Feminist Ethics Research Paper

As time passed, the feminist activists entered professions across the disciplines. They established journals and courses and eventually the discipline of women’s studies itself was legitimized and institutionalized, with its own subspecialties that include feminist ethics. Although feminist intellectual work has always been multidisciplinary, its institutionalization has taken place in the traditional context of departments, course assignments, disciplinary specialties, etc. One outcome has been that feminist ethics, like traditional ethics, has tended to fall within the territory of the humanities, despite the fact that the social sciences also have essential contributions to make.

Intellectually, feminist ethics was shaped by criticisms of the traditional moral theories that were developed to suit life in secular, Western capitalist democracies. Moral subjects and agents were defined as autonomous individuals who were equal under morality and the law—a stereotypically male subject. The traditional theories incorporate, for the most part, a variety of dualisms in which one side is valued over the other, underwriting an ethics that supports dominance and subordination of many sorts. The dualisms fundamentally value reason over emotion, with men identified with reason and mind and women (and the racially subordinated) identified with emotion, body, and nature. Out of this soil a variety of feminist moral theories have grown, ranging from modified, liberal theories of equal opportunity and rights; to theories of mothering, care, and relationship; to lesbian ethics; liberatory ethics; standpoint approaches; third world and minority approaches; and the feminist ecological ethics that is now being developed.

From the beginning, feminists worked in ‘applied ethics,’ for example, on moral issues of abortion, violence, prostitution, AIDS, clitoral cutting, the environment, peace, immigration, and many others. All of these theorists insist on taking women’s experience seriously. In addition, some feminists focus on issues of power and dominance, insisting that feminist ethics must be ‘liberatory’ and provide guides for action. The liberatory focus can be seen as asking, ‘What would an ethics be like that takes patriarchy, or racism, or anthropocentrism seriously as a social and political structure?’

The dominant public ethics in the Western democracies is an abstract moral theory of impartial reasoning, under which autonomous individuals freely chose principles of rights and justice and make their decisions accordingly. It has been used to good effect in some places as women argue for equal opportunity and rights. The impartial ethics is implicitly radical because it is supposed to apply to all individuals regardless of gender, race, age, ethnicity, relationship, etc. In practice, the radical extension to all individuals was politically won during nineteenth and twentieth century struggles to extend the suffrage, change property laws, and so on. In the process, the ethics itself was modified so as to include women (and others) among the autonomous individuals—leading to the intellectual discovery that the original moral agents of the theory were conceived to suit a stereotypically Western, white, higher class, male model. A family of feminist moral theories sprang up to remedy the problem.

The dominant Western ethics of justice, rights, and autonomy relies heavily on the reason–emotion dualism. One feminist alternative has been to remedy the imbalance by emphasizing women’s experience of care and responsibility. Long ago, Addams (1907) called for a ‘social ethic’ that would offer a guide to women’s action by expanding women’s morality in home and family into the public sphere—the Settlement House movement and the women’s peace movement were outcomes. This alternative puts the focus on care and relationship rather than on autonomous agents acting individually according to their interests, self-chosen principles, etc., and it has provided an important direction for feminist ethics. Diana T. Meyers, for example, developed an account of moral autonomy in terms of competency that could be exercised either under an ethics of impartial reason or under an ethics of responsibility and care—using studies in social psychology to support her work. Gilligan (1982) distinguished two ‘voices’ in moral reasoning, and two developmental modes, one of them charted by Lawrence Kohlberg’s scale, the other by a scale she developed through interviewing women about their abortion decisions.

Any moral theory presupposes a social theory and a theory of human nature—often implicitly. Kohlberg (1981) was explicit: his view on human rationality relied on Kant, and so did his social theory, traced back to Kant through Piaget and Durkheim. Like the latter, Kohlberg supposed there is an intimate connection between social organization and development of moral reasoning. Differences in the rate of moral development, he said, are due to differences in opportunities for social role taking— and for the highest stage of development, opportunities in the ‘public sphere’ institutions of government, law, and economy are required (historically ‘men’s sphere’), in contrast to the ‘domestic or personal sphere’ of family, etc. Women in general tested out at the lower stages, and they were diagnosed as confusing moral problems with issues of interpersonal relations.

Kohlberg measured development in terms of subject responses to abstract moral dilemmas. Gilligan developed a different scale for measuring development by asking women about their actual abortion decisions. The basic concepts of her theory were those of care and responsibility in relationships—in contrast to individual rights and justice. She constructed the ethics in the mid-1970s, using interviews with women, but her later work indicates that both men and women use care and responsibility reasoning and develop along her scale.

Gilligan was one of the early theorists of the care and relationship approach, but there were many others, particularly those who focused on mothering as an alternative paradigm to the ‘public man’ that operated in a society of autonomous moral equals. These ‘maternal ethics’ concern care and responsibility among those who are not equal in power or ability—those who are cared for and those who give care, those who are dependent and those on whom they depend. Ruddick’s (1980) work on mothering was widely influential.

To a degree, these ‘care’ ethics accept the dualisms of reason/emotion and public personal, but they argue for the distinctive importance of women’s experience in developing an ethics for both men and women. However, there are political implications of accepting the dualisms. Tronto (1993) connects the traditional separation of ethics and politics with the division into public and domestic (or personal) spheres, marking it as a boundary that has excluded women from power. She develops a positive alternative of an ‘ethico-politics’ of care.

