Feminist ethics involves which belief

Reflecting further on women's alleged moral superiority, Mill concluded that women's "moral nature" is not the result of innate female propensities but of systematic social conditioning. To praise women on account of their great "virtue" is merely to compliment patriarchal society for having inculcated in women those psychological traits that serve to maintain it. Women are taught to live for and sacrifice for others; to always give and never receive; to submit, yield and obey; to be long-suffering.

Their "virtue" is not of their own doing; society imposes it upon them J. Mill, The Subjection of Women , In contrast to Wollstonecraft and Mill, other eighteenth-and nineteenth-century thinkers denied that virtue is one.

Instead, they forwarded either a separate-but-equal theory of virtue according to which male and female virtues are simply different, or a separate-and unequal theory of virtue according to which female virtue is ultimately better than male virtue. Significantly, this diverse group of thinkers disagreed among themselves whether the characteristics typically associated with women nurturance, empathy, compassion, self sacrifice, kindness are 1 full-fledged moral virtues to be developed by men as well as by women; 2 positive psychological traits to be developed by women alone; 3 or negative psychological traits to be developed neither by women nor men.

Catherine Beecher belonged to this group of thinkers. Even though she believed that women's place is in the home, she did not believe that women's work is unimportant. On the contrary, she believed that women's work — the creation and maintenance of homes in which moral virtue thrives — is absolutely essential for society's well-being.

She reasoned that men would lose their raison d'etre for working if they lacked loving families and well-ordered homes. In an effort to make certain that society would indeed value women's work at least as much as men's work, Beecher and her sister Harriet created the discipline of "domestic science.

They also emphasized that women's most important work is to make society Christlike — that is, submissive, self-sacrificial, and benevolent. Sheltered safely in the private realm, where they are largely insulated from the siren calls of wealth, power, and prestige that pervade the public sphere of politics and economics, women are supposedly better situated to cultivate what Beecher and her sister termed the Christlike virtue of "self-denying benevolence.

Convinced that women were somehow responsible for the moral rectitude of men and children, it never occurred to Beecher to ask herself why Christ, a man, had selected women rather than men to specialize in the virtue of self-denying benevolence Beecher and Stowe, The American Woman's Home , Writing around the time Beecher wrote, Elizabeth Cady Stanton also found differences between women's and men's moralities.

Stanton's discussion of this already knotty topic is complicated by her apparent inability to decide whether female and male virtue and vice are more the product of nurture or nature.

But whether her final view is that men's and women's diverging virtues and vices are the result of social manipulation or biological imperative, Stanton consistently maintained that what she regarded as men's inferior set of morals have set the standard for behavior in the public world.

Women's set of morals, which Stanton regarded as superior to men's, have been either suppressed or ignored to the detriment of the public world. The solution to this unfortunate state of affairs, said Stanton, is a relatively simple one: permit, indeed require, women to enter the public world. Humankind cannot afford to leave women, as Beecher would, in the private world, struggling to exert their good influence there and only there.

Buhle and Buhle, eds. Yet, despite the fact that like Beecher, Stanton valued women's self-denying benevolence, she believed there was a higher virtue for women to develop: namely, self-development. In the course of interpreting a biblical passage in which Jesus praises a poor widow for her charitable actions, Stanton observed that an oppressed person cannot always afford to be so giving — not without destroying herself.

Agreeing that the poor widow's charitable actions were indeed laudatory, Stanton nonetheless cautioned women that women's self-sacrifice may effectively perpetuate women's second-class status.

Although the duty of self-sacrifice is morally required in the abstract, "ought" implies can in the concrete. Because few women in a patriarchal society have the political and economic means to practice benevolence without men taking advantage of them, they cannot always afford to be other-directed; sometimes they have to be self-centered. Although she probably did not think of herself as extending Stanton's line of reasoning, Charlotte Perkins Gilman portrayed on all-female society in which the women are able to serve each other and their daughters produced through parthenogenesis without anyone being "sacrificed" in the process.

