Abstract

Liberal thought has been expressed largely in terms of an ethic of justice, emphasizing the sanctity of individual rights and taking justice to be "the first virtue of social institutions" , the one whose demands must be met before other social virtues can make a claim. I examine the ethic of justice and its limitations, revealing the correlative limitations of liberalism. ;Central to the ethic of justice is a commitment to justificational neutrality. I first reconstruct various forms this commitment takes, showing that none are themselves neutral. Not only do they all privilege some conceptions of the good over others in effect; they also presuppose an ideal of the moral self. I then question whether we should accept this ideal. ;I investigate and reject challenges to this ideal offered by recent communitarians, who argue that it relies on an untenable metaphysics. I argue that liberalism's weakness is moral, not metaphysical, contrasting the ethic of justice with an alternative, recently dubbed the "ethic of care." Though the ethic of care is not alone an adequate ethical paradigm, I show that the viability of an ethic of justice is parasitic on the viability of an ethic of care: the stability of a just society presupposes that demands of "care" are met. I argue, moreover, that an ethic of justice cannot accommodate an ethic of care; thus, the ethic of justice not only does not, but also cannot account for the conditions of its own viability. ;This criticism reveals the need to abandon the neutrality constraint and to embrace a more robust conception of the moral self than that to which the ethic of justice is committed. The result both transforms our conception of justice and shifts justice out of center stage; it points to a more demanding ethic of virtue which gives an essential place to "care" through ideals of character and citizenship. The limitations of liberalism are thus not external ones; they concern its very viability. A morality uninformed by an ethic of care cannot deliver even justice