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 by Brian Milstein Submitted originally as a final paper for the course "Critical Theory II: Habermas and Beyond," Spring 2003, at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, Nancy Fraser, Instructor Cite as: Milstein, Brian. "Habermas and Kohlberg: An Exercise in Feminist Critique." Unpublished paper, New School for Social Research, New York (accessed on [DATE] at http://magictheatre.panopticweb.com/aesthetics/writings/kohlberg.html). This paper may best be described as an exercise in the use of feminist theory as a resource for critical social theory. I am choosing to examine the normative theories of Jürgen Habermas from the perspective of his (in my opinion unfortunate) extensive use of the ontogenetic moral psychology of Lawrence Kohlberg, who has himself drawn much criticism from feminist theorists. In part 1, I will provide an excursus on Habermas's use of Kohlberg in both his social and moral theories, particularly on the way he employs Kohlberg's stages of moral development to link up his own ideas on deontological morality with social evolution. Part 2 will attempt to explicate the critical debates surrounding Kohlberg's theory that began with the challenge of Carol Gilligan's idea of an "ethic of care," and then to show how Habermas opens himself up to similar lines of critique in his own ideas on morality. Finally, part 3 will focus on the possible "political" consequences of these lines of critique for Habermas's social theory. (a) Habermas's idea of a "discourse ethics" is tailored to the critical theory of society he outlines in The Theory of Communicative Action. Like his broader social theory, Habermas grounds his moral theory in a form of rationality implicit in everyday communication -- one that connects communication with validity claims susceptible to objective evaluation. Such evaluation requires that communication, at the pragmatic level, satisfy the conditions for the possibility of argumentation: "Argumentation makes possible behavior that counts as rational in a specific sense, namely learning from specific mistakes" (CA1 22). Argumentation is essential to intersubjective learning processes; for Habermas, this has consequences not only for individual cognitive development but to the progressive rationalization of society at large, conceived as the development of formal world-concepts. Indeed, the two are themselves interrelated. Habermas resorts to the Piaget-Kohlberg paradigm of developmental psychology to integrate communicative action with a model of societal evolution: [T]here are internal relations between the capacity for decentered perception and manipulation of things and events on the one hand, and the capacity for reaching intersubjective understanding about things and events on the other. Piaget chooses the model of social cooperation, in which several subjects coordinate their interventions in the objective world through communicative action. The contrasts stand out only when one tries, as is usual in empiricist research traditions, to separate the cognitive-instrumental rationality based on the monological employment of descriptive knowledge from communicative rationality. This shows up, for example, in concepts like "responsibility" and "autonomy." (CA1 14)He draws upon Piaget's model of stages of cognitive development to distinguish stages of social evolution in terms of its possibilities for "the decentration of an egocentric understanding of the world" (CA1 69, see 67-73; cf. also CES 98ff). The three basic stages the Habermas specifies of rationalization of worldviews -- mythical, religious-metaphysical, and modern -- correspond to the resources such worldviews allow for the cognitive differentiation of relations to the world, which provide communicative actors with schemata for evaluating the validity of statements in argumentation (CA1 205-15). (b) Modernity is characterized by a decentered worldview comprised of three such relations to the objective world, the social world, and the subjective world, which correlate to three basic attitudes toward the cognitive, normative, and expressive elements of culture (CA1 235-6). This differentiation of world-relations and basic attitudes makes possible the rationality complexes that base the cognitive-instrumental, moral-practical, and aesthetic-practical value spheres characteristic of modernity; the availability of similarly differentiated validity claims permits the coordination of action through discourse that can crystallize into institutionalized action systems -- science, morality, art (CA1 238-41). While all three domains are essential to modernization, however, it is morality that carries a disproportionate burden of social integration in the transition of society from a religious-metaphysical to a modern worldview (CA2 91-2). Habermas draws here on Durkheim and Mead, both of whom "credited only universalistic morality with the power to hold together a secularized society and to replace the basic, ritually secured normative agreement on a highly abstract level" (CA2 92, my emphasis). With the devaluation of normative consensus based on tradition, norms that have the binding force of law must, at base, attain validity from communicatively achieved agreement -- ideal-typically, through an uncoerced process of argumentation. For