PLURALISMS FOR EDUCATION:
AN ETHICS OF CARE PERSPECTIVE

Ann Diller
University of New Hampshire

Within the last decade the Ethics of Care has emerged as a promising ethic for educational practice. But its implications for major educational issues such as pluralism have yet to be worked out. In this essay I sketch an ethics of care approach to pluralism in education.¹

In particular I suggest that using an ethics of care leads us to articulate, and attend to, new forms of pluralism that are (in the spirit of pluralism itself) compatible with each other rather than mutually exclusive. I propose furthermore that these forms of pluralism are appropriate aims for education, but that to pursue them as viable educational practices we must also follow the ethics of care in its insistence on changing our ethical focus from a preoccupation with justification to a concern for better caring relationships.

Four distinctive features structure the ethics of care: (1) a relational ontology; (2) a relational ideal; (3) a methodology of caring attentiveness; and (4) an insistence upon knowledge of the particular. To create, maintain, and enhance caring relationships among ourselves constitutes the central moral task. In order to do so we practice what Nel Noddings terms ‘engrossment,’ the giving of caring attentiveness to particular persons in particular situations.²

I

What happens when we look at existing pluralisms from an ethics of care perspective? Let us consider two standard forms: (a) pluralisms of co-existence; and (b) pluralisms of co-operation.

A Pluralism of Co-Existence requires basic non-interference, combined with mutual tolerance. Under ideal circumstances it would also carry a mutual respect for those who differ from us.³ In a speech near the end of the nineteenth century, William James summed up its features and appeal:

It is negative in one sense, but positive in another. It absolutely forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off….⁴

Almost a century later, pluralisms of co-existence still have a wide appeal. For example James’s “Hands Off” point recurs in a recent statement by a woman of color speaking to white women about the contrast between obligation and friendship; her version of “obligation” resembles “hands off”:

Out of obligation you should stay out of our way, respect us and our distance, and forego the use of whatever power you have over us — for example, the power to use your language in our meetings, the power to overwhelm us with your education, the power to intrude in our communities in order to research us and to record the supposed dying of our cultures, the power to engrain in us a sense that we are members of dying cultures and are doomed to assimilate, the power to keep us in a defensive posture with respect to our own cultures.⁵

However attractive “hands off” may be, life in our contemporary world is so interdependent that we can rarely have co-existence without some degree of cooperation. Pluralisms of cooperation do, however, encompass a wide range. At one extreme we may have quite fragile, temporary forms of cooperation such as the one Robert Axelrod describes in his account of how during World War I along the “Western Front” (a five-hundred-mile line in France and Belgium), enemy soldiers in the trenches managed to cooperate enough to establish their own frontline truces and then to maintain these “Live-and-Let-Live Systems” for extended periods of time.⁶ At the other end of the cooperative spectrum, membership in a community may be so extensive that it leads persons to transcend their separate ethnic, racial, class, or gender differences by identifying with the “public interest” and common good of the larger cooperative.

In any case, most serious efforts at mutual co-existence do enmesh us, to some degree, in pluralisms of cooperation, just as co-existence provides the “fall-back position,” so to speak, for the closer connections of cooperation.

When we consider pluralisms of co-existence and cooperation from an ethics of care perspective, I believe we must conclude that they are necessary and valuable but also insufficient. While each helps us to regulate, to negotiate and to benefit from our human differences, they are not sufficient for the relational tasks of human communities. For example, pluralisms of co-existence can provide necessary conditions, basic ground rules, to enable other more demanding forms of pluralism to flourish. But for the rearing of children, the care of the sick and the elderly, the enhancement of personal relations, the endeavors of friendship and affection, a pluralism of co-existence is simply not enough.

Similarly most pluralisms of cooperation while crucial for facilitating constructive forms of interdependency are also insufficient to meet the concerns of an ethics of care. For one thing the relations among persons need not be taken as ends-in-themselves but can be merely instrumental. There is no intrinsic reason to care for each other. This does not mean caring cannot arise or is not often part of a cooperative endeavor, it simply means caring is not essential, or constitutive, and thus may be absent or avoided.

Thus neither pluralisms of co-existence nor of cooperation are sufficient for an ethics of care even though both may provide important and necessary conditions. At least two additional forms of pluralism seem to me to be in keeping with an ethics of care and also at work in recent feminist dialogues: (1) a pluralism of co-exploring, and (2) a pluralism of co-enjoyment.

II

The concept of co-exploring as I am using it here exemplifies and also extends the basic engrossment methodology of an ethics of care. An insistence on the practice of receptive attention not only recurs among advocates of an ethics of care it also appears in recent feminist writings as well.

