The risk in ethics is not only to get things wrong, but to be in the wrong: to err not only intellectually but to commit oneself to ethical positions that are themselves subject to ethical failure. This is particularly apparent when ethics, politics, and the methodologies of moral philosophy and moral psychology intersect.

Iris Murdoch points out that most ordinary people ‘think of [their ethics] as continuous with some sort of larger structure of reality, whether this be a religious structure, or a social or historical one.’ Philosophical objections to such thinking are not logical in nature, but rather rooted in the ethical concern that seeing one’s morality as continuous with such a ‘larger structure’ risks taking ‘too much for granted’ and failing to differentiate between what are and aren’t objective facts we need not question. This, according to Murdoch, is ‘a straight moral objection to the effect that certain bad results follow in practice from thinking about morality in a certain way ... a moral argument which properly belongs in the propaganda of Liberalism.’ (Murdoch, 1997, pp. 65-66)

The ‘moralising’ common in modern moral philosophy, according to Murdoch, is the implicit valuation of meta-ethical neutrality and an existentialist picture of unconstrained freedom and individual responsibility. Under this conception, any given individual’s morality is equally accessible and intelligible through linguistic analysis, in isolation, in terms of shared concepts. It ties in with what Mary Midgley calls a ‘homogenizing approach to equality ... an unrealistic attempt to treat people as abstract, social entities, divorced from nature’, which she traces back to ‘the bad side of our inheritance from the Age of Reason’ (2002, p. xxv).

There is no room in these conceptions of the individual and its ethical, epistemic, or material interactions with the world for social context, senses of meaning shared within such contexts, or much attention to interpersonal relationships, let alone love or care as ethically significant over and above more abstract, existentialist conceptions of individual commitments and projects. The idea is, basically, that every man’s (or, when this picture of ethics and personhood succeeds in not being implicitly gendered, every person’s) morality might be examined and discussed in the Free Marketplace of Ethics. is idea has clear – if perhaps not immediately obvious – implications for what can and cannot be examined and discussed in this way, and thereby what even counts as ethics.

This is evident in early operationalisations of moral reasoning under Lawrence Kohlberg’s (1976) cognitivist paradigm of children’s moral development, which later research by Carol Gilligan found to be systematically biased in favour of a duty-ethics understanding of ‘justice’ more commonly articulated by boys than girls. (Gilligan, 1982) I discuss the implicit moralising in Kohlberg’s supposedly objective operationalisation of ‘optimal’ moral development, and how it fails to do justice – both intellectually and ethically – to care-oriented approaches to ethics.