Habermas, the capacity to legitimate a societal order in this way is tied directly to the achievements of social evolution: At the stage of primitive law, there is as yet no concept of an objective norm; at the stage of traditional law, norms are taken as given, as conventions that are passed on; only at the stage of modern can norms be regarded as free enactments and judged in the light of principles that are themselves viewed as hypothetical. The rationalization of law reflects the same stages of preconventional, conventional, and postconventional basic concepts that developmental psychology has shown to obtain in ontogenesis. (CA1 258)Universal morality constitutes the modern domain of justice as a "systematization of meaning relations [that] presupposes the transition to posttraditional stages of moral consciousness made possible by the ethical rationalization of worldviews" (CA1 256). Such a formulation casts social integration in terms of a totality of normatively regulated intersubjective relations. Habermas's theory of social evolution relies on Kohlberg's distinction between preconventional, conventional, and postconventional stages of moral consciousness. The modern form of social integration requires the development of legal institutions that can accommodate the postconventional level of moral consciousness (CA2 174-5). At this level, "moral decisions are generated from rights, values or principles that are (or could be) agreeable to all individuals composing or creating a society designed to have fair and beneficial practices" (MC 124). Habermas demonstrates this capacity in the rationality of modern society in terms of a tripartite categorization of world-concepts and their correlates in cultural standards of value. He describes this "hallmark of modernity" in terms of the compartmentalization of reason into three moments: truth, as embodied in modern science, justice, as in modern law and posttraditional ethics, and taste, as in the vocations of art and art criticism (MC 17). Modern communicative rationality reaches intersubjective understanding in terms of these criticizable claims to validity: the truth of a proposition, the rightness of a norm, the authenticity of a self-expression. Only the second of these claims, that of the normative rightness of an utterance, is relevant to moral argumentation. This delimitation of the moral domain, as Habermas sees it, has the consequence of it being restricted to the validity of deontological claims that can be applied as universal norms (MC 57ff). "Cognitivist moral theories," he writes, "disgorge issues of the good life, focusing instead on strictly deontological, generalizable aspects of ethics, so that all that remains of 'the good' is the just" (MC 17). This concept of the moral principle, which is the point of departure for the theory of discourse ethics, is tied into the social integration of a rationalized society. The capacity for argumentation in the form of discourses that test the validity of claims to normative rightness is therefore bound up with the cognitive opportunities for learning available in the socialization process (see CES 154). (c) Habermas's theory of discourse ethics is of course a reformulation of Kantian morality in terms of a theory of argumentation. Once he leaves behind Kant's transcendental justification of the categorical imperative, however, he must demonstrate that discourse ethics is justifiable from the perspective of social theory. Kohlberg's theory of moral development is appealing to Habermas because it offers, first, to verify empirically the universality of his notion of argumentation from the "moral point of view," and second, to establish a basis in ego psychology for a concept of moral autonomy (MC 117). Moreover, insofar as Kohlberg's moral psychology is an implicit justification of a distinctive "moral point of view" -- that is, of an autonomous sphere of morality differentiated from issues of truth or of taste -- it lends support to Habermas's characterization of modernity in terms of a tripartite fragmentation of reason into its moments (MC 36-7). Being that Kohlberg's theory already presupposes a Kantian theory of morality derived from Rawls, this process of verification is obviously circular, but this does not concern Habermas. Habermas states that he is merely looking for "coherence" between fields in philosophy and science, viz. philosophical ethics and developmental psychology, and not for "an independent corroboration of the normative theory" (MC 118). It follows then that Habermas's discourse ethics aims to support Kohlberg's theory as well as visa versa, and this seems to partly underlie his attempt to reconstruct the theory of moral development within the framework of communicative action (MC 133ff). Kohlberg's stages of preconventional, conventional, and postconventional levels are thus recast as ontogenetic orientations toward normatively regulated interaction. The postconventional stage, which represents the achievement of moral autonomy and responsibility, is the level at which the communicative actor is able to thematize and criticize claims to normative validity independently of culturally given norms (MC 162; cf. CES 154-5). | ||||||||||||||||||
