Annette Baier's The Need For More Than Justice

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In the her article “The Need for More Than Justice,” Annette Baier distinguishes between the justice perspective of philosophers such as Kant and Rawls and the care perspective Carol Gilligan found in her studies of the moral development of women. Baier argues that the justice perspective alone is inadequate as a moral theory. It overlooks inequalities between people, and it has an unrealistic view of freedom of choice, and it ignores the importance of emotions such as love. The best moral theory, she claims, is one that harmonizes justice and care. The theory of moral development has two dimensions the first is the aim to achieve satisfying community relations with others, the other aiming at autonomy or equality of power, these two aims begin from infancy. The relative predominance of one aspect of development over the other depends…show more content…
Baier said that this provides the germs of a theory about why, given current customs of childrearing, it should be mainly woman who are not content with the moral outlook that she calls the justice perspective. She points out that this is rather strange considering that it is this perspective that is partly responsible for the end liberation from sexual oppression. They (women), like blacks, used the language of rights and justice to change their own social position, but nevertheless see limitations in that language, according to Gilligan’s findings as a moral psychologist. She reports the “discontent: with the individualist more or
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