This chapter argues that feminists accuse traditional approaches to ethics of showing less concern for women's as opposed to men's issues and interests. They view as trivial the moral issues that arise in the private world, the realm in which women do housework and take care of children, the infirm, and the elderly. Traditional approaches imply that, in general, women are not as morally mature as men. The approaches overrate culturally masculine traits and underrate culturally feminine traits. They favour male ways of moral reasoning that emphasize rules, rights, universality, and impartiality over female ways of moral reasoning that emphasize relationships, responsibilities, particularity, and partiality. Care-focused and status-focused feminist approaches to ethics do not impose a single normative standard on women. Rather, they offer to women multiple ways to understand the ways in which gender, race, and class affect their moral decisions.
Top5.0 Introduction
Feminist ethics is an attempt to revise, reformulate, or rethink traditional ethics to the extent it devalues women's moral experience. Traditional approaches to ethics have been accused of not seriously considering gender issues. Feminist ethics covers a range of gender-specific social justice and moral questions. It is concerned with the values and virtues of both the individual and the community via feminist and woman-centred approaches and responses to mainstream ethics and moral theory, especially liberalism and communitarianism. More specifically, feminist ethics spans traditional ethics and political philosophy, the public and private domains, and individual vs. community analyses to demonstrate the extent and importance of private values in the public sphere and vice versa. Additionally, this field aims to highlight deficiencies in philosophies connected to matters of justice due to theoretical and practical gender-based exclusion. One core goal of this sub-discipline is to broaden philosophical inclusiveness beyond gender concerns by paying attention to and emphasizing issues related to privilege, power, and intersectionality.
Feminist Ethics aims to understand, criticise, and correct the binary view of gender; the privilege historically available to men; and the ways that views about gender maintain oppressive social orders or practices that harm others, especially girls and women who historically have been subordinated, along gendered dimensions including sexuality and gender-identity. Since oppression often involves ignoring the perspectives of the marginalised, different approaches to feminist ethics have in common a commitment to better understand the experiences of persons oppressed in gendered ways. That commitment results in a tendency, in feminist ethics, to take into account empirical information and material actualities.
Feminist ethicists criticise the gender binary, arguing that upholding a fixed conception of the world as constituted only by biological men and women contributes to the maintenance of oppressive and gendered social orders, especially when doing so marginalises those who do not conform to gender binaries (Butler, 1990; Bettcher, 2014; Dea, 2016). Feminist ethicists who are attentive to the intersections of multiple aspects of identity including race, class, and disability, in addition to gender, criticise and correct assumptions that men are historically privileged, as if privilege distributes equally among all men regardless of how they are socially situated. They instead focus more on criticising and correcting oppressive practices that harm and marginalise others who live at these intersections in order to account for the distinctive experiences of women whose experiences are not those of members of culturally dominant groups (Crenshaw, 1991; Khader, 2013). Whatever the focus of feminist ethicists, a widely shared characteristic of their works is at least some overt attention to power, privilege, or limited access to social goods.
The point of feminist ethics is, ideally, to change ethics for the better by improving ethical theorising and offering better approaches to issues including those involving gender. Feminist ethics is not limited to gendered issues because the insights of feminist ethics are often applicable to analyses of moral experiences that share features with gendered issues or that reflect the intersection of gender with other bases of oppression.
This chapter discusses criticisms of traditional approaches to ethics, historical background to feminist ethics, gender binarism, care-focused feminist approaches to ethics and status-oriented feminist approaches to ethics. The chapter objectives are to identify weaknesses of traditional approaches to ethics; trace the historical background to feminist ethics; discuss care-focused feminist approaches to ethics; and assess status-oriented feminist approaches to ethics.
Top5.1 Criticisms Of Traditional Approaches To Ethics
Feminists, among them Jaggar (1992), fault traditional ethics for letting women down in five related ways. First, traditional ethics shows less concern for women's as opposed to men's issues and interests. Second, traditional ethics views as trivial the moral issues that arise in the private world, the realm in which women do housework and take care of children, the infirm, and the elderly. Third, it implies that, in general, women are not as morally mature as men. Fourth, traditional ethics overrates culturally masculine traits and underrates culturally feminine traits. Fifth, it favours male ways of moral reasoning that emphasize rules, rights, universality, and impartiality over female ways of moral reasoning that emphasize relationships, responsibilities, particularity, and partiality.