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(a) When Habermas published The Theory of Communicative Action and, soon after, Moralbewusstsein und kommunikatives Handeln, the criticisms of Kohlberg's theory sparked by Carol Gilligan were only beginning to gain momentum. The debate began over certain results of Kohlberg's system of testing, which graded six "stages" of moral development from preconventional (stages 1 and 2) through conventional (3 and 4) and finally postconventional (5 and 6) levels of maturity in moral judgment. The highest stage, calibrated to deontological moral theories such as Kant's or Rawls', characterizes thinking through abstract principles of "right" and "imperative." Gilligan (1993) argued that Kohlberg's methodology prevented female responses from being scored above stage 3 -- sometimes characterized by Kohlberg as the "good boy/nice girl" level of moral development (18). At the time Habermas published his own work on "Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action" (MC 116-94), Kohlberg was still disputing Gilligan's interpretation that his mode of testing was necessarily gender biased (Kohlberg 1982, 517-8; cf. MC 175-6). Since then, the debate has gone through a number of transformations, but the major theme has remained constant -- the "moral point of view" -- which plays a central role in Habermas's social and moral theories. The essential of Gilligan's initial argument is that female subjects often follow paths of argument that do not conform to Kohlberg's hierarchy of stages, even though they display features of postconventional moral reasoning. She suggests that the women interviewed, far from being "morally underdeveloped," employ a different orientation to moral dilemmas that emphasize responsibility and opposed to right, the concrete as opposed to the abstract, the act of caring as opposed to the theory of justice: In this conception, the moral problem arises from conflicting responsibilities rather than from competing rights and requires for its resolution a mode of thinking that is contextual and narrative rather than formal and abstract. This conception of morality as concerned with the activity of care centers moral development around the understanding of responsibility and relationships, just as the conception of morality as fairness ties moral development to the understanding of rights and rules. (Gilligan 1993, 19)Gilligan argues that female responses to Kohlberg's hypothetical dilemmas differ from the male because women tend to "contextualize" the issue in terms of real-life situations instead of abstracting it to the level of universal principles: "The proclivity of women to reconstruct hypothetical dilemmas in terms of the real, to request or to supply missing information about the nature of the people and the places where they live, shifts their judgment away from the hierarchical ordering of principles and the formal procedures of decision making" (Gilligan 1993, 100-1). The "ethics of care" holds the same potential for questioning the validity of norms, but with reference to the particularity of conflicts rather than to formally conceived rules. (b) Joan Tronto (1993) has noted that, while Gilligan generally presents her findings in a way that at least implies the major difference to be along gender lines, no definitive evidence has been given that suggests that this "alternate" morality is women's morality: "A more telling finding is that the differences Gilligan found between men and women may also describe the differences between working and middle class, white and ethnic minorities, and that a gender difference may not be prominent among other groups in the population besides the relatively privileged people who have constituted Gilligan's samples" (82). For Tronto, the experience of "care" is the domain not merely of women but of many groups marginalized by modern society; indeed, it would seem that the "moral point of view" espoused by Rawls, Kohlberg, and Habermas corresponds to a certain domain of social privilege. Kohlberg attempts to counter this criticism. He asserts that his theory can account for differences in level of moral development by referring to "opportunities for social role taking," the availability of which often varies with social status: "Of particular importance for development to later stages of moral reasoning (stages 4 and 5) are opportunities for power, responsibility, and participation in the secondary institutions of society (i.e., institutions of government, law, economy, in contrast to the primary institutions of society such as the family, the adolescent peer group, and other small face-to-face groups). Also of importance to rate of development is higher education..." (1982, 518). Gender differences, for example, tend to fade when controlled for age, education, and occupation; remaining contrasts between men and women in moral orientation can be investigated by referring to differences in normative role expectations. Kohlberg argued that differentials in rate of moral development can be attributed to political, economic, and social inequality; his theory could then be used to measure the extent and effects of such inequalities and serve as a guide to facilitating social institutions that would remedy them (Tronto 1993, 72). Tronto replies that even this explanation it unsatisfactory, not the least because she attributes to it an assimilationist tendency. Gilligan likewise suggests that Kohlberg's theory