Charles Peirce's famous contention that the ultimate meaning of a concept is some difference in human habits of behavior may effectively lead us toward behavioral conceptions of inquiry virtues such critical and creative thinking. In fact, we often speak of impartiality, consistency, reasonableness, and the like as cognitive virtues, meaning behavioral dispositions that are useful to rational deliberation. Our behavioral analysis may further lead us to identify noncognitive virtues of inquiry, such as affective and democratic virtues. And we should consider cognitive and other kinds of vices, meaning habits of behavior that tend to block inquiry. Something like this, in fact, is the point being made by Matthew Lipman, Ann Margaret Sharp, and others who analyze thinking in behavioral terms such as making certain kinds of moves and following certain procedures. And Peirce helped us to understand that since behavior may be collective and collaborative, and since groups of people develop habits of interactive behavior, including cognitive behavior, our conception of the behavioral virtues of inquiry is equally useful in analyzing individuals and communities. In discussing virtues of care and democracy in this essay, I will employ this behavioral conception of the term virutes.

Is care a democratic virtue? Is education that is directed toward habituating teachers and learners to pursue democratic ends by democratic means, in principle committed to fostering dispositions for empathy and solidarity among us as well? To answer these questions I will first present a behavioral interpretation of the virtue of care, and then show how certain caring behaviors are necessary for two democratic practices: rational inquiry and the facilitation of pluralism. In this section I will give a behavioral interpretation of Carol Gilligan's concept of care as an ethic, not because her conception is definitive, but because it is robust and multi-faceted. I present it as a somewhat arbitrary starting point, against which other notions of care may be contrasted.

In her ground-breaking book, In a Different Voice, Gilligan reported the findings of her research in human moral development.² Gilligan found that on the whole, women and men in her culture aspire to different moral paradigms. Gilligan was at one time an associate of Lawrence Kohlberg, whose paradigm of moral reasoning was characterized by dispassion, impartiality, and universalized conceptions of rights and justice, and who used that paradigm to diagnose the caring, relationship-based moral reasoning of many women and girls as immature. Gilligan's thesis is not the simple reverse of Kohlberg's - that his male-oriented paradigm is less mature than the female. Rather, Gilligan discusses the strengths of both paradigms, and concludes that the two compliment each other - that in fact, each paradigm needs the other to curb its excesses, correct its misdirections, and compensate for its lacks. Men would do well, that is, to become mindful of what effect their blind calculations of rights and justice, and their fierce assertions of independence have on the network of human relationships in which they live, while women would do well to give their ideas, desires, and interests (their "voices") dignity, consideration, and equal emphasis to those of others, especially other men. Moral maturity, for Gilligan, is a matter of being able to use both paradigms.

I will now describe six virtues that I take to be elemental to Gilligan's ethic of care: general mindfulness, close mindfulness, attempting solidarity, solidarity, tolerance, and self-care. I will begin a behavioral interpretation of these virtues, suggesting a number of behavioral dispositions and procedures that realize them. Most of the behaviors I mention should be understood as sufficient but not necessary instances of these caring virtues.

To be caring is, first of all, to be mindful of the network of human relationships one is involved in, and second, to consider the effects of one's actions (including speech and very subtle actions such as facial expressions) on the people one is socially related to.³ Even the practice of justice requires awareness of human relations, and a caring person will not always exercise the rights that justice grants her: she will sometimes give others more than they have the right to expect from her.⁴ General mindfulness of others becomes a virtue when it is instantiated in habitual behaviors such as noticing, imagining, naming, remarking on, and communicating with others.⁵ The goal of general mindfulness is simply awareness of the other beings our conduct may affect. Therefore, while this goal is fulfilled in simple acquaintance, its scope is indeterminate. There is no way to follow the ripple of effects caused by our conduct, to know who will be affected. In the law of torts, this obscurity gives rise to the standard of proximate cause, which we may adapt: A caring person is one who makes herself aware of the others she might reasonably expect to affect.

