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...application feminist moral principles values to specific areas of practice such as health, education, reproduction, war, and so forth). (1) Yet although it is a branch of moral philosophy, there is a sense in which feminist ethics has always unsettled and subverted the morality/politics binary that helps to define the business of modern moral philosophy in the Western academy.
According to this mainstream thinking (reflected also in much commonsense usage) morality may ground, orient, or be applied as a corrective to politics, but nevertheless a clear line is (must be) drawn between them. (2) Morality is defined as being about values and principles that transcend the particularities of any specific human life, whereas politics is about the struggles and negotiations through which those particularities are constructed, sustained, challenged, and managed. The subversion of this binary takes different forms in different strands of feminist ethics. But one common thread that runs through all feminist ethics is the argument that the moral theories, religious and philosophical, that have dominated thinking about morality from ancient times to modernity in the West are fundamentally political in one key sense. All of them purport to be the revelation of God or outcome of reason (or both), but all of them turn out, in whole or in part, to be about the reflection and maintenance of relations of power in which women are systematically oppressed, excluded, and silenced.
However, feminist ethicists differ in the extent to which they interpret the latter as a problem in principle or in application and in the extent to which they turn the same skeptical eye upon their own moral discourse. (3) As a result of this, ongoing debates within feminist ethics have been less to do with the substantive accounts of justice and the good on offer and more to do with the question of whether feminist claims about justice and the good have any authoritative foundation or can achieve universal reach across different women in different times and places.
For feminist critics of moral universalism, feminist ethics risks assimilating and/or silencing different women, thus reproducing the same oppressive politics as the patriarchal mainstream in which morality operates as a mask for power. For feminist universalists, their critics risk reducing morality to politics in the sense of making all moral claims contingent on specificities of power and culture and thereby losing the possibility of making the moral critique of women's oppression that is needed to underpin feminism as a political project.
Within the context of feminism as a transnational movement, which reaches across barriers of state and culture, the question of authoritative foundation and universal reach for the claims of feminist ethics is particularly salient. For example, most feminist ethics in the Western tradition has tended to focus either on abstract meta-ethical issues or on the application of feminist insights to issues that particularly affect women within Western liberal states. (4) Even where specifically international contexts or issues are in question (e.g., global distributive justice, human rights, and war) there has been a tendency to take an ethical position worked out in relation to the context of a Western liberal state and apply it to the international domain. (5) This tendency has increasingly become subject to challenge by non-Western feminists, who argue for the irrelevance or inapplicability of the concerns of Western feminist ethics to the lives and experiences of women in nonliberal states and/or non-Judeo-Christian cultures. (6)
In this article, my concern is with a response to the feminist dilemma between moral universalism and moral pluralism--a response that appears to offer a particularly promising route forward for a feminist ethics that is specifically concerned with international, transnational, or global political contexts and issues. This development is labeled in various ways--as a turn to discourse ethics, communicative ethics, or dialogic ethics. In this article, I use the term civil-society argument because this development in feminist theory involves the invocation of the importance of the norms inherent in actual communicative activity within public spheres distinct from the state. In the case of feminist ethics, this means that there is a focus is on how the voices of women, who occupy very different positions within hegemonic and subaltern publics within global civil society, may be heard and exert influence in the articulation and legitimation of feminist moral principles and values. (7)
The path of discourse ethics as a way of dealing with dilemmas of difference (both vertical and horizontal) without assimilation is one which many feminist theorists, working in a broadly critical-theory tradition, have taken in recent years. (8) This path is one that moves from the ground of philosophical ethics, in which questions of moral truth and prescription can be addressed in the realm of reason alone, toward politics, the realm of practical dialogue, and contestation, of groups with competing interests, of institutions and unequally situated actors.
The civil-society argument claims the central importance both of the concrete identity of moral agents and of the public dialogic encounter between different moral agents both to doing or attaining and to unpacking the meaning of justice and the good, whether in terms of principle, norm, virtue, or policy. The civil-society argument appears to offer the possibility of a meaningful feminist international ethics that is not inherently assimilative but that also does not simply collapse into moral pluralism in which there is no common vocabulary within which feminist conceptions of justice and the good may be articulated. The aim of this article is to assess whether some version of a civil-society argument does offer a useful way forward for feminist international ethics. (9)
In order to assess the potential for feminist ethics of the civil-society argument, I draw, respectively, on the work of Seyla Benhabib, Iris Marion Young, and Gayatri Spivak. (10) These three thinkers share ground in important respects: Each of them rejects the idea that there are strong apolitical (rational or essential) foundations for normative judgment; and each of them rejects (or at least purports to reject) what Young terms the assimilationism of liberalism, in which differences of power, culture, and identity are bracketed out of dialogic exchange through assumptions of formal civil and political equality. Following on from this, each of them pursues their moral vision in relation to the unassimilability of difference within actual institutional contexts of political engagement and contestation and hold out for the possibility of moral and political transformation through encounter with others. Each of them also explicitly draws out her argument to the level of the global, though it is only Spivak whose argument in some sense starts from a specifically transnational political context.
Having said this, however, it must also be said that the three thinkers are also different in important respects. Benhabib is the thinker who stays closest to Habermasian discourse ethics and to the insistence on a clear and hierarchical distinction between morality and politics. Young sees the politics of difference as cutting more deeply than Benhabib and threatens to reverse the traditional hierarchy by giving priority to politics in her discursive ideal. At the same time, however, Young stays close to Benhabib and to the legacy of Habermasian discourse ethics in modeling her discursive ideal in terms of a particular kind of dialogue, underpinned by egalitarian norms. In Spivak's case, although the notion of a reciprocal encounter between different subjects remains crucial to her articulation of morality as ethical singularity, the notion of egalitarian dialogue as the model for this encounter is put into question.
On the basis of my exploration of the arguments of these three theorists, I argue that Spivak's critique of the civil-society argument in the work of thinkers such as Benhabib and Young offers the best guide to conceiving what it means to make moral claims as a feminist in cross-cultural and transnational contexts. The proponents of the civil-society argument, as anti-essentialist moral and political theorists, rethink traditional moral philosophical conceptions of morality and politics and the relation between them. In doing so, however, they fail to capture the dynamic of a secular moral relation that emerges out of encounters with others without reference to any substantive, transcendental, or teleological anchor in a 'beyond.' (11)
The problem, I suggest, has to do with the foregrounding of a dialogic ideal in which equality (substantively and in terms of respect) and equality of participation (self-determination) are the keynotes. The discourses and practices of education and of imaginative invention--which are invoked by all three thinkers, but are central only to Spivak's account--tell us more about the logic of morality than those of dialogic exchange. Both learning and invention are inegalitarian and undemocratic activities. Feminist international ethics, as a discourse about the meaning of morality and about how we may make moral claims as a feminist across the boundaries of state and culture, exceeds principles of universal respect or egalitarian reciprocity and is irreducible to a dialogical relation between different women. Rather, it depends on the ultimately unjustifiable acknowledgment and invention of moral authority, a moral authority that may or may not be recognized by those to whom, or on behalf of whom, moral claims are addressed.
Egalitarian Reciprocity
In her recent book The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era, (12) Benhabib applies her argument for a moderated form of Habermasian discourse ethics (previously articulated in Situating the Self) (13) to the...
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