Abstract

Carol Gilligan is best known for her presentation of the ethics of care as an alternative to what she calls ethics in the justice tradition. Her project is motivated by her commitment to listening to girls and women, whom, she argued, have been marginalized within moral psychology. I argue that the principle of care, presented in Gilligan's In A Different Voice, inadequately reflects the more radically novel potential of the care ethic as a narrative ethic. Gilligan's project was undermined, I maintain, by the need to defend the care voice's claim to the status of moral voice, and to make this defense in terms set by the dominant moral paradigm. I redescribe it as the paradigm of justification rather than justice. I claim that it is characterized by argumentational reasoning which makes appeal to normative principles . ;Though Gilligan claimed to be using a narrative or hermeneutic method in her early work, the main role of stories there is to illustrate her account of the distinction between care and justice principles. I argue that the narrative care voice has a different function. Through the relational process of bringing to voice the narrative perspective of a story, the moral perspective it thereby constitutes is authorized. I explore how the dynamics of this process is developed in Gilligan's more recent work with Lyn Mikel Brown and consider how it functions in two extended cases of narrative response: Toni Morrison's Beloved and the biblical story of Jephthah's daughter . Where appeal to principles of justification, even the principle of care, fails to allow the reader to relate to the central character of each story, as one moral subject to another, application of a narrative ethics of care facilitates and sustains such a relationship