Herland is a child-centered society of mothers in which the lines between the so-called private and public realms have been radically redrawn. The women of Herland are at ease in the halls of justice and centers of trade as well as in the nurseries and schools.

Competitive individualistic approaches to life, with their hostility toward connectedness, disappear in Herland, and its women are able to relate to each other without dominating each other. No wonder that the three American explorers — Terry, Jeff and Van — who stumble on Herland are shocked and confused. Before they arrive, they joke about the mythical land, assuming that there must be men it, since women could not possibly cooperate well enough, or be competent enough, to run a country.

When they see how successfully Herland is run, only one of them, Van, praises its all female population as a group of exemplary human beings whose behavior all persons, male as well as female, should seek to emulate. As he sees it, the women of Herland exhibit virtues that are neither feminine nor masculine, but simply fully human Gilman, Herland , Of course, Herland is a fictional, ideal-world in which imagined social, economic, and ideological conditions permit women to develop in morally good as well as psychological healthy ways.

Conditions are quite different for women in our nonfictional, real-world. In Women and Economics , Gilman wrote that to the degree women are dependent on men for support, women will be known for their blind faith, complete submission, and servile self-sacrifice, and men will be known for their stubborn opinions, dominating actions, and arrogant selfishness.

Only when women are men's economic equals will women and men both be able to develop truly human moral virtue, the perfect blend of pride and humility: namely, self-respect. Clearly, women-centered thinkers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries tended to think of morality as gendered.

Since women-centered thinkers in the twentieth century also tend to think of morality as gendered, it is important to determine whether a gendered conception of morality is indeed correct. Apparently, most of the thinkers who have forwarded a woman-centered approach to ethics have rejected the ontological assumptions that the more separate the self is from others, the more fully-developed that self is; and the epistemological assumption that the more universal, abstract, impartial, and rational knowledge is, the more closely it mirrors reality.

In place of these assumptions, they have instead embraced the ontological assumption that the more connected the self is to others, the better that self is, and the epistemological assumption that the more particular, concrete, partial, and emotional knowledge is, the more likely it represents the world as it truly is.

Thus, it is not surprising that "communal woman" rather than "autonomous man" appears in almost every woman-centered approach to ethics, but that she stresses a different message about "women's morality" depending on her particular guise: feminine, maternal, feminist, or lesbian.

Proponents of feminine approaches to ethics like Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings stress that traditional western moral theories, principles, practices, and policies are deficient to the degree that they lack, ignore, trivialize, or demean those traits of personality and virtues of character that are culturally associated with women.

Gilligan presents her work as a response to the Freudian notion that whereas men have a well-developed moral sense, women do not. Freud attributed women's supposed moral inferiority to girls' psychosexual development. Whereas boys break their attachment to their mothers for fear of being castrated by their fathers if they don't, girls remain emotionally tied to their mothers since castration threats have no power over them. As a result of this state of affairs, girls are supposedly much slower than boys to develop a sense of themselves as autonomous moral agents personally responsible for the consequences of their actions or inactions; as persons who must obey society's rules or face its punishments.

According to Gilligan, Freud is simply one of many western psychologists and philosophers who have seen women's moral inferiority where, in Gilligan's estimation, they should have instead seen simply women's moral difference from men. Gilligan singles out her former mentor, educational psychologist and moralist Lawrence Kohlberg for particular criticism. Kohlberg claimed that moral development is a six-stage process.

Stage One is the punishment and obedience orientation. Stage Two is "the instrumental relativist orientation. Stage Three is the "good boy-nice girl" orientation. Adolescents conform to prevailing norms to secure others' approval and love. Stage Four is the law and order orientation.

Adolescents begin to do their duty, show respect for authority, and maintain the given social order to secure others' admiration and respect for them as honorable, law abiding citizens. Stage Five is the social-contract legalistic orientation. Adults adopt an essentially utilitarian moral point of view according to which individuals are permitted to do as they please, provided they refrain from harming other people in the process.

