Caring for Justice.

• Author: Cahill, Michael T.

Caring for Justice. By Robin West. New York: New York University Press. 1997. Pp. ix, 356. $35.

If the sexes are indeed from different planets, as the title of a recent bestseller informs us,(1) one wonders what those planets were like before their inhabitants made the trek to Earth. Did the citizens of the all-female Venus structure their lives, work, moral commitments, and political systems differently from the males over on Mars? If so, what happened when these cultural worlds collided to form our own? Does our culture represent a synthesis of these two separate systems into a new and better, or perhaps worse, one, or is it the result of one planet's wholesale conquest of the other?

Fanciful as these questions may seem, they raise serious issues relating to the most fundamental aspects of our personal interactions and political institutions. In her latest book, Caring for Justice, Robin West(2) sets herself the task of asking and answering a version of these questions, and exploring the implications of the answers she adopts. Or rather, such is her task in part of the book, for Caring for Justice is not truly a book -- in the sense of a single work devoted to a central thesis -- but a collection of essays whose relation to one another frequently seems tangential. Only the first two chapters explore the work's stated themes in depth.(3) Later chapters sometimes suggest peripheral elements of prior discussions, but they generally fail to establish explicit connections or to build on the earlier material.(4) The totality of Caring for Justice ultimately is precisely equal to the sum of its parts, as those parts do not interact meaningfully in a way that would enhance their collective impact.

That being said, the parts themselves are excellent. Caring for Justice is the rare work that offers a clear map of the current academic landscape as well as a provocative foray into new territory. If the book steps lightly and moves quickly, at least it manages to cover a lot of ground. West describes and critiques entire schools of jurisprudence -- law and economics, law and literature, postmodernism and, of course, various strains of thought falling under the clumsy catchall term feminism.... both concisely and precisely.

Before starting her journey, West packs -- and also unpacks -- some fairly weighty intellectual baggage. The book starts from the premise that our society, and more particularly our legal system, reflects and represents the unfortunate triumph of "male" over "female" morality. The former perspective, which has come to dominate Western political philosophy, posits "a society and state the raison d'etre of which is the satisfaction of the interests, preferences, wishes, desires, and whims of ... atomized individuals" (pp. 4-5). West, following Carol Gilligan and others, calls this moral view the ethic of justice (p. 23). "Female" morality, or the ethic of care (p. 6), is grounded in connections to others (p. 1) rather than in the pursuit of individual interests. This ethic is "embedded in the female labor of attending to intimate relations" (p. 6).

Although "more than any other experience we share" (p. 1), the relationships to which the ethic of care devotes itself "inform and constitute our `moral sense`" (p. 1), our legal system frequently operates to undermine rather than to support them.(5) This institutional neglect of, and opposition to, the ethic of care "is all a function of our sorry history of sexist exclusion" (p. 7). These statements reflect the two overtly expressed premises that underlie the remainder of West's discussion. The first premise states that there is an ethic of care -- that is, "that the work, disproportionately clone by women, of caring for the relationships that sustain us, is moral work, rather than emotional affect" (p. 7). Relationships of care fall within the category of moral activity as squarely as autonomous, rational ethical choices do. They should not be dismissed as merely natural or intuitive female behavior without regard to this moral component. The second premise is "that women, as a group, have been subordinated in this culture, rather than simply `discriminated against' by the state" (p. 7).

West later advocates greater incorporation of the ethic of care into our legal decisionmaking processes. Before addressing the merits of the ethic of care, however, West must acknowledge, and attempt to defuse, the potential controversy surrounding her mere declaration of its existence. Other scholars -- many, perhaps most, of them feminists -- have vigorously contested the proposition that there are essential differences between men and women.(6) Yet both of West's premises are grounded in the assertion of such categorical differences: "They both seek to express something generally true of all women and hence of each woman" (p. 10). West notes four basic categories of objection to her essentialist claims: first, an empirical denial that anything meaningful can be said of a sex generally; second, a strategic objection, grounded in the postmodern sensibility, that finds the truth or falsity of West's claims irrelevant but contends that such claims are politically unhelpful -- if not downright dangerous -- for women;(7) third, a political opposition to an oversimplified focus on sexism that ignores or downplays the complex matrix of types of discrimination simultaneously faced by, for example, African-American women or lesbians; and finally, the potential backlash from the male counterargument that men's essential biological differences from women may drive their misogynist behavior (pp. 11-13).

West answers these objections in reverse order. Responding to the backlash concern, she basically claims that biology is not destiny, so men get nowhere by cloaking their immoral behavior in the inevitability of genetics. To the political argument, which she considers the most serious, West replies that even if some women confront subordination along several axes at once -- such as racism, sexism, and heterosexism -- sexism is certainly one of these axes, and all women face discrimination along that axis. It is therefore not meaningless or inaccurate to describe sexism as a universal, however complicated, female experience. For her rejection of postmodernism, West summons some bile. She labels it "constitutively anti-Darwinian, anti-naturalist and anti-scientific" (p. 16), an "at bottom inhuman" philosophy that transforms priceless ideas into fungible commodities and that "will surely diminish us" (p. 17).

The empirical objection to essentialism, though not considered the most significant by West, causes her the most trouble. First, she backpedals a little to concede that there is "no ironclad correspondence between women and `an orientation toward an ethic of care'" (p. 18). Then she claims, albeit not unconvincingly, that the antiessentialists should bear the "burden of proof" on this empirical question.(8) Finally, and most persuasively, she attacks the moral intuition that gives the empirical objection force: the visceral unease one feels at the prospect of stereotyping morality, or anything else, by sex. Her attack upholds the standard of free intellectual discourse, arguing that "[t]here is a real danger of cutting off fruitful inquiry if we cut off inquiry into sex and gender differences solely out of worries over stereotyping" (p. 19). West points out that whatever philosophical legitimacy the ethic of care possesses exists independently of its biological or historical provenance. Yet even if it is not theoretically necessary, she somewhat tentatively asserts, linking the ethic of care to the experiences of women may have strategic utility. West seems to be doing little more here than requesting an opportunity to state her case.

THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF JUSTICE AND CARE

That case begins with the argument, in Chapter One, that our system of justice undervalues the dictates of the nurturing, connected ethic of care. The erection of such an opposition between particularized care and universalized justice, and the rejection of the former in favor of the latter, is of course hardly new to Western political philosophy. After all, Plato's Republic, our first extended treatment of the subject, envisions an ideally just society that not only condones but demands the separation of parents from their children.(9)

West is not so bold as to say that care is more important than justice or should supplant it as a basis for legal decisionmaking. Instead, she claims that the ethics of justice and care are both necessary conditions of any desirable legal regime and, perhaps more intriguingly, "are each necessary conditions of the other.... `[J]ustice must be caring if it is to be just, and .... caring must be just if it is to be caring'" (p. 24)...