness are impersonalstandards “that apply to everyone in their social interrelationshipswhether or not [those relationships are] characterized by affectionand a concern for each other’s well-being.”14 Such abstract princi-ples are useful, she argues, since we cannot assume in advancethat everyone will care enough about others to treat them well.However, the abstract nature of these general principles is a prob-lem if we use them to evaluate close personal relationships, sincepersonal relationships cannot be abstracted from the personallinks that constitute them.

Just Caring

Friedman argues that although the general duties of justice associ-ated with society and citizenship are inappropriate for personalrelationships, there are other special duties of justice that arise inclose personal relationships. These special duties of justice aregrounded on affection or kinship, and they can take three forms:distributive justice, corrective justice, and a broader sense of jus-tice that she does not name.

Distributive justice within personal relationships concerns thedivision of responsibilities. For example, a relationship can bedistributively unjust if one of the parties is forced to be responsiblefor maintaining the relationship. Friedman cites Marilyn Frye’sarguments that women suffer this kind of distributive injustice inall cultures and classes.15 A distributively just relationship equita-bly divides responsibilities within the relationship, and takes intoaccount the needs and relationships of all parties.

Corrective justice in a relationship refers to how harms are recti-fied. Personal relationships can be unjust in the corrective sense


when there is no compensation or rectification for harms done.Friedman notes that we are much more vulnerable in personal rela-tionships than in our impersonal relationships—it is an old truththat only those we trust can betray us. Friedman does not specu-late about what form corrective justice might take in personalrelationships. One of the stumbling blocks in devising universalcorrective strategies for personal relationships is that the ideal casewould seem to require that the transgressor truly regret the trans-gression, and that part of this regret would include the desire torectify the harm. Further, we might expect that part of this rectifi-cation would include modifying character traits that led to thetransgression. More than behavior is needed to correct harms inclose personal relationships; sometimes what is needed is a changeof heart and character.

In the above discussion of distributive and corrective justice,Friedman assumes that all parties to the relationships are compe-tent adults. The third type of justice, which she does not name,applies to groups in which some of the members are vulnerable,and need special help from others. Families, for example, oftenhave children, and these children need to be nurtured to adult-hood. Friedman says:

Personal relationships may also be regarded in the context oftheir various institutional settings, such as marriage and thefamily. Here justice emerges again as a relevant ideal, its rolebeing to define appropriate institutions to structure inter-actions among family members, other household co-habitants,and intimates in general. The family, for example, is a miniaturesociety, exhibiting all the major facets of large-scale social life:decision-making affecting the whole unit; executive action;judgments of guilt and innocence; reward and punishment;allocation of responsibilities and privileges, of burdens and ben-efits; and monumental influences on the life chances of both itsmaturing and its matured members.16

The justice of the overall structure of relationships and the princi-ples, rules, and practices that define and shape the way individualsbehave in groups like the family is neither distributive nor correc-tive, although it encompasses and orders both kinds of justice. Theoverall familial structure also helps shape the natural affectionsthat members develop for each other.

Although Friedman does not give a name to this third kind of jus-tice, perhaps the term “relational justice” would be appropriate,


since this kind of justice seems to be a property of the entire set ofprinciples, rules and practices that make up the family group.Groups are relationally just insofar as their principles, rules, andpractices help all members of the group develop their humanpotential. Groups help their members do this is by being just in thedistributive and corrective senses; another way is by nurturing thedevelopment of deep and caring relationships. Hence, reasoningabout relational justice includes and integrates rights and carereasoning.

Caring Justice

We have been discussing why Friedman thinks that justice needsto be integrated into caring. She also argues that care needs to beintegrated with justice when reasoning about public policy. Fried-man notes that “care in the public realm would show itself . . . inforeign aid, welfare programs, famine or disaster relief, or othersocial programs designed to relieve suffering and attend to humanneeds.”17 The 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act is an example ofpublic policy that has been justified by the care perspective.

If care is applied in the public realm independently of the stan-dards of justice, we could end up by helping only those about whomwe care, ignoring others whose needs are as great or greater. Fried-man cites the late Mayor Daley of Chicago. Mayor Daley was loyal tofriends and family by running city government on a patronage sys-tem that excluded many people. On a grander and more horriblescale, one could argue that conflicts in the Balkans are based oncare for those within kinship groups, and no sense of justice forthose outside kinship groups.