While Noddings favors the term ‘engrossment’ and talks also of ‘receptivity’, Sara Ruddick calls it ‘attentive love’. Marilyn Frye uses the image of the ‘loving eye’ and contrasts it to the ‘arrogant eye’. Lisa Delpit describes a “special kind of listening” that entails “really hearing.” And Sarah Hoagland simply advocates ‘attending’.⁷

Although these authors diverge in other ways, their views on attentiveness show a remarkable convergence. They all agree that when we attend to each other in this special way we must temporarily suspend our own projects, set aside our own agendas, and bracket our a priori expectations; we do this in order to apprehend another’s reality on their own terms.

In addition to distinguishing ‘receptive’ attending from other ways of attending such as projection, these authors, as well as Carol Gilligan and other proponents of an ethics of care, agree with Iris Murdoch when she says that to undertake such attentiveness constitutes a distinctively moral act:

I have used the word ‘attention’, which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality. I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent.’⁸

Once we begin practicing engrossment, transformations occur. Nel Noddings describes the transformation in her own personal experience that occurred with a colleague for whom she had “never had much regard” and “little professional respect.” She writes that it was “as though his eyes and mine have combined to look at the scene he describes. I know that I would have behaved differently in the situation, but this is in itself a matter of indifference. I feel what he says he felt…. I shall never again be completely without regard for him.”⁹

Noddings account is apropos in that it makes explicit both the changed perception and also the fact of continuing differences. The recognition of plurality has not been diminished; indeed it may be heightened by additional specificity, but the relationship between the persons has changed. A new understanding alters the landscape; it lessens the power of differences to build barriers and to maintain fences of disregard.

But what Noddings recounts is only a one-way, uni-directional understanding. She gives no indication that there has been mutual understanding, or even a reciprocal effort at engrossment. In order to do co-exploring all the parties must engage in engrossment practices.

For an unmistakable example of co-explorers, I want to turn to an often cited dialogue between Maria Lugones, Hispana, and Vicky Spelman, white/Anglo woman. Sometimes each of the co-authors speaks singly in her own voice while at other times they speak jointly. This published Lugones-Spelman dialogue gives us an example in-print of the co-exploring process. It addresses both the procedures and the substantive issues for pluralistic exploration. The following quotation is found near the end of the dialogue, spoken “Problematically in the voice of a woman of color”:

To attain the appropriate reciprocity of care for your and our well-being as whole beings, you will have a stake in us and in our world, you will be moved to satisfy the need for reciprocity of understanding that will enable you to follow us in our experiences as we are able to follow you in yours.¹⁰

It is this emphasis on a “reciprocity of understanding,” a mutual attentiveness, that marks a pluralism of co-exploring.

In addition to its clear call, both by precept and example, for a reciprocity of understanding, the Lugones-Spelman dialogue brings out some further aspects for serious co-explorers to consider. For one thing we have to confront the personal discomfort that arises when we try to follow another person into their own culture and life experiences. Maria Lugones describes the problem when she observes that “the task at hand for you is one of extraordinary difficulty….[It] calls for circumspection, for questioning of yourselves and your roles in your own culture.”¹¹

To follow another person into their reality can be uncomfortable and threatening. Lisa Delpit describes the problem when she talks about how difficult it is to get white educators to listen to what parents and teachers of color say about their own children, how hard it is to hear each other across cultural, racial, ethnic and economic barriers:

To do so takes a very special kind of listening, listening that requires not only open eyes and ears, but open hearts and minds. We do not really see through our eyes or hear through our ears, but through our beliefs. To put our beliefs on hold is to cease to exist as ourselves for a moment — and that is not easy. It is painful as well, because it means turning yourself inside out, giving up your sense of who you are, and being willing to see yourself in the unflattering light of another’s angry gaze. It is not easy, but it is the only way to learn what it might feel like to be someone else and the only way to start the dialogue.¹²

This feeling of discomfort helps to explain the strong resistance most of us experience when faced with honest, and often angry, cross-cultural encounters.

In addition to the fact that none of us likes to be criticized, there is also, I believe, another deeper fear that blocks us from full engagement in listening and hearing another culture on its own terms. This is the fear that the “rightness” of our own position may be undermined, that our grip of certainty on our own beliefs may be loosened. So long as we are preoccupied with justifying and defending the superiority of our own beliefs we are caught in this fear.