of a singular hierarchy normalizes his own concept of a moral domain by disregarding alternative perspectives: "To the question, 'What does he see that she does not?' Kohlberg's theory has a ready response... to the question, 'What does she see that he does not?' Kohlberg's theory has nothing to say. Since most of her responses fall through the sieve of Kohlberg's scoring system, her responses appear from his perspective to lie outside the moral domain" (Gilligan 1993, 31). Tronto believes that there remains a closed-endedness in his theory that reinforces and promotes discourses of normalization and exclusion along lines of social privilege (Tronto 1993, 72-6). We will explore this aspect in greater detail below. (c) Gilligan, Tronto, and other feminist theorists, while disagreeing with each other on a number of points, generally agree that the weakness of the deontological paradigm Kohlberg relies on stems from a particular definition of the "moral point of view" that identifies issues of morality with issues of justice. On the other hand, it is precisely by defining moral questions in terms of "criteria of justice" that Habermas attempts to respond to criticisms such as Gilligan's; indeed, his refusal of Gilligan's critique in "Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action" is in some ways stronger than Kohlberg's. Habermas rejects Gilligan's thesis regarding a "postconventional contextualism" categorically, claiming that she fails "to distinguish sufficiently between moral and evaluative issues, between issues of justice and issues of the good life" (MC 181). Habermas argues that Gilligan's "ethics of care" is ultimately superfluous, based first of all on a failure to distinguish between "cognitive" problems and "motivational" ones -- on the one hand, the question of how to reconcile the validity of a universal norm with the real-life situation in which the validity of the norm comes into question and, on the other hand, the ability to mediate one's ability to reason autonomously against one's embeddedness in the contexts of a lifeworld. The latter issue -- the motivational -- comes down to a distinction between "ego development," through which the individual gains an identity within the contexts of communicative action and intersubjective relations, and "moral development" ("superego"), which permits the capacity to distance oneself from these contexts and take a "demotivated" position on issues that from this level can only take the form of generalized norms, of universal validity. The former issue -- the cognitive -- regards how to take these insights concerning the validity or "justification" of norms and apply them to real-life contexts of action; this requires, according to Habermas, "the additional competence of hermeneutic prudence, or in Kantian terminology, reflective judgment" (MC 180). The upshot of these distinctions (summarized in Figure 1) is that, had Gilligan recognized the distinction between moral and ego development, she would have recognized that the "moral point of view" is unavoidable due to the necessary autonomy of superego structures relative to the ego (see MC 183). Moreover, the cognitive application of moral insights to real-life action situations is epiphenomenal to the issue of justification; the contextual question, which indeed depends on and is informed by the products of ego development (identity, life goals, self-realization), can only be addressed after the moral question has been resolved -- thus a supplementary "ethics of care" would be unnecessary (see MC 181).
Gilligan leaves herself open to this line of criticism not in her attempts to break away from Kohlberg's framework but, ironically, in her attempts to remain within it. Gilligan essentializes her "ethics of care" by reducing her differences with Kohlberg to one between hypothetical and contextual points of view. She then proceeds to construct a parallel developmental theory of stages using a similar method of interviewing and evaluating, requiring subjects to respond to actual moral experiences instead of hypothetical dilemmas (Tronto 77-81). It is this substitution of the actual for the hypothetical that leaves her defenseless against Habermas's assertion that she confuses the question of "what I ought to do" with that of "what I would do," between cognition and motivation. Yet Habermas himself states that this distinction comes up only after one accepts the abstraction of morality from ethical life in a way that counterposes universalistic justification to contextual application (MC 179). To be sure, it could also be argued that Gilligan fails to make this distinction as well, but even though she seems to imply one by putting forward her "ethics of care" as a "supplement" to Kohlberg's Kantian morality, it is not at all clear that her idea of a "ethics of care" is altogether reducible to what Habermas calls "issues of the 'good life.'" Habermas only equates "ethics of care" with "ethical life" indirectly, by opposing both to Kohlberg's conception of deontological morality (and thus in terms of it); but to do this, Habermas must make two presuppositions: first, that his own distinction of "issues of justice" versus "issues of the 'good life'" does indeed encompass the entirety of the practical domain, and second, that all practical questions can be analytically fit into