Care and Rights in Business

Marilyn Friedman has given us good reasons to believe that rightsand care constitute our relationships in the personal and civicrealm. As I interpret her, she does not argue that the close connec-tion between justice and caring means that every instance of caringis also an instance of justice or that every instance of justice is alsoan instance of caring. Rather, she argues that the basic institutionsof family and civic life need both features if they are to exhibiteither.


Another basic institution that guides our life is business. In whatfollows I examine three levels of business activity. I first examineRobert Solomon’s argument that rights and care reasoning areineliminable aspects of the corporation.18 I then look at how rightsand care intersect in company-consumer relationships, focusingon mortgage lending. Finally, I look at how rights and care reason-ing intersect with what is sometimes called “crony capitalism,” apurported cause of the recent economic crisis in Asia. All of theseissues, I argue, integrate care and rights, so we need both types ofreasoning to understand and act effectively within them.

Care and Rights in the Corporation

In “The Moral Psychology of Business: Care and Compassion in theCorporation,” Robert Solomon argues that we cannot make senseof the role of justice in business unless it is tightly integrated withfeelings of care and compassion. He says:

What care and compassion do in the context of justice is pro-vide that mutual understanding and shared sentiment thatmakes for harmony and allows for cooperative and mutuallyformulated solutions.19

but that

Sentiments alone cannot solve or account for the large policyissues that are (or should be) the ultimate concern of . . .theories of justice . . . .20

He makes the point made by Marilyn Friedman, above, that senti-ments without justice can be brutal. Solomon goes on to give manyexamples of why care and justice need to be integrated, and of howone is impoverished without the other. Let’s apply Solomon’s viewsto the Dennis Collins case, above.

In Collins’ case, a mid-level manager (Mgr/F) is a friend and fel-low employee of a person to be laid off (Loff/F). Mgr/F is governed(not in the pejorative sense) by considerations of care and justice. IfMgr/F were to read Solomon’s article, I do not think there is muchpractical guidance about what, if anything, Mgr/F should say toLoff/F. This is not a criticism of Solomon’s article, since it is pri-marily concerned with making room for care in the corporation, notfor designing care reasoning into corporate decision making. At a


deeper level, though, Solomon’s article could help Mgr/F in two sig-nificant ways. First, it could lead Mgr/F to reevaluate the dilemma.Second, this reevaluation could lead Mgr/F to examine the organi-zational environment in which the dilemma arose in the first place.

Mgr/F reevaluates the dilemma. Mgr/F first understood thedilemma as a conflict between friendship and duty to the corpora-tion. However, Solomon repeatedly argues that this dichotomy isfalse and perverse. Let’s begin with the friendship side of the falsedichotomy. Relying on Solomon, we could argue that one of thereasons Mgr/F wants to tell Loff/F about the layoffs is that thelayoff procedure seems unfair. Employment-at-will notwithstand-ing, people plan, and reasonably plan, their financial futures on thecontinuance of their job, at least when the company is financiallysound. This is not some idiosyncratic trait, but one that is reliedon by banks, credit card issuers, spouses and partners. To see theimportance of fairness in the Mgr/F’s dilemma, consider how theproblem would change if the layoffs did not seem so unfair.

Scenario 1: Suppose the company had announced manage-ment layoffs in the next few months but refused to say whowas targeted. Under these conditions, a manager who closeson a house is taking a known risk, and Mgr/F would have lessof a dilemma.

Scenario 2: Assume scenario 1, but also suppose Loff/F hadpromoted a risky marketing project, and was told from thebeginning that future employment is tied to the success of theproject. If that project is failing, the dilemma for Mgr/F all butdisappears.

On this analysis, Mgr/F needs both care and rights reasoning tounderstand the dilemma.