Stage Six is the universal ethical principle orientation. Adults adopt an essentially Kantian moral perspective that seeks to transcend and judge all conventional moralities. Adults are no longer ruled by self-interest, the opinion of others, or the fear of legal punishment, but by self-legislated and self-imposed universal principles such as those of justice, reciprocity, and respect for the dignity of human persons Kohlberg in Mischel, ed.

Although Gilligan concedes that Kohlberg's six-stage scale appeals to many people schooled in traditional western ethics, she insists that the popularity of a theory of moral development is not an index of its truth.

She asks whether Kohlberg's six stages of moral developments are indeed: 1 universal, 2 invariant a always precedes b, b always precedes c, etc. In particular, she asks why, in the Kohlbergian work with which she is most familiar, women rarely climb past Stage Three, whereas men routinely ascend to Stages Four and even Five? Does this gender difference mean that women are less morally developed than men are?

Or does it instead mean that there is something wrong with Kohlberg's methodology — some bias that permits men to achieve higher moral development scores than women? Gilligan answers that Kohlberg's methodology is male-biased. Its "ears" are tuned to male, not female, moral voices. Thus, it fails to register the different voice Gilligan claims to have first heard in her study of twenty-nine women reflecting on their abortion decisions.

This moral voice, insists Gilligan, speaks a language of care stressing relationships and responsibilities, a language that is largely unintelligible to Kohlbergian researchers, who speak the dominant moral language of western ethical tradition — namely, a language of justice emphasizing rights and rules.

Although Gilligan emphasizes that the languages of care and justice are not gender correlated in any iron-clad way, with all women speaking only the language of care and all men speaking only the language of justice, the examples she uses tend to belie her important disclaimer. In her foundational abortion study, she shows only women moving in and out of the three moral frames of reference that constitute her relational ethics: Level One in which women overemphasize the interests of their selves; Level Two in which women overemphasize others' interests; and Level Three in which women weave their own interests together with those of others.

Thus, a woman at Level One would make her abortion decision in terms of what is best for herself, at Level Two in terms of what is best for others, and at Level Three in terms of what is best for herself and others considered as a relational unit Gilligan, In a Different Voice, As described so far, Gilligan's Levels seem no more an account of human moral development than Kohlberg's Stages, with Kohlberg focusing on men's moral experience, and Gilligan on women's.

Openly admitting this point, Gilligan has begun to study men's as well as women's moral experience. Her central aim is to expose the ways in which the U. Gilligan stresses that unlike today's women who speak the moral language of justice and rights nearly as fluently as the moral language of care and relationship, today's boys and men remain largely unable to articulate their moral concerns in anything other than the moral language of justice and rights.

One index of the importance of Gilligan's work is not only the number of thinkers who have applied her insights to their areas of expertise but also the number of thinkers who have taken her work seriously enough to critique it. To date Gilligan's critics have focused either on the relationship between justice and care, considered as two, gender-neutral perspectives on morality, or on the fact, that women are culturally associated with care and men are culturally associated with justice.

Critics who adopt the first strategy are primarily non-feminist critics. Some of them argue that even if care is a moral virtue and not simply a pleasing psychological trait that some people happen to have, it is a less essential moral virtue than justice.

Among the statements such non feminist critics make is that it is better to act out of a general moral principle like "aid the needy" than a particular caring feeling like human heartedness because principles are more reliable and less ephemeral than feelings; and 2 that, when justice and care conflict, considerations of impartiality must trump considerations of partiality: my children's fundamental rights and basic needs are neither more nor less important than anyone else's children's.

Other non-feminist critics fault Gilligan not for claiming that care is a genuine moral virtue equal in value to justice, but for suggesting that this is ethical "news. From benevolence flow the principle of utility, the principle of not harming anyone, and the principle of not interfering with another's liberty. From justice flows the principles of equality of respect and consideration and equality before the law.