one category or the other. (d) Seyla Benhabib (1992) demonstrates that these presuppositions are unreliable. For Benhabib, the problem with deontological theories such as those of Kant, Rawls, Kohlberg, and Habermas lie not so much in universalism per se but in a perception of "the moral point of view" as delimited by "issues of justice." This definition, she argues, is far from immanent in the idea of practical reason, but stems from specific features of the development of modern political and moral thought, of the concept of private property, and of post-Reformation demands to rethink the basis of legitimate authority: Justice alone becomes the center of moral theory when bourgeois individuals in a disenchanted universe face the task of creating the legitimate basis of the social order for themselves. What "ought" to be is now defined as what all would have rationally to agree to in order to ensure civil peace and prosperity (Hobbes, Locke), or the "ought" is derived from the rational form of the moral law alone (Rousseau, Kant). As long as the social bases of cooperation and the rights claims of individuals are respected, the autonomous bourgeois subject can define the good life as his mind and conscience dictate. (154)Benhabib introduces the concept of the concrete other in contrast to that of the generalized other that Kohlberg and Habermas draw upon and which she argues underlies the concept of the individual throughout modern political thought, beginning with the "state-of-nature" theories of Hobbes and Locke and continuing in Rawls' "original position" and, to a lesser extent, Habermas's "ideal speech situation." The generalized other is the perspective from which all individuals are formally equal and therefore theoretically reversible; equality implies identity among participants (158-9). The concrete other, in contrast, implies not individualism but individuality, not reversibility but "complementarity": "each is entitled to expect and to assume from the other forms of behavior through which the other feels recognized and confirmed as a concrete, individual being with specific needs, talents and capacities" (159). It is as the concrete other that we must contend with issues related to individual (ego) identity, care, need, interconnection and context. Benhabib asserts that there is nothing in the concept of the concrete other that excludes it from the consideration of moral questions, yet it has been the generalized other that has dominated discourses on morality since the seventeenth century. Social contract theories from Hobbes to Rawls assume a philosophical anthropology in which the moral person is a disembedded and disembodied being. The moral world, taking the form of a state of nature or an original position, is composed of rational, autonomous, public individuals, each of which can take on and argue from the standpoint of any other. Benhabib, however, observes that such a portrait of man [sic] assumes a moral existence that is prior to any hermeneutic experience, a world "in which individuals are grown up before they have been born; in which boys are men before they have been children; a world where neither mother, nor sister, nor wife exist" (157). The participants in practical discourse are entirely abstracted from their identities, life experiences, and personal relations, indeed their very status as "real" human beings. Plurality as such is stripped of content. In moral deliberation, prejudices, beliefs, and personal experiences need not be mediated or worked through but simply "turned off" (167). The object of morality is preservation of the freedom and will of universal, rational, autonomous individuals, and thus concerns the establishment of maxims of action that can be applied as broadly and perpetually as possible. Moral argument therefore must relegate issues directly connected to identity, care, context, or other questions not concerning the general order of society; it is this remainder qua remainder that constitutes the realm of individual preference, of the private realm, of the "good life." Benhabib argues that Habermas's discourse ethics could be framed to overcome disputes over the "definition" of the moral by defining it in terms of argumentation (169f). Essentially, her position is that if one can argue that something is a moral issue, then it is a moral issue; it follows that anything that can be described in language is potentially a topic of morality, and this indeed seems to be what Habermas is saying when he asserts that any speech act can be criticized on the basis of its normative validity as well as its propositional truth or its sincerity (see, for example, CA1 308ff; MC 136-8). Benhabib thus finds it "profoundly odd" that Habermas should subscribe to a metaethical boundary that specifies the moral domain as being restricted to issues of justice (Benhabib 1992, 184). She argues that both Habermas and Kohlberg "conflate the standpoint of a universalist morality with a narrow definition of the moral domain" (185). In doing so, Habermas unnecessarily excludes a large portion of practical questions from his definition of the moral. Benhabib argues that the "universalizability" of a moral question is to be established in the procedure of its justification, and this provides all the necessary constraints on what constitutes the moral domain. One can then entertain a morality that is universalistic while remaining sensitive to concrete otherness as well as generalized otherness: "The autonomous self is not the disembodied self; universalist moral theory must acknowledge the deep experiences in the formation of the human being to which justice and care correspond" (188-9). | ||||||||||||||||||