Mgr/F reevaluates the organizational environment. It is thecaring friendship that brings the dilemma to light, but the per-ceived unfairness adds weight to the dilemma. The more unfair theact, the more unwilling one is to let one’s friend suffer it. Fairness,however, is universal, and if the layoffs treat Loff/F unfairly, thereis a presumption that the others to be laid off are also being treatedunfairly. Mgr/F could use the dilemma as an impetus to evaluatethe corporation’s layoff procedures. If Mgr/F can initiate such anexamination, the company could develop more caring and more


just layoff procedures. In the course of these reevaluations, newalternatives may arise that will enable Mgr/F to avoid the dilemma.Of course, it may turn out that there is no hope of any change inthe company. In that case, Mgr/F may start looking for anotherposition. Mgr/F may also tell Loff/F about the impending lay-off,believing both fairness and care demand it.

Care and Rights in Company-Customer Relationships

Let’s return to the loan example I used to distinguish partial (care)reasoning from impartial (rights) reasoning. In that example, Iargued that a care-reasoning loan officer might give a loan to afriend simply because that person is a friend. A rights-reasoningloan officer, on the other hand, would give a loan to a friend only ifthe friend met impartially applied standards that apply to all appli-cants. Is this a counter-example to Friedman’s and Solomon’sarguments that rights and care are inextricably intertwined? Theanswer is “Yes” and “No.” The answer is “Yes” because a care rea-soner and a rights reasoner could reason in these ways.

The answer is “No” because the consequences of acting in theseways could alert both reasoners that so acting could violate thevery principles that guided their initial decisions. Let’s look at thecare reasoner first. Suppose the applicant-friend (App/F) does notqualify for the loan, but convinces the loan officer-friend (Lndr/F)that App/F can make the payments—App/F is getting a raise,selling a car. . . . If the loan goes bad, what is Lndr/F to do? TheLndr/F could start normal procedures that lead to garnishment.However, this does not seem to be a caring thing to do. If App/Fappeals to the Lndr/F for help, Lndr/F could “lose the paper-work”for a while. However, that could make things worse for both ofthem. What the Lndr/F could learn from this experience is thatimpartially applied standards for loans, insofar as they are aroughly accurate way to gauge a borrower’s ability to repay, are away to care for an applicant. In ethics-speak, rights reasoning canhelp us care for our friends. This is in the integrative spirit of Mari-lyn Friedman and Solomon, above.

Let’s now look at a rights reasoner who feels it is his duty toapply the same rules about loans to everyone impartially. Supposethis loan officer (Rghts/Lndr), a white European male, is told byan internal bank committee that he is giving proportionally moreloans to European white applicants than to African-American black


applicants. Rghts/Lndr responds that he applies the same stan-dards to everyone, so it must be that African-American black appli-cations do not meet bank standards more often than Europeanwhite applicants. The committee does not dispute this, as theyhave looked into the records and found that no qualified blackapplicants were rejected. However, they did find that Rghts/Lndrgave loans to more marginally qualified whites than to marginallyqualified blacks. Rghts/Lndr has no idea why this might be thecase.

David M. Messick has a set of hypotheses that can explain whyRghts/Lndr approved a disproportionate number of marginallyqualified whites.21 First, Messick distinguishes between what I willcall negative and positive racial discrimination. Negative discrimi-nation is what we usually think of when think about racial discrim-ination. A person reflectively or unreflectively disrespects anotherperson because of their race. Positive racial discrimination occurswhen an individual expends effort to help those of the preferredrace leaving less time for non-preferred races. Like negative dis-crimination, this can be reflective or unreflective. Messick arguesthat positive, unreflective racial discrimination can be very hardto identify. In the case of the rights reasoner, above, however, thelarger number of white marginally qualified applications suggeststhat this may be what is happening.

One way that positive, unreflective racial discrimination couldincrease the number of successful marginal applications by whitesis the time spent with applicants and the manner of the interaction.Assuming positive, unreflective racial discrimination, the whiteloan officer will feel more comfortable being in the same room withwhite applicants than with black applicants. The extended timeitself would allow more information to come out. The comfort levelcould also lead to more probing questions on the part of the loanofficer. Consider the following example.

Rghts/Lndr’s bank has a rule that when an application barelymeets financial requirements, continuity of job and residence isthe deciding factor. An application showing marginal assets andincome shows that the applicant and his spouse have had six jobsbetween them in the last two years and have moved three times.They have been at their latest jobs and residence for three months.If the applicants are white, the loan officer may discover that in thiscase, this job/residence history works in favor of the applicants.