But to be caring of others one must often regard them in their particularity. That is, besides paying attention to how our action may affect any random, generalized other, we must also pay a closer attention to how we may affect the particular people we know well, for example our family members, friends, colleagues, and neighbors. The special care that is appropriate among people who know each other well requires sensitivity - a closer mindfulness of one another's particular needs and interests. Gilligan notes that many of the games young girls play in her culture "foster the development of the empathy and sensitivity necessary for taking the role of 'the particular other' and point...toward knowing the other as different from the self."⁶

The virtue of close mindfulness is exercised in behaviors such as inquiring into and articulating others' needs and interests, especially those that are different from our own. The aim of this virtue is understanding those needs and interests, which is not evidenced by the behaviors of close mindfulness. Understanding can only be demonstrated by behavior that cannot be explained without it - such as behavior that embodies the subsequent caring virtues.

It is one thing to understand the peculiar claims of suffering and ecstasy of those around us, and another to actually sympathize with those claims: to suffer with people who suffer differently, and to be happy with people who find happiness in ways very different from our own. Gilligan recommends a radical sympathy that is not measured in the liberal moral theory of equality. To respect a person's autonomy, even to defend her right to pursue peculiar interests, is not the same as attempting to share those interests even long enough to help her pursue them. Rather, as Richard Rorty has observed:

The virtue of attempting solidarity requires that we reserve judgment on the peculiarities of others brought to our attention by close mindfulness. Solidarity may be attempted by many means: imagining such peculiarities as belonging to ourselves; studying their causes; seeing our own needs and interests as peculiar; broadening our exposure to the chaotic history of human purpose and desire. These means may be sought in literature and art, in anthropology and history, in thought experiment, travel, and intimate conversation.

Our solidarity with others means either that we have become converted to their ways of life - so that the same things make all of us happy or miserable - or that we empathize with them sufficiently to suffer and celebrate with them. The former is a solidarity of conscience, an example of which might be my religious conversion to your doctrines, so that I come to share your peculiar concerns about the morality of our community. An example of the latter might be a heterosexual's coming to believe that the relationship of a gay couple he knows has the same significance and moral standing as his own heterosexual marriage. While these different types of solidarity are often realized in different types of behavior, both are also realized in our pursuit of needs and interests claimed by others. Moreover, both kinds of solidarity preclude didactic, paternalistic, or pastoral care - the kind that presumes to address needs and interests the person being cared for does not countenance - no matter how sincerely intended. Consider the brutal ministrations made by sixteenth-century Franciscans to Yucatan Mayans, in the name of Christian love, as related by Friar Diego de Landa:

It was not the failure of the Franciscans to accept Mayan religion and morality that constituted their breach of the ethic of care, but their use of force rather than persuasion in their ministrations. That is, the failure of the Franciscans to even attempt to see Mayan ways as legitimate, even for Mayans, was a glaring failure of mindfulness and attempting solidarity; but I would argue that the ethic of care only demands that this attempt be made, not that it succeed. The requirement that we sympathize with all claims of suffering and happiness would rest on the absurd assumption that all private moralities are ultimately commensurable: that they can all be fitted together in a unified view of the good life. I do not believe they can; and so I propose that to care for others requires only an honest attempt at solidarity, that is, an effort to imagine and then actually believe that what others claim is good and bad, really is, or is, at least for them. If this attempt should fail (as it has failed for me, for example, regarding White and Christian supremacy, and certain forms of addiction), then we may still care for others by committing to use only persuasion and never force to win their solidarity, to try to convert them to our own view of what is good for them. This commitment is the basis of the virtue of tolerance, and while it is not the kind of care we hope to share with intimates, it is precisely the kind that we may expect and demand from our fellow democratic citizens.

Tolerance is almost a negative virtue, in that it describes the quintessential democratic disposition to refrain from interfering with the pursuits and pastimes of others, no matter how abhorrent to us, that do not themselves prevent the same scope of liberty to others. Behaviorally, tolerance is evidenced as much by the absence of repressive actions as by the establishment and practice of nondiscriminatory political and social procedures. Of course, arrangements for reciprocal political and social noninterference may be motivated more by self-regard than by care for others; but the willingness to give all kinds - and very different kinds - of people the political and social room to pursue what is important to them, though we ourselves cannot appreciate those pursuits, because we see that otherwise we will cause them to suffer, is surely a kind of compassion.

