154 Kathleen S. G. Skott-Myhre
against any scale. We are neither moral nor immoral according to any
outside universal measure.
Carol Gilligan’s (1982/1993) work in challenging Kohlberg’s
universalist concepts of hierarchical moral development opened the door to
ethics and morality as particularized aspects of lived experience. In her
work she has offered us the possibility of premising our ethics outside
transcendent abstract notions of justice and morality that often obscure
power relations premised in culture, class, sexuality, or gender. Premising
her proposals on an alternate epistemology and lineage premised in
women’s ways of knowing, she suggests a morality/ethics premised in an
ecologically founded form of subjectivity. For Gilligan (1982/1993), ethics
is not centered within an individual subject, but is premised in relational
webs of care. She argues that ethics/morality is a collective endeavor
conducted by human beings as responsive, connected and interdependent.
Ethical/moral decision-making is a response to injustice and careless
treatment of living things. In a recent interview (Gilligan, 2011), she
stated:
A feminist ethic of care is an ethic of resistance to the injustices
inherent in patriarchy (the association of care and caring with women
rather than with humans, the feminization of care work, the rendering of
care as subsidiary to justice—a matter of special obligations or
interpersonal relationships). A feminist ethic of care guides the historic
struggle to free democracy from patriarchy; it is the ethic of a democratic
society, it transcends the gender binaries and hierarchies that structure
patriarchal institutions and cultures. An ethics of care is key to human
survival and also to the realization of a global society. (para 8)This perspective on care moves us beyond traditional notions of
development or morality. If we extend Gilligan’s assertion that we are
inherently relational and open her definition of global society to include
more-than-human others, we can see that our capacity for ethical care is
premised in a radical materiality through which discursive elements,
neurological elements, bacterial elements, viral elements, and cellular