Thus Carol Gilligan, a psychologist, demonstrates how women’s moral values tend to stress responsibility, whereas men emphasize rights. Women look to context, where men appeal to neutral, abstract notions of justice. In particular, she argues, women endorse an ‘ethic of care’ which proclaims that no one should be hurt. This morality of caring and

Liberal feminism accentuates equality, while radical feminism is concerned with difference.

Liberalism prizes individual rights, both civil and political. Liberals assert the need for a large realm of personal freedom, including freedom of speech, conscience, association, and sexuality, immune to state regulation, save to protect others from harm.

the legitimacy of the law lies in some conception of justice, and the language of the law is unavoidably normative,

‘I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.’ Thus spake Jean-François Lyotard (1924–98) in his influential book, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. The promise of truth or justice held out by the grand ‘metanarratives’ of Kant, Hegel, Marx, and others has, in our age, been betrayed.

The legitimacy of the law, he contends, depends significantly on the effectiveness of the process of discourse by which the law is made. Consequently freedom of speech and other fundamental democratic rights are central to his theory of ‘communicative action’.

In a capitalist society, he saw this reification as the result of the alienation of workers from the product of their work: the ‘general social form of labour appears as the property of a thing’; it is reified through the ‘fetishism of commodities’. Capitalist relations appear to protect individual freedom, but equality before the law is merely a

Punishment is an essential element of his conception of crime: the state reinforces the collective conscience by punishing those who offend against the state itself.

Crime, according to Durkheim, is a perfectly normal aspect of social life. Moreover, he provocatively suggests, it is an integral part of all healthy societies. This is because crime is closely connected to the social values expressed in the ‘collective conscience’: an act becomes criminal when it offends deeply held aspects of this collective