Finally, to be caring is not to be completely selfless, for as Gilligan observes, "to be selfless means not to be in relationship."⁹ Gilligan characterizes "the age-old opposition between selfishness and selflessness" as a false dichotomy.¹⁰ The ethic of care she elaborates recognizes the needs and interests of everyone in a relationship network, including the caring self, who must creatively balance the conflicting claims of "compassion and autonomy," "virtue and power."¹¹ Gilligan does not argue (as some Taoists and Christians do) that a sufficiently caring person will find a perfect balance to strike in every situation of competing needs, only that in such competitions the needs of the caring self should not be habitually slighted. It was this virtue of self-care, so strongly emphasized in the ethic of autonomy and rights, that Gilligan found to be less habitual among the women than among the men of her culture. For these women, Gilligan recommended such practices as articulating their own needs, interests, and desires, and negotiating them on a more equal basis with the needs, interests, and desires of others.

I have described the ethic of care as a complex of virtues, or behavioral dispositions. Now, in order to relate care to democracy, I must describe democracy in the currency of behavioral habits as well. In fact, I have found it useful to think of democracy as two systems of practices that are compatible but not necessary to each other: one a system of social noninterference, and the other, of social cooperation. Richard Shusterman has written about these different conceptions of democracy, in defending John Dewey's conception (which emphasizes social cooperation) against Richard Rorty's (which emphasizes social noninterference).¹²

Rorty's democracy is characterized by the capitalist values of extreme individualism, vast personal liberty, and freedom from too much association. Rorty uses the phrase "private morality" to refer to visions and pursuits of self-realization, whether they be temporary or life-long, whether they be hobbies or whole ways of life (ways of whole lives), and whether they be pursued by individuals, clubs, congregations, or entire cultures. "Public morality" means politics - the way one justifies using social power to coerce others - and Rorty explains that democracy is the public morality that attempts to be neutral among conflicting private moralities. That is, democratic people only interfere with each other's private moralities when those moralities become undemocratic by threatening other private moralities.

In Dewey's socialist democracy, individuals derive meaning and purpose from association, and so construe their political freedoms positively: as opportunities to pursue the benefits of associated life. I take Dewey's description of democracy to be a prediction that given the chance, people will find the best use of democratic freedoms to be cultural habits of mutually beneficial social interaction. But then for Dewey, social empowerment was a means to individual freedom of conscience:

But this kind of individual development requires, besides the empowerment of social collaboration, the freedom to associate and disassociate with others, as we see fit, in the pursuits we deem worthy. The positive freedoms of association, cooperation, and collective growth presuppose the negative freedoms of not being told how, when, and for what purposes to associate. A democracy of nonintervention, like Rorty's, is therefore both logically and practically prior to a Deweyan democracy of collective flourishing. Indeed, Rorty's only point in differentiating an arena of public morality from the arena of competing private moralities is that if the latter are not privatized, they become oppressive. And the only constraint Rorty sees democracy putting on private moralities is that they acquire their converts by persuasion rather than by force.¹⁴

The behavioral interpretation of democracy I begin here will reflect this distinction between democratic principles of nonintervention and beneficial association. I will describe a separate set of behaviors for each set of principles. I believe a behavioral interpretation of these principles is more useful than a conceptual interpretation for demonstrating that association presupposes nonintervention. At times I will describe procedures rather than behaviors, but on the assumption that a procedure is only a rule for behavior that has been adopted by some community. The fact that these procedures get written down, so that sometimes in discussing them we make reference to texts rather than to actual human conduct, does not make them any less appropriate to behavioral studies, as long as the procedures are rules for how to act and not how to think or what to believe. Of course, a community that aspires to democracy should continually monitor the democratic quality of both its formal procedures and the actual habits of human interaction that form within it.

To begin with, the ideal of nonintervention is realized by the establishment of relatively value-neutral procedures for facilitating the pursuit of private moralities. The distinction Rorty wants to maintain between public and private moralities is another way of describing a procedural, as opposed to a substantive democracy - a distinction I believe to be as necessary as it is indeterminate. A procedural democracy is one in which there is general agreement on procedures for free speech, universal franchisement, the separation of church and state, rules of evidence, and the like - procedures that are neutral to the content of private moralities, for example, religious or political platforms. In substantive democracies there is no such neutrality: citizens may use governmental power to sponsor or aid the pursuits of private moralities that gain a majority of collective support. This distinction is naïve, of course, because there is no such thing as a value-neutral procedure; but I also believe this distinction is one we cannot do without, because democracy depends on the identification of procedures that are at least relatively value-neutral, in that the only values to which it is opposed are those hostile to democracy itself, such as Fascism. This is one reason I like Rorty's characterization of democracy as one kind of "public morality," for it is a morality - a normative stance, a choice of values - but it addresses a different sphere of moral choices than is addressed by each individual's "private morality," or vision of perfection.¹⁵ And democracy aims to make the kind of public moral choices that will least interfere with our private moral choices.