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(a) Thomas McCarthy (1978) explains that Habermas draws on the ontogenetic theories of Piaget and Kohlberg to preserve the teleological aspect of historical materialism in his efforts at reconstruction (239-40). However, McCarthy notes, a theory of social evolution grounded in ontogenetic theories may be problematic. For not only is Habermas drawing on theories of developmental psychology that have themselves been heavily criticized on conceptual, epistemological, and methodological grounds, he wants to apply these theories of child development to the evolution of social systems -- a transposition he needs to justify additionally (261). The debate over the "moral point of view" as spawned by Gilligan and taken up by Tronto, Benhabib, and others thus takes on a particular significance. Kohlberg plays important roles both in Habermas's social theory and in his moral theory, but it is also key to linking them together. It is understood that the verification of one contributes to the verification of the other, but the flipside is also true: problematizing the social-theoretic aspects of his argument immediately raises questions regarding the moral-theoretic aspects, and visa versa. As we saw in section 1, Habermas engineers his theory into a symbiosis with Kohlberg's by connecting the capacity for postconventional moral judgment with a theory of social evolution that differentiates validity claims such that there exists a domain of practical discourse (the "moral point of view") distinct from scientific discourse, on one hand, and from aesthetic discourse, on the other. "Only in a rationalized lifeworld," he writes, "do moral issues become independent of issues of the good life. Only then do they have to be dealt with autonomously as issues of justice, at least initially" (MC 178). This separation is manifest not only in Habermas's theory of moral consciousness, it is also hardwired into his theory of modern society. As we have seen, the rationalization of the moral domain is reflected in modernity in the institutionalization of law; positive law and moral maxims are to this extent identical in form. Morality and law, for Habermas, can also both be described in ontogenetic terms -- the former in individual development, the latter in social evolution (CA1 258; CA2 174-5). Law constitutes a domain of institutionalized action justified from the perspective of a postconventional moral consciousness that encompasses issues of justice and formally organizes social integration. From the moral perspective, modern law preserves the rights of individuals while purportedly maintaining the integrity of a realm of personal life-projects; from the sociological perspective, modern law confirms the separation of "public" and "private" spheres. (b) The development of "the moral point of view" -- of the normative foundations of modern law -- is connected with the development of modern capitalism and bourgeois civil society: This legal order is characterized by positivity, legality, and formality; it is constructed on the basis of the modern concept of statutory law and the concept of the legal person as one who can enter into contracts, acquire, alienate, and bequeath property. The legal order is supposed to guarantee the liberty and property of the private person, the security of law, the formal equality of all legal subjects before the law, and thereby the calculability of all legally normed action. (CA2 358, my emphases; cf. 304)Tronto and Benhabib both argue that justice-oriented morality is tailored to an increasingly economically-oriented body politic, constituted as a population of divided labor and commercial self-interest (Benhabib 1992, 154; Tronto 1993, 28-9). The legal individual was closely bound up with the economic individual, a both aspects fuse into the modern moral person. As such, the moral person is tied into the social order not merely via his communicative competences but via his relations of property, labor, etc. He thus takes up his relation to society through what Habermas calls "material" as well as "symbolic" (communicative) means. The significance of this fact becomes clear as we recall Benhabib's critique of the generalized other presupposed in social contract theory. Insofar as one's moral positioning in society presupposes a definition of autonomy that is "disembedded and dismbodied" -- unborn, unraised, unmothered -- these empirical necessities are categorically removed from one's moral status and relegated elsewhere. Habermas recognizes the division of labor between the public and private spheres, "which stand in a complementary relation to one another," and their contributions to social integration: The institutional core of the private sphere is the nuclear family, relieved of productive functions and specialized tasks of socialization; from the systemic perspective of the economy, it is viewed as the environment of private households. The institutional core of the public