But in defense of Gilligan, what some traditional western philosophers mean by "benevolence" may not be what Gilligan means by "care. Blum invites us to consider the specific principle "Protect one's children from harm," a principle that flows from the general principle of benevolence. As Blum sees it, all sorts of parents subscribe to this specific principle, but only those parents who are caring — that is, sensitive to and aware of their children's unique interests and needs — will not only know when and how to meet the terms of the principle, but actually be motivated to do so.

Although most traditional western philosophers agree with Blum that caring parents are more likely to actually act benevolently than uncaring parents are, they do not agree with him that only caring parents are capable of so acting. Instead they insist that a formal sense of duty, whether or not it is accompanied by caring feelings, is sufficient to generate moral action.

Like many ethicists who are developing feminine approaches to ethics, however, Blum believes that the person who would be moral must do more than merely obey the letter of the law. He or she must also be infused with the proper spirit — the appropriate emotions, sentiments, feelings — to perform an entirely morally worthy action Blum, Friendship, Altruism, and Morality, In addition to the non-feminist criticisms that have been raised against Gilligan, several feminist criticisms have been directed against her work.

Of these criticisms, the most powerful worries that even if women are better carers than men, it may still be epistemically, ethically, and politically imprudent to associate women with the value of care. To link women with caring is to promote the view that because women can care, they should care no matter the cost to themselves.

In Femininity and Domination , feminist critic Sandra Lee Bartky argues that women's experience of feeding men's egos and tending men's wounds ultimately disempowers women. She notes that the kind of emotional work practiced by women in some service-oriented occupations often causes these women to lose touch with their own emotional base. For example, to pay a person to be "relentlessly cheerful" — to smile at even the most verbally-abusive and unreasonably demanding customer — means paying a person to feign a certain set of emotions.

Yet, a person can pretend to be happy only so many times before that person forgets how it feels to be genuinely or authentically happy. Bartky concedes that women insist that, far from draining them, the emotional work they do energizes them. Indeed many wives and mothers claim the experience of caring for their husbands and children is meaning-giving and self-validating.

The better carers they become, they more they view themselves as the family's or marriage's indispensable backbone. Yet subjective feelings of empowerment are not the same as the objective reality of actually having power, says Bartky. She explains how women's androcentric emotional work can work against women distorting women's moral integrity. Despite the fact that her husband's monstrous activities horrified her, she continued to "feed" and "tend" him dutifully, even lovingly.

In doing so, however, she played footloose and fancy free with her own soul, for a woman cannot remain silent about evil and still expect to keep her goodness entirely intact. Since horror perpetrated by a loved one is still horror, women need to analyze "the pitfalls and temptations of caregiving itself" before they embrace as ethics of care wholeheartedly Bartky, Femininity and Domination, Mullet reinforces Bartky's fears about a feminine ethics of care.

She distinguishes between "distortion of caring" on the one hand and "undistorted caring" one the other. Thus, genuine, or fully authentic caring cannot occur, for example, under conditions characterized by male domination and female subordination. As long as men demand and expect more caring from women than women demand and expect from men, both sexes will remain morally impoverished.

Neither men nor women will be able to authentically care. Bartky's and Mullet's interpretation of care are far too pessimistic in the opinion of the thinkers — and there are more than Gilligan — who favor "feminine" approaches to ethics.

They stress that even if it is dangerous for women to care in a patriarchal society, care remains part of the solution as well as part of the problem. Care's conflicted status calls for the development of a more robust ethics of care, not for the abandonment of care. In response to the summons for a sound and complete ethics of care, Nel Noddings has developed a feminine, relational ethics.

For Noddings, ethics is about particular relationships between two parties, the "one-caring" and the "cared-for. I can't be said to care about the children in Somalia as much as I care for my own two sons. Real care requires actual encounters with specific individuals; it cannot be accomplished through good intentions alone.

Noddings claims that as children we act from a natural caring that moves us to help others simply because we want to. Later, when society distorts our wants and makes it harder for us to care, the deliberateness of ethical caring supplements the spontaneity of natural caring. Nevertheless, says Noddings, natural caring remains somehow better than ethical caring — and certainly the condition of its possibility.