More interesting, perhaps, than the rules of democratic institutions are the patterns and habits of interpersonal behavior among their members. The ideal of nonintervention in such behavior is to avoid using force - including legislation, violence, fraud, and fallacious reasoning - to win adherence to one's private moral views and practices. The alternative is persuasion. A person who, when offended at the way her neighbor worships, is inclined to speak to her neighbor about it rather than to her senator, has developed a democratic disposition. A related disposition is to oppose undemocratic uses of force: to notice coercion and object to it.

But of course, the distinction between persuasion and force is indeterminate. It is obvious that hate crimes and rioting are undemocratic means of pursuing private moral visions, and that writing books, appearing on talk shows, and participating in other forms of public dialogue are not overly intrusive. But the democracy of many behaviors is contestable, especially in many kinds of social activism, such as picketing, boycotts, sit-ins, and hunger strikes. Is it persuasion or force to follow a woman out of an abortion clinic and persist in verbal confrontation with her whenever she enters public space? Different communities may evolve this distinction in different ways and be equally democratic, so long as they have evolved either procedures or collective habits (or both) of pursuing the distinction, through inquiry and social reconstruction, in order to maximize freedom of conscience. Democratic communities are communities that, among other things, constantly worry that their individual and collective behaviors may cause someone's conscience to be forced.

It is easy to formulate a behavioral interpretation of Dewey's concept of social cooperation, since that concept was modeled on the habits of scientific communities. Dewey and Rorty have both taken the purpose of social life to be individual self-realization, of which there is no authoritative standard. Dewey saw that this kind of growth requires above all two things: variety in the environment and adaptability (openness to change) in the individual. And Dewey saw that both of these were easier to achieve among cooperative communities than by individuals, and like Peirce before him he found that communities of scientists had evolved useful habits of interaction that cultivated both variety and adaptability.

Variety means that potentials for change in the natural and social environment are not artificially or dogmatically limited. In scientific communities this ideal is realized by the standards of free and open inquiry that isolate scientific research from the sanctions of church and state. These correspond, in democratic communities, to the procedures and practices of nonintervention I have discussed, which facilitate an ideological and cultural pluralism. Adaptability is the ability to grow by discerning and selecting from the many meanings, materials, opportunities and risks our natural and social environments have to offer. In science, adaptability involves such inquiry skills as discerning aberrant phenomena, investigation, imagining new hypotheses, careful reasoning, honest experimenting, and self-correction. And each of these skills is collective as well as individual. That is, many communities of scientists have developed habits of collective discernment and reasoning, to name only a couple, and have found their collective inquiries to be more efficacious and more beneficial to each member than the isolated inquiries of any individual. People with similar goals and standards can correct each other's mistakes and model their strengths for each other, so that not only can members of the community grow individually by learning from each other, but also the members can grow as a community, by learning how best to interact - to divide their efforts, to compensate for each other's weaknesses and build on each other's strengths - so that a strong community actually comes to practice virtues that none of its members can practice alone. Dewey urged American society to become more democratic by attempting to structure just this kind of social cooperation - particularly in schools - in which free citizens join in like-minded communities to draw more growth out of one another than any of them could achieve on her own.

It does not follow that there is any public obligation to support, further, or otherwise care for private pursuits one does not share. Democracy requires the distinction between pursuing a collective private vision and pursuing a public vision. A public or political vision is pursued by citizens acting as the engineers of society, and the result will be executed by the government, by force. If they are democratic, this vision will be limited by the principle of nonintervention. Powerful majorities will not use the government to enforce their private moralities. In contrast, a collective private vision is pursued by people who are not acting as citizens, at least while they pursue it, but as Mormons, skinheads, Disney stockholders, Jane Austen buffs, Queer Nation activists, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, or what have you. Some of these communities are alarmingly powerful, but again, if they are democratic they will not be tempted to use their power in undemocratic ways. Democracy provides the uncoerced arena in which people with private passions attempt to persuade one another about what is important - about what they should care about.

