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Show Chapter XIII. Baier's Hume 560 be fair to Kant (MP xii, 269, 290); but that is her job. She does not have to like Kant. But if she is going to discuss his views, it is her intellectual obligation to read him carefully and represent his views accurately to the best of her ability. The disrespect and lack of fidelity with which she often represents Kant's views express her philosophical distaste for him much more strongly than any objections - which are correspondingly unwarranted and unpersuasive - she actually levels against him. One would have thought she would have wanted not merely to express that distaste, but to give it a sound philosophical justification. Then there is her stereotyping of women. Given that so many other European American, middle-class women academics have made the same mistake, it would be unfair to single out Baier for her embrace of Carol Gilligan's conclusions about female moral development, based, as they are, on a research sample that is so extremely provincial with respect to race and 21 class. But it is not unfair to expect from a major philosopher more careful and qualified empirical generalizations than that "[in] women's moral outlook, ... [there is] the tendency of the care perspective to dominate over the justice perspective in their moral deliberations" (MP 52); or that "women's [moral] theory, expressive mainly of women's insights and concerns, would be an ethics of love," whereas "men theorists' preoccupation [has been] 22 obligation" (MP 4). And it is not unfair to expect more searching and nuanced speculation than that maybe "reflective women, when they become philosophers, want to do without moral theory, want no part in the construction of such theories" (MP 2). These ill-considered remarks about what "reflective" women are presumed to want are particularly objectionable. Baier says that Gilligan's research tells us how "intelligent and reflective twentieth-century women see morality, and how different it is from that of ... the men who eagerly assent to the claims of currently orthodox contractarian-Kantian moralities" (MP 115116; emphasis added). So what of all the women philosophers engaged in Kant scholarship or in reconstructing a Kantian morality? What of the women political philosophers who not merely "eagerly assent" to but indeed assert and actively defend the claims of "contractarian-Kantian moralities"? Are we perhaps just not intelligent and reflective enough? Or trapped in the wrong century? Or not real women? nevertheless fair treatment of Kant's analysis of beneficence and debt-avoidance (MP 190-191). 21 Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). 22 Particularly since her normative views are so much more nuanced and sophisticated than these crude categorizations would suggest. See, for example, her recent "Note on Justice, Care, and Immigration Policy," Hypatia 10, 2 (Spring 1995), 150-152. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