sphere comprises communicative networks amplified by a cultural complex, a press, and, later, mass media; they make it possible for a public of art-enjoying private persons to participate in the reproduction of culture, and for a public of citizens of the state to participate in the social integration mediated by public opinion. From the systemic perspective of the state, the cultural and political public spheres are viewed as the environment relevant to generating legitimation. (CA2 319)What is interesting is that the "environment relevant to generating legitimation" relies on the prior existence of real social ordering and normative relations, namely, its separation from a complementary "environment of private households." The public sphere in this formulation is of course the "moral point of view" in its institutional form; it follows that the private sphere is the allocated place for morality's remainder -- questions of care, need, particularity. In the context of social integration, however, this division is hardly arbitrary. In Benhabib's words, "care and responsibility of others is essential for us to develop into morally competent, self-sufficient individuals" (It is, moreover, precisely this aspect of moral development that Kohlberg and Habermas systematically disregard and Gilligan tries to recover [Benhabib 1992, 188-9]). The necessity of receiving care, however, which brings the universality of the individual down to the concrete, as it were, contradicts the standard of autonomy, rationality, and self-sufficiency that characterizes the individual of the public realm. The universal, autonomous individual for which the "moral point of view" is tailored must therefore be "produced" by a relegation of one's caring needs to the background of the private realm. (c) Tronto claims that there is an elitism implicit in Kohlberg's model of moral development and its brand of "universalism" serves to rationalize relations of power and privilege. "Kohlberg's theory," she writes, "only tells the story of moral development from the standpoint of those who have remained on top throughout the entire process. Those who have stumbled need to forget their experiences and become like the successful ones. Those who try to tell the story of racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, and so forth, are misunderstood or derided for their inability to get beyond these sticking points" (Tronto 1993, 73). For Tronto, the separation of "public" from "private" as well as "moral point of view" constitute boundaries that have maintained the subservience and "containment" of out-groups in part by inhibiting them from making morally intelligible claims in the public sphere. At the same time, these same boundaries work to preserve the ideology of disembedded, self-sufficient individualism by throwing the tasks of caring onto the less privileged and the marginalized (111-3). Comparable problems arise when Habermas attempts to transpose Kohlberg's stage model of moral development onto a telos of social evolution. For Habermas, the rationalization of law and morality is the "pacemaker" of social evolution, and as we have seen, he describes its progression in Kohlbergian terms: preconventional, conventional, and postconventional. For a successful moral-practical rationalization of society, "The legal system as a whole needs to be anchored in basic principles of legitimation. In the bourgeois constitutional state these are, in the first place, basic rights and principles of popular sovereignty; they embody postconventional structures of moral consciousness" (CA2 178). The postconventional status of society's normative structures comes about interdependently with the capacities of individuals to achieve postconventional moral consciousness (McCarthy 1978, 247-8). It is through this association that Habermas might find it necessary to equate morality with justice, insofar as subjective moral consciousness reflects the societal rationalization of justice. Yet Habermas seems to overestimate the egalitarianism behind the forms of communicatively achieved agreements that feed into and inform society's moral-practical action systems. In other words, he assumes that the "postconventional" achievement of the institutional framework is a sufficient indicator of a general capacity among society's members to achieve the moral autonomy afforded by the highest stages of moral consciousness (cf. MC 160-3). The observations made above, however, indicate that this is need not be the case; the "moral consciousness" embodied in normative structures of society could just as well reflect the capacities of an elite in power, without these capacities extending to the less privileged or marginalized. In fact, our study has suggested the possibility that the "moral point of view" constitutive of the legitimation-generating environment of the public sphere is dependent on the relegation of other activities (such as "care") to the private sphere, in correspondence with their exclusion from the moral domain. I want to thank David Jacobus, Jorge Romero León, Seth Graham, Markus Frensch, and Eli Cubol for their helpful presentations on The Theory of Communicative Action (both for this seminar and last Fall), which proved indispensable for writing this paper. | ||||||||||||||||||
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