I hope that my efforts to bring many ideals of care and of democracy into the currency of behavior has already made some of their similarities obvious. And, on the basis of this behavioral analysis, I am now able to assert my thesis: the relationship between caring and democracy is one of identity between certain of their respective behaviors. Certain behaviors and virtues (as behavioral habits) that partially constitute a person's or a community's "caringness" also partially constitute that person's or that community's democracy. I say "partial" because there are behaviors and virtues that belong to care and not to democracy, and vice versa.

The behaviors implicated by the caring virtues of general mindfulness, close mindfulness, and attempting solidarity also belong to the virtue of democratic cooperation - specifically, the virtue of adaptability, or mutual growth through social inquiry. These behaviors include noticing, imagining, and communicating with others, inquiring into and articulating the needs and interests of others, imagining the peculiar desires of others as belonging to ourselves, and broadening our exposure to human experience. I think it is obvious that this kind of examination and experimentation is as relevant to thorough social inquiry as to thorough interpersonal care, and that any community in which these practices become habitual is as likely to experience practical, cooperative social improvement as the emergence of strong and varied foci of solidarity.

Solidarity itself, of the types I have described, is not properly a public goal. That is, the intense interpersonal caring that is manifest in people taking up one another's burdens and causes is certainly conducive to all the ideals of democracy I have named, and in fact, is facilitated by the democratic procedures I have described. But such solidarity of conscience and private purposes is not itself a democratic ideal, and to try to make it into one would violate the democratic ideal of noninterference. Democratic practices preclude citizens from coercing each other to homogenize their views in deference to any particular value system or for the sake of solidarity itself. Altruism, sacrifice, compassion, and unity of conscience, insofar as their behaviors are distinguishable from the democratic behaviors of noninterference and of social cooperation, belong to the realm of private morality and are not properly the objects of political concern. Democracy leaves citizens free to pursue them or not.

Tolerance, on the other hand, is a quintessential democratic virtue: its practice constitutes the ideal of social noninterference.¹⁶ As such, tolerance is related to the democratic goal of cultivating pluralism for the sake of cooperative growth. Moreover, tolerant behaviors are an important part of the process of social inquiry. It turns out, as Dewey saw, that the same tolerant dispositions and procedures that are necessary for our political freedom are equally necessary for thorough inquiry. That is, a community of citizens with different moral ambitions, who aim for inclusiveness and who accommodate each other in their divergent pursuits (as far as those pursuits are politically compatible), is the ideally fertile ground for personal and collective growth.¹⁷

The virtue of self-care is similarly relevant to both the cultivation of variety and the process of collective growth through inquiry. Without sufficient self-regard, our unique insights and desires may not be articulated, and thus have no chance to be explored, tested, extended, or nurtured by our community. And it is the community as well as the individual that suffers from this loss of voice. This was the page of evolutionary science that Dewey took from Darwin: The more homogenous a society is, no matter how rigorous its process of inquiry, the less potential it has for improvement. The cognitive virtue of impartiality proscribes self-effacement as much as self-absorption.

In conclusion, I am concerned that advocates of various ethics of care have promoted virtues such as sympathy, altruism, sacrifice, and unity of conscience, as public virtues integral to both inquiry and democracy. I have shown to what extent I believe this is true: Democracy imposes on its adherents the public obligation to treat one another with the consideration, respect, and sometimes the tolerance, that will allow all private pursuits (that is, individual and collective pursuits that do not threaten democratic pluralism) to thrive. Apart from that, however, democratic authority must not be used to promote caring virtues espoused by private communities.

The arena of most concern to me is the public schools, where programs for religious instruction, moral education, good citizenship, and intercultural empathy sometimes cross the line that separates public from private enculturation. Time and again, I have heard the argument that since increasingly, young children are not taught basic moral values at home, public schools must take on some of this responsibility. I believe there is a place in public education for programs of character education, but the objectives of these programs must be either to help young people understand and practice the behaviors of social noninterference, or to give them the tools they will need to participate in the project of social growth. Both of these educational goals are relatively value-neutral, in that they do not predispose students to accept any particular private beliefs, values, or practices. Such neutrality is the first standard democracy requires of character education.

For a response to this essay, see Vokey.

17. For instance, tolerance allows us to profit from the mistakes and successes of others involved in pursuits we consider misguided or distasteful.