They have moved and relocated because headhunters have helpedthem get a succession of better, higher paying jobs. If the appli-cants are black, this information may never come out. The problemin this case is not one of applying the same standards differently todifferent races, but of having less information about black appli-cants than white applicants.

In the language of care and rights that we have been using, theloan officer is unreflectively disposed to care more for white appli-cants than for black applicants. This difference in caring leads tounfair treatment. Hence, for Rghts/Lndr to act fairly, he must careenough about applicants to get pertinent information.

The Asian Economic Crisis: Care, Rights, and Crony Capitalism

The Asian economic crisis has many contributing factors, and theplight of each Asian nation is unique in its many particulars. Onefeature, however, so-called “crony capitalism,” has been claimed tobe a problem common to all. Crony capitalism (even if you don’tknow what it means, it sounds bad) is the practice of makingresource allocation decisions based on friendship and family tiesinstead on impersonal considerations like cost and quality. Inethics-speak, Asian business people and government officials use acare ethic rather than a rights ethic when making business deci-sions. This criticism presumes that business practice and businessorganizations should be rights based, and that care, predominantin Asian economies, is incompatible with rights based systems.

This account of the Asian financial crisis challenges the view thatrights and care are inextricably linked. Yet, there is a way toacknowledge that crony capitalism played a significant role in theAsian crisis without at the same time endorsing a care and rightssplit. Let’s begin with a recent analysis of the Asian crisis by PaulKrugman.

. . . the idea that economies are being punished for their weak-nesses [the sins of crony capitalism] is unconvincing on atleast two grounds. For one, the scale of the punishment seemswholly disproportionate to the crime. Why should bad invest-ment decisions lead not merely to a slow-down in growth butto a massive collapse in output and employment? Further-more, if the fault lies with the countries, why have so many ofthem gotten into trouble at the same time?22


Krugman goes on to argue that every economy has problems, butthat these problems need to intersect with other problems before acrisis occurs. What the problems of Asian nations intersected with,argues Krugman, was the general rollback of currency restrictionsthat had been adopted after World War II. While these new impar-tial and open trading rules for currency helped spur the massivegrowth of many Asian nations, they also allowed massive capitalflight. So it is not crony capitalism per se that led to the Asian cri-sis, but crony capitalism coupled with an impersonal currencytrading system. Still, it could be argued that the Western rightsbased system is better, and that care based crony capitalism hasgot to go. In ethics-speak, rights rules and care loses.

The superiority of the rights based Western economic system canbe maintained only if two assumptions are true: first, the Westernsystem is based on rights and second, that the Western rights basedsystem does not have the harmful consequences of crony capital-ism. I offer reasons to doubt both of these assumptions. First, it isnot clear that Western capitalism is rights based. Business and gov-ernment in the United States have many care elements and thenumber of these elements is growing. At the corporate level we seecompanies, like 3M, devoting large amount of time and money tofamily issues when relocating senior managers.23 At the state levelwe have Minnesota developing its own medical insurance policy forthe working poor. At the federal level we have the Family and Medi-cal Leave Act of 1993, designed to allow employees to attend tofamily matters by taking up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave. Theseexamples all have significant care based aspects. Examinations ofEuropean business practices and government policies reveal manymore care based elements.

Second, even if Western capitalism is rights based, it producesmany policies and relationships that are similar to those identifiedwith crony capitalism. The Cato Institute, for example, has esti-mated that the U.S spends up to 90 billion dollars yearly on corpo-rate welfare.24 Add to this the billions of dollars to save Chrysler,repair the S & L crisis, and most recently the Federally coordinatedbailout of Long-Term Capital Management LP, and surely we haveenough government market manipulation to rival any Asian nation.


Reasoning and the Structure of Relationships

The discussion so far suggests that we need both care and rightsreasoning to understand the institutions of family, government,and business. Although I will not pursue it here, I think the samecould be said of another major social institution, religion, whichguides the lives of many and influences the lives of all. Given themodest realism I have postulated—that when our reasoning helpsus work in the world to produce expected ends, there are structuralsimilarities between our reasoning and the world—it follows thatour relationships are founded on both values, although one or theother may dominate in certain kinds of circumstances.