Although Noddings insists that men as well as women can and should be carers, most of her examples of caring involve women, many of whom seem to care too much — that is, to the point of imperiling their own identity, integrity, and even survival. Although Noddings protests that, in her estimation, it is moral for the one-caring to care for herself, she conveys the impression that the one caring should care for herself only insomuch as her self-caring enables her to care for others better.

Thus, the one-caring's self-caring is actually a disguised form of other-directed care. In Starting at Home: Caring and Social Policy , Noddings extends the principles of her relationally-based ethic of care to the larger social domain and into the arena of public policy.

In response to those who have criticized feminine ethics of care as a "fine domestic theory" that is largely irrelevant when addressing the moral complexities of wider social issues and policies, Noddings insists that the possibility to develop a robust sense of social justice is conditioned on the lessons learned in the domestic arena.

On her view, if we are to develop truly effective social policies about matters such as homelessness, mental illness, and education, we have much to learn by "starting at home" where the origins of care have their roots. Fiona Robinson reinforces Noddings' point that the ethics of care must prevail in all regions of life: public and private. According to Robinson, in the region of international relations, no real progress can be made to address a problem like poverty without a critical ethic of care in the forefront of moral deliberation.

In these pivotal works, she advanced the case that embodiment and social situatedness are not only relevant to human existence, but are the stuff of human existence, so crucial that philosophy ought not ignore them Andrew , In The Second Sex , she argued that some men in philosophy managed the bad-faith project of both ignoring their own sex-situatedness and yet describing women as the Other and men as the Self.

Because men in philosophy take themselves to be paradigmatically human and take it upon themselves to characterize the nature of womankind as different from men, Beauvoir said that men socially construct woman as the Other. Instead, by the middle of the twentieth century, some influential philosophers in Europe and the Americas had moved toward approaches that often led to describing both gender and ethics as irrelevant to philosophical discourse Garry In the fifty years that feminist ethics has been a subject of philosophical scholarship in initially Western and increasingly international discourse, theorists have considered metaethical, theoretical, and practical questions.

One main area of inquiry addresses whether and why there may be meaningful differences in feminine and masculine priorities of care and justice in normative theory. Concern about feminist methods of articulating ethical theories arise during this time and continue.

These debates can be found in the scholarship of intersectionality, Black feminist thought and women of color feminism, transnational feminism, queer theory, disability studies, and twenty-first century criticisms of feminist ethics. They are of special concern whenever feminist ethicists seem to uphold a gender binary and simplistic conceptualizations of woman as a category. Questions about the shortcomings of traditional ethical theories, about which virtues constitute morally good character in contexts of oppression, and about which kinds of ethical theories will ameliorate gendered oppressions and evils generate critical scholarship in every decade.

Gender binarism, which is the view that there are only two genders—male and female—and that everyone is only one of them Dea a, , is assumed by most feminist ethicists in the s and s Jaggar ; Daly Some of these feminists criticize male supremacy without thereby preferring female supremacy Frye ; Card ; Hoagland Other feminist ethicists offer radically different views. Some of them argue that separatism allows a setting in which to create alternative ethics, rather than merely responding to the male-dominated ethical theories traditionally discussed in the academy.

In deep disagreement, philosophers such as Alison Jaggar argue against separatism as being in any way productive of a different and morally better world. Related arguments for androgynous approaches to ethics are influential in arguments supporting androgyny, gender bending, and gender-blending that are prevalent in the s Butler ; Butler , and gender-eliminativist and humanist approaches to feminist ethics and social philosophy that are prevalent in the twenty-first century LaBrada ; Mikkola ; Ayala and Vasilyeva ; Haslanger One criticism of gender binarism is that its assumption marginalizes nonconforming individuals.