III

If co-exploring among members of different “cultures,” or even between persons who have “real differences,” is to have a chance of success, we may need to follow the ethics of care in its insistence on changing our focus from a preoccupation with moral justification to a concern with how we can create and maintain better relationships for all of us. Noddings, for example, contrasts the pursuit of justification with the practices of an ethics of care:

As one-caring, I am not seeking justification for my action; I am not standing alone before some tribunal. What I seek is completion in the other — the sense of being cared-for and, I hope, the renewed commitment of the cared-for to turn about and act as one-caring….¹³

Thus an ethics of care changes what we take to be the moral problem.

In his fascinating book on creativity, D.N. Perkins tells this story of a changed problem:

Early on in the space race, NASA spent much time and effort seeking a metal robust enough to withstand the heat of reentry and protect the astronauts. The endeavor failed. At some point, a clever person changed the problem. The real problem was to protect the astronauts, and perhaps this could be done without a material that could withstand reentry. The solution, the ablative heat shield, had characteristics just opposite to those originally sought. Rather than withstanding the heat, it slowly burnt away and carried the heat away from the vehicle.¹⁴

From an ethics of care perspective, to persist in trying to determine who’s “right,” and by implication who’s “wrong,” resembles the NASA search for a metal to withstand the heat of reentry. We need instead to solve the real problem which is how to improve our relationships with each other. And, as with the NASA heat shield, the characteristics most appropriate for this task may be just the opposite of those that lead us to insist on and defend our “rightness.”

On this construal the framework for co-exploring can shift to a pluralistic search for better relationships. As co-explorers we can then work together to achieve reciprocal understanding, we can pursue complex truths via shared inquiry, attentive to each person’s account of the terrain as they travel it. If we make serious efforts to attain reciprocal understanding of each other’s worlds, differences and misunderstandings will not cease to exist. Quite the contrary. We shall take differences for granted as the nature of the terrain, and accept misunderstandings as one of the inevitable hardships of the expedition. But to continue as co-explorers does mean that we face these hardships together and that we stay with the expedition.

At this point one might well observe that, given the admitted discomforts and inevitable hardships of such co-exploring expeditions, we are faced with strong reasons for resistance and perhaps for desertion as well. Why would anyone undertake this? When Maria Lugones raises this question she answers: “out of friendship” or “from within friendship you may be moved by friendship.”¹⁵

When she identifies friendship as the appropriate moving force, Lugones points us toward the recursive effects of reciprocal understanding. Such encounters can cultivate the grounds for transformative friendships.¹⁶ But for this recursive effect to occur the process must get going in the first place. How does it start? Here is where I believe we need another new pluralism — namely a pluralism of co-enjoyment.

IV

How can we give friendship a chance to develop, to get started? To answer this question we need to return to the issue of particularity, to the insistence that moral knowledge consists of specific knowledge about particular persons. But to which specific knowledge do we need to attend? When we ask Simone Weil’s question, ‘What are you going through?’¹⁷ we tend to hear about suffering, sorrows, grief, or pain. All of which do constitute an integral part of our lives. But only a part.

In his essay “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” William James calls upon an extended quotation from Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Lantern-bearers” to make the point that “to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action. That is the explanation, that the excuse.”¹⁸ Here we have, as James the Pluralist well knew, the clue for a crucial refinement on our claims about knowledge of the particular, namely which particulars give us the most essential knowledge of someone: “to miss the joy is to miss all.”

Can anyone really know us who knows nothing of our personal joys? In this connection, Spelman reminds us of Nikki Giovanni’s lines:

and I really hope no white person ever has cause
to write about me
   because they never understand Black love is
Black wealth and they’ll
   probably talk about my hard childhood
and never understand that
   all the while I was quite happy.¹⁹

It is not enough, then, to have moved from the general to the particular — to concrete specific knowledge of persons-in-situations, unless we have also begun to understand what “really matters” to this particular person. And here is where “to miss the joy” is at least to miss a great deal, if not all.

In advocating a Pluralism of Co-Enjoyment, I believe that experiences of co-enjoyment can work as a moving force to encourage and sustain efforts at mutual attentiveness. I also believe that as educators we ourselves would do well to practice and teach the pluralisms of both co-enjoyment and co-exploring. Indeed I suggest that in education we need to give serious conscious attention to all four forms of pluralism. Let us look more closely at what this might mean.

V

In contrast to large political configurations, such as nation-states, educational institutions (schools, colleges, universities) are small community-sized units with relatively stable groups of people, many of whom meet face-to-face on a regular basis. Educational institutions are, therefore, already in a favorable position to practice the four forms of pluralism which we have been discussing.

In the first place, educational institutions are in a position to enforce and implement a Pluralism of Co-Existence. One can expect and insist that members of an educational institution will refrain from harming one another and shall exhibit outward tolerance as well as being respectful, or at least “polite,” regardless of inward feelings or attitudes.