QUESTION 3: DO THE ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS 1AND 2 SHED LIGHT ON THE THESIS

THAT CARE REASONING IS FOUND ALMOSTEXCLUSIVELY IN GIRLS AND WOMEN

AND THAT RIGHTS REASONING IS FOUNDALMOST EXCLUSIVELY IN BOYS AND MEN?

The answers to questions 1 and 2 suggest that rights and care arenot divided between genders. To see this, let’s review the responseto question 1. In that section, I argued that although rights andcare are formally incompatible, we can reason serially about thesame relationship using both perspectives. The duck-rabbit exam-ple exhibits this nicely. We have one drawing that we can see fromeither perspective, but we cannot engage both perspectives at thesame time. Marilyn Friedman argues that the preponderance ofempirical evidence supports the view that rights and care aredistributed roughly equally between men and women.25 Yet, sheacknowledges that many reject this. To her credit, she explores theroots of this dissonance: why is it that many women and menperceive that the genders reason differently when they do not?

Friedman bases her answer on the social science literature.First, she cites research that shows that both men and womenagree that women are likely to be more empathetic, altruistic,and communal than men. Men, on the other hand, are seenas “agentic,” which is defined in terms of independence, forcefuldominance, and self-assertion.26 These stereotypes prescribe howwomen and men should act, and they lead us to discount or ignore


disconfirming instances. When we apply this to moral reasoning,men and women believe they reason differently because this iswhat the social stereotypes lead them to believe. If this explanationis correct, then there is no dissonance generated by the differencebetween the perception of how we reason and how we do reason. Infact, the opposite is true: it would be odd if there were no differencebetween perception and reality.

The response to question 2 further supports the view that bothmen and women use both types of reasoning. In that discussionwe briefly examined the institutions of family, government, andbusiness. In each case using rights and care yielded a better under-standing of those institutions than using only one form of reason-ing. Since women and men participate, and successfully so, in allthree of these institutions, it is reasonable to assume that men andwomen are competent at both kinds of reasoning.

Despite Friedman’s criticisms, she believes that Gilligan hasmade important and enduring contributions to moral psychologyand ethics. The lack of empirical support for the thesis that womenreason differently than men about morality is only one part of alarger project to give care and rights issues equal standing. Thislarger project, in my estimation, has succeeded.27 Further, thismore expansive view of Gilligan’s project is consistent with a goalGilligan set for herself early on when she said:

The different voice I describe is characterized not by genderbut theme. Its association with women is an empirical obser-vation. . . . But this association is not absolute and the con-trasts between male and female voices are presented here tohighlight a distinction between two modes of thought and tofocus a problem of interpretation rather than to represent ageneralization about either sex.28

QUESTION 4: CAN THE RESPONSESTO THE ABOVE THREE QUESTIONS HELP US

UNDERSTAND MORAL THEORY?

The responses to Questions 1–3 suggest that rights and care, twofoundations of human relationships, are so different that we cannotreason about them at the same time. If we take cognitive moraldevelopmental theory seriously, we need to add two other values:self-interest (another kind of partialism) and utilitarianism (another


kind of impartialism).29 The multiplicity of values is increasedbecause people can have several interpretations of each of thesefour fundamental values. If business ethics is to help people makebetter business decisions, it cannot ignore the plurality of valuesthat people really use to make decisions, nor can it ignore the plu-ralistic decision-making environment. This plurality of values canbe addressed at the practical and theoretical level.

Practical Reasoning and The Multiplicity of Values

The multiplicity of values can be understood as an efficient way forindividuals with bounded rationality to understand complex socialinstitutional environments. To make this point about efficiency, weneed to distinguish two functions of moral reasoning: informationgathering and judgment. As information gathering tools, differentethical values direct our attention to different aspects of the contextin which a decision arises. Consider the following, very differentcases. In a career decision, self-interest can lead us to make a care-ful evaluation of our strengths and weaknesses. In consoling aheart-broken child, care will direct us to the look at the emotionalhistory of this child. When trying to improve the productivity of acompany, utilitarianism will focus us on how different parts of thecompany do and do not work together. When deciding how to votefor a constitutional amendment that guarantees voting rights toadults, as legislators had to do with the 15th, 19th, and 26thAmendments, a rights focus will direct us to look at the moral foun-dations of representative democracy. Most decisions require us toget information relevant to two or more values. In these cases, wecan switch perspectives, as we do with gestalt drawings.

