Vol. XXXVIII / 1 - Studia Moralia

254 STEPHEN T. REHRAUER
order. Justice consists in being who you are, doing what is
expected of you, and knowing and remaining in your proper
place in the social group. In the latter, one’s identity is the result
of a process of making one’s self into a marketable product. Selfworth
is based on one’s having been able to develop one’s own
personal abilities, and on the basis of whether one has received
compensation appropriate to one’s contributions. One’s place in
the social world depends upon what one’s abilities are, what one
does, and how hard one tries. 55 Justice consists in getting what
you deserve, and what you deserve is calculated rationally on the
basis of what you have earned. 56
Women in the Western world, where most of the
psychological studies have been carried out, typically have been
assigned the role of caretakers in society. As such they are
socialized into and develop self-constructs more in keeping with
the obligated self. Men, on the other hand, because of the way in
which the social structure of Western society has historically
developed, typically participate more fully and directly in the
world of the marketplace and are socialized into and develop
self-constructs bounded by the domain of the exchanger self.
Since this is the case, we might expect that women would tend
to make use more of a justice framework constructed around the
concepts of care–helping others, treating people equally, the
55
D. MARGOLIS, The Fabric of Self, pp. 74-76.
56
Rom Harré points to a similar distinction between societies whose
morality is organized around the central concepts of honor and deliberation.
Honor based moralities are grounded in the demands of obedience to role
specified tasks, and give rise to moral thinking which is more narrative and
character oriented in nature, whereas deliberation systems of morality focus
primarily upon the concrete individual acts of agents with particular interest
in the reasons why they choose to act as they do. The first presupposes that
the moral task is given by the dictates of one’s place in society and justice
consists in fulfilling one’s obligations in obedience. Thus injustice would
result from a lack of will-power, being fundamentally a sin of akrasia. The
second perspective allows that individual’s have a choice between alternative
courses of behavior and make use of their intellectual capacity to discern
through processes of deliberation which of the two or more courses of action
are more morally appropriate. In this type of moral world, injustice is the
result of bad judgment or insufficient deliberation. It is a sin of wrong
choice. See R. HARRÉ, Personal Being, pp. 219-255.