In the second place, the pluralism of co-operation gives us effective and appropriate educational practices; effective in part because of their indirectness. A cooperative effort often elicits mutual understanding, camaraderie, and bonding. John Dewey’s influence has, of course, made cooperative practices widespread in education; and at present, methods of “cooperative learning” seem to be in the ascendancy. Whether or not these methods successfully incorporate pluralism is a further question.

Third, appearing under other names, such as ‘the dialectic,’ certain forms of co-exploring have a long respectable history in educational inquiry. But to practice a true pluralism of co-exploring, one that entails reciprocal understanding across cultural and racial differences, requires conditions that are not easily met. Although the details are beyond the scope of this short paper, I believe that, in brief, we need to create educational spaces that are both safe and expansive: (a) safe psychologically, as well as physically and linguistically, so that exchanges of particular, and personally revealing, knowledge become possible, so that students can take risks both in speaking and in hearing; and (b) expansive enough that new, and sometimes discomforting, possibilities can be seriously entertained.

In the fourth place, I think we should, as educators, aim straight for the Pluralism of Co-Enjoyment not only as a long-term, distant possibility but also as an everyday “happening” consciously structured into our teaching-and-learning lives.

And finally, if our educational efforts are successful, all four forms of pluralism — co-existence, co-operation, co-exploration, and co-enjoyment — will become possibilities for us and for our students. We can then set out together on expeditions into new, unexplored territories. Adrienne Rich gives us a poet’s account:

The rules break like a thermometer,
quicksilver spills across the charted systems,
we’re out in a country that has no language
no laws, we’re chasing the raven and the wren
through gorges unexplored since dawn
whatever we do together is pure invention
the maps they gave us were out of date
by years…²⁰

For a response to this essay, see Thompson.

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¹ I wish to thank Debra Shogun, Susan Franzosa, Barbara Houston, Jane Martin, Beatrice Nelson, Jennifer Radden, and Janet Farrell Smith for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

² I am using Nel Noddings, Caring (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) as the primary source for this discussion of an ethics of care. Two other widely discussed sources are Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982) and Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989).

³ The role of respect in pluralism is complex, in his presidential address to PES Walter Feinberg distinguished three “forms of respect”; Feinberg’s first two ‘Laissez Faire’ and ‘Respect as Constraint’ would come under pluralisms of co-existence, but his third form ‘Respect as Cultural Encounter’ is closer to what I term ‘co-exploring’ as is much of Feinberg’s own account of his encounters with Japanese culture. See W. Feinberg, “A Role for Philosophy of Education in Intercultural Research: A Reexamination of the Relativism-Absolutism Debate,” in Philosophy of Education 1989 (Normal Illinois: Philosophy of Education Society, 1989), 2-19.

⁴ William James, Talks To Teachers on Psychology and to Students on some of Life’s Ideals (New York: Norton Library Edition, 1958), 169.

⁵ Maria C. Lugones and Elizabeth V. Spelman, “Have We Got a Theory for You! Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism and the Demand for ‘The Woman’s Voice’,” Women’s Studies International Forum, 6, no. 6 (1983) reprinted in Women and Values: Readings in Recent Feminist Philosophy (Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing Co.,1986), 19-31.

⁶ Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984), ch. 4.

⁷ Noddings, Caring. Ruddick, Maternal Thinking. Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (Trumansburg, New York: The Crossing Press, 1983). Lisa C. Delpit, “The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People’s Children,” Harvard Educational Review, 58, no. 3 (August 1988), 280-298. Sarah Lucia Hoagland, Lesbian Ethics (Palo Alto, California: Institute of Lesbian Studies, 1988).

⁸ Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 34.

⁹ Noddings, Caring, 30-31.

¹⁰ Lugones and Spelman, “Have We Got a Theory,” 30.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Delpit, “Silenced Dialogue,” 297.

¹³ Noddings, Caring, 95.

¹⁴ D.N. Perkins, The Mind’s Best Work (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1981), 217

¹⁵ Lugones and Spelman, “Have We Got a Theory,” 23,30.

¹⁶ Audrey Thompson gives a relational account of the transformative effects of friendship in “Friendship and Moral Character: Feminist Implications for Moral Education,” in Philosophy of Education 1989 (Normal Illinois: Philosophy of Education Society, 1989) 61-75.

¹⁷ Simone Weil, “Reflections of the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” in Waiting for God (New York: G. Putnam’s, 1951).

¹⁸ James, Talks, 154-155.

¹⁹ “Nikki Rosa” quoted by Elizabeth V. Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988) 124-125.

²⁰ Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 31.