The efficiency of the multiplicity of values at the judgment level isless clear. If we gather information using several values, how do wedecide which value is most important when making the final deci-sion? It seems we must choose one and exclude the others. Forexample, if I am motivated by self-interest, I am not acting fromcare, utility, or rights. However, this problem is reduced if actingfrom one value is consistent with acting from one or more of theother three. One action can bring different values into alignment.

Let’s return once more to the example of the loan-officer (Lndr/F)who is a friend of a person applying for a loan (App/F). In thatexample we saw that one way to act as a friend is to apply rules


impartially. Another way to say this is that the practice of lendingcan be structured by relevant institutions to bring care and rightsinto alignment.30 But the alignment is richer still. It is in the self-interest of Lndr/F not to approve unsuccessful loans and it is in theself-interest of the App/F not to accept loans that cannot be repaid.Further, it is in the interest of the group to set rules that accuratelypredict loan repayment.

Moral Theory and The Multiplicity of Values

The history of philosophy is filled with honest and convincingattempts to show that each of the four values—self-interest, care,utility, and justice—is more valuable than the other three. Thatthese attempts are convincing is at the heart of the problem ofchoosing the most important value. Choosing one forces us intothe undesirable position of rejecting good arguments and values.31

We are forced into this undesirable position, however, only if weassume there is one overriding value. If pluralism is correct, andseveral values can be equally good, then the fact a good case can bemade for many of them is what we should expect. From this plural-istic point of view, the history of ethics is not a chaotic, quixoticsearch for the ultimate value, but a series of investigations, brim-ming with information, of some of our most important values. Notall values have survived. Blind loyalty to political leaders has beentried throughout the centuries and failed every time. Hatred andrace purity have also failed. What have stood the test of time aremoderate views of self -interest, devotion to family and friends, loveof community, and justice, fairness, and respect of human rights.The task of a moral theory then, is to understand both the how andthe should of integrating these values at the individual, organiza-tional, and social levels.

Whether or not pluralism is the best way to understand andthink about ethics is an issue that goes far beyond the scope ofthis paper. However, it should be noted that there has been arecent spate of literature supporting ethical pluralism. Cavenaugh,Moberg, and Velasquez argue that an ethical view that combinescare, group good, justice, and rights will be more effective than atheory that is based on fewer of these concerns.32 One problem withthis particular approach is that it does not give us much directionin cases where these principles conflict. Robert Solomon argues


for pluralism in Ethics and Excellence;33 I make a similar case inBusiness, Institutions and Ethics: A Text with Cases and Readings(2000).34 Solomon and I argue, in different ways, for a structuredpluralism that helps us resolve value conflicts. Both of us get muchof our inspiration from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, the firstand most comprehensive statement of pluralism in the West.

CONCLUSION

I have argued that care and rights reasoning are inextricably inter-twined. The arguments that support these conclusions are basedon psychological and philosophical reasoning. If these argumentslead us in the right direction, they hold many implications for busi-ness, business ethics, and everyday life. We discussed how Solo-mon explored implications for organizations. Two other sets ofimplications were examined here: (a) implications for relationshipsbetween organizational members and external constituencies and(b) implications for public policy and interpreting public issues.Finally, I argued that the presence of care and rights issues in busi-ness, and our need to use care and rights reasoning to understandthese issues, make a presumptive case for a structured ethicalpluralism.

NOTES

1. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s

Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).2. Lawrence Kohlberg, The Psychology of Moral Development: The Nature

and Validity of Moral Stages (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984).3. Lawrence Kohlberg, Moral Stages: A Current Formulation and a

Response To Critics (New York: Karger, 1983). John Broughton, “Women’sRationality and Men’s Virtues: A Critique of Gender Dualism in Gilligan’sTheory of Moral Development,” in An Ethic of Care: Feminist and Interdisci-

plinary Perspectives, Mary Jeanne Larrabee, ed., (New York: Routledge,1983). Gilligan, 1982. John Dobson, “The Feminine Firm: A Comment,”Business Ethics Quarterly 6:2 (1996). Andrew Wicks, “Reflections on thePractical Relevance of Feminist Thought To Business,” Business Ethics

Quarterly 6:4 (1996). Carol Gilligan and Jane Attanucci, “Two Moral


Orientations,” in Mapping the Moral Domain, Carol Gilligan, Janie VictoriaWard, Jill McLean Taylor, eds., (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1988).