The work of psychologist Carol Gilligan therefore has great influence on philosophers interested in just such evidence for substantial sex differences in moral reasoning, despite the fact that Gilligan herself does not describe these differences as polar. Further, the development of masculinity typically involves valuing autonomy, rights, disconnection from others, and independence, while seeing other persons and intimate relationships as dangers or obstacles to pursuing those values.

In normative theory and applied ethics, care-work and caring in workplace relationships have come to receive more attention in twenty-first century philosophy than previously, as appreciation for the ethical demands of relational support-provision and client-centered or helping professions come to be influenced by variations on the ethic of care Kittay ; Feder and Kittay ; Tronto ; Lanoix ; Reiheld Some feminist ethicists have argued that the ethic of care valorizes the burdened history of femininity associated with caring Card If that burdened feminine history includes attention to particular relationships at the expense of attention to wider social institutions and systematic political injustice, then the ethic of care runs the risk of lacking a feminist vision for changing systematic and institutional forms of oppression Hoagland ; Bell Further worries about the ethic of care include whether unidirectional caring enables the exploitation of caregivers Houston ; Card ; Davion , and whether such caring excludes moral responsibilities to strangers and individuals we may affect without meeting interpersonally Card , thereby risking an insular ethic that ignores political and material realities Hoagland The above criticisms tend to proceed from a view that it is problematic that an ethic of care is predicated on seeing femininity as valuable.

They suggest that critical feminist perspectives require us to doubt the value of femininity. However, it remains controversial whether femininity is necessarily defined in relationship to masculinity and is thereby an inauthentic or insufficiently critical perspective for feminist ethics, or whether femininity is a distinctive contribution of moral and valuing agents to a feminist project that rejects or corrects some of the errors and excesses of legacies of masculinity Irigaray ; Harding ; Tong ; Bartky One way that some philosophers offer to resolve the possible tension between conceptions of femininity and feminism is to bring intersectional approaches to the question as to whose femininity is being discussed.

Concerns that femininity is antithetical to a critical feminist perspective seem to presuppose a conception of femininity as passive, gentle, obedient, emotional, and dependent, in contrast with a conception of masculinity as its opposite. The insights of philosophers of Black Feminism, intersectionality, queer theory, critical race theory, disability studies, and transfeminism, among others, contribute to a view that there is no universal definition of femininity or of the category of woman that neatly applies to all women.

Some of these philosophers suggest that the distinctive moral and valuing experiences of women and individuals of all genders may be unjustly ignored or denied by a conception of women or femininity that turns out to be white, ableist, and cisgender Crenshaw ; Collins ; Wendell ; hooks ; Tremain ; Serano ; McKinnon Although intersectional insights can be found in the works of writers even from the distant past, the predominance of intersectionality in feminist ethics today is largely owed to Black feminists and critical race theorists, who were the first to argue for the significance of intersectionality Crenshaw ; Collins ; Gines ; Bailey For example, when Black men, but not any women, were permitted to work on a General Motors factory floor, and white women, but not any Black persons, were permitted to work in the General Motors secretarial pool, then Black women were discriminated against as Black women.

That is, they were not permitted to have any job at General Motors due to living at an intersection of categories of identity that are treated separately in the law Crenshaw Intersectionality is pursued in the interests of expanding understandings of differences and accounting for the experiences of people previously spoken for, if addressed at all, rather than consulted. Not all philosophers who embrace appreciation of the insights of intersectionality agree on whether it yields a distinct methodology, or a starting point for better inquiry, or a better conception of experiences of oppression Khader ; Garry Intersectionality is not without its critics in feminist ethics.

Other feminist ethicists raise tensions in intersectional theory that are not intended to undermine the approach but to ask for elaboration of its details, including its very definition Nash The appeal for these clarifications, however, may reflect traditions that intersectionality is dedicated to disrupting, since it is made in the context of the pursuit of justification, habits of opposition, and a narrow sense of definitional work that is typical in philosophy, a field that has a reputation for lacking appreciation for diverse practitioners Dotson If there is a commonality between all of the above feminist ethicists, it is their interest in provoking reconsideration of ethical theories that failed either to notice or to care when the perspective of the philosopher so criticized was taken for either a generic truth about moral theory or a gender-specific and false description of human nature.