The ethics of care and responsibility makes a major contribution to philosophical ethics by analyzing moral relations among persons who are not equals. For example, Baier’s (1995) work on trust considers relations among unequals in a way that is applicable in the ‘public sphere’—investigating trust between the governed and the governors. Baier also mined the history of philosophy to find alternatives to the ‘rights and justice’ approach, taking David Hume as a candidate for ‘the women’s theorist’ because he took sentiment and relationship as basic. Other feminists have broadened the ethics to other personal relationships, such as friendship or love, while some have developed an ethics of relationship within lesbian communities (Hoagland 1988, Mohin 1996).

The ‘care and responsibility’ approach has sometimes been labeled ‘feminine,’ rather than ‘feminist,’ because it emphasized women’s traditional place and feminine virtues. Proponents of what is labeled ‘feminist ethics’ claim that any feminist theory must be liberatory, or at least must provide a basis for arguing issues of injustice and domination in the public sphere. For this reason, many feminists have worked to integrate the care and justice approaches (see Held 1995). They insist not only that women’s experience be taken seriously, but that patriarchy, racism, class, and other oppressive social structures be taken seriously. Jaggar (1995) has offered an agenda for any ethics that is called feminist: the ethics must underwrite critiques of actions and practices that perpetuate women’s subordination; it should prescribe morally justified ways of resisting those practices; and it should envision morally desirable alternative promises of women’s emancipation. Feminist ethics should offer a guide to feminist action.

Traditional ethics was criticized because the ideal of a moral agent was modeled on certain men’s experience, excluding the experience of women. Both feminine and feminist ethics have themselves been criticized for using an ideal of Western white, middleclass women’s experience as the experience of all women—excluding the experiences of many women worldwide. They have been accused of ‘essentialism’—assuming women everywhere share certain essential experiences of reproduction and of subordination under patriarchy. This is a very serious accusation, because it questions whether women share a common experience across race and class, in rich and poor nations, in radically different personal and public relations. Because feminists claim to take women’s experience seriously, a ‘common experience’ is needed to make a general ‘ethico-politics’ that works for all women—whether it is classified as feminine or feminist.

Many critics argue that ‘women’s experience’ is heterogeneous, and it varies along the significant lines of dominance that mark racial, economic, and political oppression. Women of color, lesbians, and working-class women have raised objections—with the result that the varieties of women’s experience have been brought into the light. Collins’s (1991) work on black feminist thought has offered both criticism and positive alternatives. Narayan (1995) has written on colonialism and the ethics of rights and care, and the place of ‘the other’ in feminist theory. The early and influential feminist theorist, Flax (1993), now calls for ‘an ethics of multiplicity.’ Those working in both feminine and feminist ethics agree to the need, but it is by no means clear how the ethics might offer either a general theory of care and responsibility or a general guide to feminist action. As Sandoval (2000) writes, ‘US third-world women’ have their own strategies of action which suit their own needs in their own situations.

Feminists are committed to respecting the experiences of all women—and avoiding the imperialism of traditional Western approaches. This commitment may be impossible to fulfill, given the multiplicity of ways of life in all the many places of the earth. Globally, women’s situations and their moral and political agency differ radically. It is not clear how a secular, Western feminist ethics would apply in a situation where Islam is important to the lives, identities, and politics of women, for example. In other communities, women have objected to the ethics of women’s individual autonomy that is grounded in the ethics. Western feminists have themselves been accused of using Western standards and meanings to define third-world subjects (Ong 1988). ‘Postmodern’ feminists have argued that feminist ethico-politics presupposes women as the subject of action, and as moral agents, when in fact gender and agency are not givens but are political constructs, enacted in particular times and places (Butler 1990).

Other interesting developments in feminist ethics have been made by the ‘ecological feminists.’ These feminists offer general criticisms of hierarchies involved in dominance and subordination. They insist that the dualisms of the traditional ethics are incorporated into the social order so as to support dominance in many forms—with domination by men over women and man over nature being central. Ecological feminists share some of their ethics with nonfeminists in the environmental movement, but they insist that understanding patriarchy is fundamental to understanding the hierarchies involved in domination of nature (Warren 1995). One of the earlier books that had an impact was Merchant’s The Death of Nature (1980), that presents a history of the change in the relation of man and nature from one of respect for a living being (Mother Earth) to a resource to be exploited. Feminist spirituality and ‘third world’ women have also been important influences in ecological feminism (Ruether 1996).

Within feminist ethics proper, there is criticism of the androcentrism or male centeredness of traditional ethics, but ecological feminists also criticize its anthropocentrism—putting humans at the center of the value universe in a way that permits exploitation of nonhumans. Human interests and human life are the sole moral issues, not only for traditional ethics but for most feminist ethics as well—adding women’s interest to men’s interest doesn’t change that fact. The most interesting of the ecological feminist theories require respect for nonhumans, and they insist on including them within the range of ethics.

Over the years, feminist ethics has come to have a wide influence in other fields. It has made major contributions to biomedical ethics, to business, engineering, and other professional ethics (Leidka 1996, Tong 1997, Whitbeck 1997). The work on care in relationship and the discussions of trust have been particularly important. In this way, feminist ethics has offered practical, new ‘guides to action’ in some significant arenas of the public world.

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