2
right because of who she is, hers is an abstract particularity in contrast to the abstract
universality of the slave of law, who knows what is right precisely because he does not
know who he is. In terms of Hegel’s discussion the slave of law is gendered masculine and
the beautiful soul is gendered feminine, but in both cases the moral subject is identified as
such because of his/her capacity to tap into an uncontaminated source that both legitimates
(authorizes) and makes possible the capacity to recognise and enact what ought to be done.
Moral authority is locked up within a kind of subjectivity which relies for its meaning on
familiar hierarchical dualisms in which subject is required to master object, and self to
distinguish itself from other in order to be confirmed as subject and self.
2
As with many feminist philosophers, I am uneasy about modes of conceptualising the moral
subject that recall the slave of law/ beautiful soul alternatives. A great deal of work within
feminist ethics has identified the abstraction of moral subjectivity in mainstream ethics as
problematic, associating it with a violent politics of judgment, which rides roughshod over
context and complexity. In contrast to the Kantian or Romantic sovereign moral individual,
feminist ethicists have argued for the embeddedness of moral judgment, the importance of
the concrete as well as the abstract ‘other’, and the understanding of moral agency in terms
of relational as opposed to pure autonomy.
3
In addition, feminists have been wary of the
idea of moral truth with which mainstream notions of moral subjectivity are associated,
2
The ‘slave of law’ and ‘beautiful soul’ alternatives are ideal types for thinking about moral
subjectivity and Hegel’s association of these types with particular thinkers is certainly contestable (see
for instance the kind of reading of Kant’s moral thought offered by Barbara Herman (Herman, 1993).
Nevertheless, I contend that they are useful to pinpoint a peculiarly modern development, following on
from the protestant reformation and the European Enlightenment (in both rationalist and Romantic
forms), in which the core of morality is located within the subject and questions about what is ethical
become inseparable from questions about the internal nature and motivation of human agents.
3
Carol Gilligan is famous for having put forward the idea that women’s mode of moral judgment is
more contextual and relational than men’s (Gilligan, 1993). This insight has been foundational for the
work of feminist ethicists such as Ruddick (1990), Held (1993) and has become labelled as the feminist
ethic of care (see Browning-Cole and Coultrap-McQuin, 1992). Seyla Benhabib makes the case for the
invocation of the ‘concrete’ other in the process of moral judgment (Benhabib, 1992) and the notion of
relational autonomy is explored in Mackenzie and Stoljar (2000).s
Convention