In other words, philosophers have at times presumed that they speak for many without sufficient attention to their own presumptions. The provocation to alertness is evident in feminist critiques of traditional ethical theories such as deontology, consequentialism, social contract theory, and virtue ethics. Some feminist ethicists sympathetically extend canonical work to concerns that male theorists did not address, while other feminist ethicists resoundingly reject traditional ethical theories because the theories rely on a conception of moral agency or moral value with which they disagree.

While building on existing frameworks of liberalism, rights theory, and deontology, feminist ethicists have argued for granting rights where they have been previously neglected Brennan Feminist criticism of duty-centered frameworks, or, deontology, include those articulated by authors of the ethic of care, who argue against an ethic of duty, especially Kantian ethics, on several grounds.

First, they claim that it proceeds from absolutist and universal principles which are unduly prioritized over consideration of the material contexts informing embodied experiences, particularities, and relationships.

Second, they claim that it inaccurately separates capacities for rationality from capacities for emotion, and that it wrongly describes the latter as morally uninformative or worthless most likely because of their traditional association with women or femininity Noddings ; Held ; Slote Some feminist ethicists embrace forms of obligation yet reject Kantian deontology when it denies the possibility of moral dilemmas Tessman Feminists who argue that duties are socially constructed, rather than a priori, ground the nature of obligations in the normative practices of the nonideal world Walker ; Walker Transnational feminists, scholars of intersectionality, and postcolonial feminists argue that feminist advocates of global human rights routinely impose their own cultural expectations and regional practices upon the women who are purportedly the objects of their concern Mohanty ; Narayan ; Narayan ; Silvey ; Narayan ; Khader a; Khader b.

Since John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill argued both for utilitarianism and against the subjection of women, one could say that there have been feminists as long as there have been utilitarians. Some consequentialist feminists provide reasons for thinking that utilitarianism can accommodate feminist aims because it is responsive to empirical information, can accommodate the value of relationships in good lives, and is appreciative of distinctive vulnerabilities Driver Critics of utilitarianism include those who specifically resist the expectation of utilitarian impartiality, insofar as impartiality in decision-making ignores emotional connections or personal relationships with particular beings.

Feminists have advanced criticisms of impartiality from the points of view of care ethics Noddings ; Held ; Ruddick , ecofeminist or environmental ethics Adams ; Donovan ; George ; Warren , and analytical social ethics Baier ; Friedman Impartiality as a desirable quality of moral agents may overly idealize moral agency Tessman or tacitly presume a biased perspective in favor of adult, racially privileged, masculine agents in a formal or public sphere whose decisions are unencumbered by relationships of unequal power Kittay Some feminists criticize consequentialism for failing to capture the qualitatively problematic nature of oppressions that are not reducible to harms Frye ; Card ; Young Card also objects on Rawlsian grounds that the wrongness of slavery was not the balance of benefits and harms, contra consequentialism, but the fact that trade-offs could never justify slavery , Contractarian ethics permit moral agents to critically assess the value of any relationship, especially family relationships that may be oppressive on gendered dimensions Okin ; Hampton ; Sample ; Radzik Contractarianism arguably corrects gross injustices and inequities traceable to gendered oppressions and the most serious evils that are socially constructed Anderson ; Hartley and Watson Feminist contractarianism may thereby generate new understandings of social contracts grounded in appreciation of material conditions, commitments, and consent Stark ; Welch Feminist critics of contractarianism also raise concerns about adaptive preferences.

Feminists who are concerned that not all moral agents can meaningfully consent to contracts point to examples of women who are denied access to the public sphere, the market, education, and information Held ; Pateman Others point out that traditionally, social contract theory has not attended to the inclusion of the needs of children, disabled community members, or their caregivers Held ; Kittay ; Edenberg and Friedman Some feminist ethicists contend that virtue ethics, which focuses on living a good life or flourishing, offers the best approach to ensuring that ethical theory correctly represents the conditions permitting vulnerable bodies to flourish in oppressive contexts.