4. John Dobson and Judith White, “Toward the Feminine Firm,” Busi-

ness Ethics Quarterly 5:3 (1995). Robbin Derry, “Toward a Feminist Firm:Comments on John Dobson and Judith White,” Business Ethics Quarterly

6:1 (1996). John Dobson, “The Feminine Firm: A Comment,” Business

Ethics Quarterly 6:2 (1996). Andrew Wicks, “Reflections on the PracticalRelevance of Feminist Thought to Business,” Business Ethics Quarterly 6:4(1996). Robert Solomon, “The Moral Psychology of Business: Care andCompassion in the Corporation,” Business Ethics Quarterly 8:3 (1998).

5. Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1962).

6. Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace (Boston:Beacon Press, 1989).

7. Marilyn Friedman, “Beyond Caring: The De-Moralization of Gender,”in An Ethic of Care: Feminist and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, MaryJeanne Larrabee, ed., (New York: Routledge, (1989).

8. D. Jeske, “Friendship, Virtue, and Impartiality,” Philosophy and Phe-

nomenological Research 57:1 (1997). J. Cottingham, “The Ethical Creden-tials of Partiality” The Presidential Address, Proceedings of the Aristotelian

Society 98 (1998). Thomas Nagel, Equality and Impartiality (New York:Oxford University Press, 1991).

9. Note that impartial criteria are not necessarily fair of unbiased. Thatis, we can impartially apply race segregation laws, and all sorts of otherhideously unfair rules.

10. Gilligan, 1982.11. Ibid.12. Ibid.13. Dennis Collins, discussion with author.14. Marilyn Friedman, 1989.15. Ibid.16. Ibid.17. Ibid.18. Solomon, 1998.19. Ibid.20. Ibid.21. David Messick, “Social Categories and Business Ethics,” Business

Ethics Quarterly, The Ruffin Series, Special Issue No. 1 (1998).


22. Paul Krugman, “Depression Economics Returns,” Foreign Affairs

78(1) (1999).23. Keith Miller, (1997) Interview with author. Mr. Miller moved from

Minnesota to Belgium to run Health, Safety, and Environment for 3MEurope.

24. S. Moore and D. Stansel, “Ending Corporate Welfare as We Know It,”Policy Analysis: 225 (May 12, 1995) Cato Institute.

25. Marilyn Friedman, 1989.26. Ibid. Ming Singer, “Paradigms Linked: A Normative Empirical Dia-

logue About Business Ethics,” Business Ethics Quarterly 8:3 (1998).27. See Broughton for a contrary view. John Broughton, “Women’s

Rationality and Men’s Virtues: A Critique of Gender Dualism in Gilligan’sTheory of Moral Development,” in An Ethic of Care: Feminist and Interdisci-

plinary Perspectives, Mary Jeanne Larrabee, ed. (New York: Routledge,1983).

28. Carol Gilligan, 1982.29. It is commonly thought that self-interest and utilitarianism are dis-

carded as we move up the stage hierarchy. This is not quite correct. Theprinciples of self-interest and utilitarianism are not discarded, but viewedas secondary to universal principles of caring or justice. If these latter twovalues are not at stake, Post-conventional reasoners can easily reason interms of the so-called “lower principles.”

30. John Dienhart, Business, Institutions, and Ethics: A Text with Cases

and Readings (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).31. David Messick, “Equality, Fairness, and Social Conflict,” Social

Justice Research 8:2 (1995).32. Gerald Cavenaugh, Dennis Moberg, and Manuel Velasquez,

“Making business ethics practical,” Business Ethics Quarterly 5:3 (1995).33. Robert Solomon, Ethics and Excellence (Ruffin Series in Business

Ethics, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).34. Dienhart, 2000.


Documents

Just Caring, Caring Justice