Philosophers who argue for feminist ethical virtues raise concerns that sexist oppression presents challenges to the exercise of virtues on the part of women and gender non-conforming people. Advocates of feminist virtue ethics and critical character ethics consider the relationships of gender to accounts of character, virtues, vices, and good lives Baier ; Card ; Cuomo ; Calhoun ; Dillon a; Snow ; Tessman ; Green and Mews ; Berges ; Broad ; Harvey Some virtue ethics also focus on what opportunities for virtue are available to agents in particular social contexts, which is useful in feminist ethics when it comes to delineating our responsibilities as relational beings and as characters who may exhibit vices resulting from oppression Bartky ; Potter ; Bell ; Tessman a; Slote ; Boryczka Indeed, the ethic of care bears so many important similarities to virtue ethics that some authors have argued that a feminist ethic of care just is a form or a subset of virtue ethics Groenhout ; Slote ; McLaren ; Halwani Others believe that at a minimum, care and virtue ethics should inform each other and are compatible with each other Benner ; Sander-Staudt Here, too, however, feminist ethicists disagree.

Some contend that lumping together care and virtue might render the complexity of moral experiences and available moral responses less understandable rather than more articulate Groenhout Others suggest that this consolidation might overlook important theoretical distinctions, including the capacity for virtue ethics to be gender-neutral while the ethic of care maintains a commitment to embodied, particular, and gendered experiences Sander-Staudt Virtue ethics provides wider opportunities for feminist ethics to attend to virtues such as integrity and courage in oppressive contexts that the ethic of care tends not to prioritize Davion ; Sander-Staudt Tessman argues that when agents live under conditions of systemic injustice, their opportunities to flourish are blocked and their pursuits may even be hopeless.

For example, feminists have argued for distinctive virtues in contexts such as whistleblowing and organizational resistance DesAutels , healthcare Tong , and ecological activism Cuomo Some care ethicists, most notably Nel Noddings , argue that virtue ethics can be overly self-regarding rather than attentive to the point of view of another, and that it locates moral motivation in rational, abstract, and idealized conceptions of the good life rather than in the natural well-spring of moral motivation that is generated by encounters with particular persons.

As is evident from the foregoing, feminist ethics is not monolithic. Feminists have sometimes clashed over being essentialist or anti-essentialist. Some feminist work is authored by members of privileged groups, while other feminist work is written by and attends to concerns of those in marginalized groups. Some feminists have located solidarity in commonality, while others advocate coalition in the presence of intersectionality. The different approaches of feminists to ethics raise questions as to whether feminist ethics can be either universalist or absolutist.

On these dominant psychological accounts of human development, male development is taken as standard, and female development is often judged as inferior in various ways. A tricky dilemma to be sure as there are competing duties here namely, a positive duty to help those in need as well as a negative duty to avoid stealing.

However, the reasoning that leads to this conclusion is based on unemotional weighing of costs and benefits, rather than a consideration of the relationships involved and asking what love might demand. Writing at the same time as Gilligan, Noddings also defended care as a particular form of moral relationship. She sees children as naturally caring with the exception of sociopaths and psychopaths and claims this is a prerequisite for ethical caring.

While Noddings does not rule men out from being caring, it is usually women who feature in her examples of caregivers. Noddings, like Gilligan, prioritises relationships that are between specific individuals in a particular context as the basis for ethical behaviour.

This stands in contrast to the idea that morality involves following a universal, abstract moral rule. Ethics of care has been influential in areas such as education, counselling, nursing and medicine. Yet there have also been feminist criticisms. Some worry that linking women to the trait of caring maintains a sexist stereotype and encourages women to continue to nurture others, to their own detriment, and even while society fails to value carers as they ought.

While Noddings claims moral agents also need to care for themselves, this is so they are better able to continue caring for others.