Feminist Ethics Stanford Encyclopedia

28 important questions on Feminist Ethics Stanford Encyclopedia

What is the aim of feminist ethics?

Feminist ethicists aim to understand, criticize and correct:
1. The binary view of gender
2. The privilege historically available to men
3. The ways that views about gender maintain oppressive social orders or practices that harm others, especially girls and women who historically have been subordinate, along gendered dimensions including sexuality and gender-identity.

What is the shared characteristic feature of feminist ethics?

A widely shared characteristic of their works is at least some overt attention to power, privilege, or limited access to social goods. In a broad sense, then, feminist ethics is fundamentally political.
This is not necessarily a feature of feminist ethics that distinguishes it from mainstream ethics, because all ethics is political.

Give some items about the historical background about feminist ethics;

  • Prior to 1970, there was no recognized body of feminist philosophy;
  • Some philosophers and writers in almost every century, discussed already moral wrongs resulting from either oppression on the basis of sex, or meta-ethical errors on the part of public intellectuals in believing ideal forms of moral reasoning to be imparticular within the capacities of men.
  • In the early twentieth century more theorists argued influentially for ending unjust discrimination on the basis of sex.
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What are the developments in the seventeenth and eighteenth century?

  • More emphasis on developing character traits of women, because they were as rational as men;
  • Their unequal access to learning was immoral and unjustifiable.
  • Affording education that would allow them to develop their moral character.
  • Mary Wollstonecraft criticizes in her Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) the philosophical assumptions of influential men that women's virtues are different (unequal?) from men's and appropriate to perceived feminine duties.
  • The revolution of the Enlightenment age motivated some men as well as women to reconsider inequities in education at a time when notion of universal human rights were gaining prominence.

What is the important principle for Wollstonecraft in her critique as mentioned above?

She denies the existence of sexual virtues; she allows that women do have different duties to fulfill, but they are human duties, and the principles that should regulate the discharge of them must be the same.

What are the influences and issues in the nineteenth century on the upcoming attention to feminist ethics?

The first time, the term feminism is occurred in this century;
  • Activist women and public intellectuals advanced feminist arguments for women's moral leadership and grater freedoms.
  • Resistance of enslaved women
  • Political activism by women
  • Anti-slavery organizations of women
  • Attention to inequity in women's acces to income, property, sequels freedom, full citizenship and enfranchisement.
  • The rise of Marxist and Socialist theories contributed to women's participation in arguments for the reductions of militarism, unfettered capitalism, domestic violence and abuse of drugs and alcohol.

Which movements are distinctive in their view upon equality?

John Stuart Mill lauded feminine virtues and women' importance in a way that it reinforces the view of women as superior because of innate qualities of gentleness, love spirituality and sentimentality.
In contrast, other socialist movements expressed radical views of the equality of men and women not by attributing distinctive or greater moral virtues to women, but by challenging systems of privilege due to sex, race, and class.

What is the focus of de Beauvoir in her works Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) and The Second Sex (1949)?

In these pivotal works of existentialist morality he emphasizes that 1. We are not all simply subjects and individual choosers but also objects shaped by the forces of oppression.
2. Beauvoir focused on the embodied experiences and social situation of women.
3. 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.

What is the characteristic point of the Second sex?

De Beauvoir 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 take themselves to be paradigmatically human and take it upon themselves to characterize the nature of womankind as different from men, so women are socially constructed by men as the Other.

What is the deeply ambiguously about the women's position in the field of research?

If you want to philosophize about women, you ought to take into account the obstacles to women's opportunities for subjecthood and choice that are created by those who constructed an oppressive situation for women to navigate. In order to take in account her total situation.

In short; what are Beauvoir's positions?

1. Woman has been defined by men and in men's terms
2. Ethical theory must attend t women's social situations and their capacity to be moral decision-makers
3. Women's oppression impedes their knowing themselves and changing their situation - reflect the concerns of many forerunners of feminist ethics.

What is the mean theme in the last fifty year about feminist ethics?

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.

What is the biggest mistake made in practice of philosophy?

Philosophers have at times presumed that they speak for many without sufficient attention to their own presumptions. As Elena Flores Ruìz says: Professional philosophy sleepwalks; its about policing checkpoints without the burden of consciousness of its actions and practices.

What does Mill bring up in his book "The Subjection of Women (1869)?


  • Mill argues that the desirable outcome of human moral progress generally is hindered by women's legal and social subordination.
  • Not only women's but also each mans' personal moral character is directly harmed by the injustice of unequal social arrangements.
  • Mill argues that men and women are fundamentally equal in their capacities for higher and lower pleasures and, arguably, in their responsibilities and interests.

What is the critique of some feminists about consequentialism?

Consequentialism fails to capture the qualitatively problematic nature of oppressions that are not reducible to harms.
For example: Card argues that even if certain behavior does not produce more harm than good, tis symbolism could violate one's dignity.

What the specific feature of Jean Hampton upon Hobbes view that a woman is under no obligation making herself prey to others?

Hampton combines insights of both Kant and Hobbes in her version of feminist contractarianism; 'building in the Kantian assumption that all persons have intrinsic value and thus must have their interests respected'.

What is one of the strongnessess of Contractarianism?

Contractarianism argumentably corrects gross injustices and inequities traceable to gendered oppressions and the most serious evils that are socially constructed (Anderson 1999; Hartley and Watson 2010).

How does contract theory behave in a changing world with changing and adaptive preferences?

There is a kind of danger in it, because dominant perspectives and oppressive social arrangements can make persons come to peer things that they would not otherwise prefer, such that the resultant preferences, when satisfied, are not for the agent's own good, and may even contribute to her group's oppression.

What are other weaknesses of Contractarianism?

Not all moral agents can meaningfully consent to contracts point to samples of women who are denied access to the public sphere, the market, education an d information.
Other point out that traditionally, social contract theory has not attended to the inclusion of the needs of children, disabled community members, or their caregivers.
Needs born from:
social location, gender, embodiment, dependency are also morally relevant and therefore, the view of nowhere can not be used as a starting point of objectivity for all agencies.

Whats is the common between virtue ethics, regarding the ethic of care?

Virtue ethics is often described as offering a theory that is not beholden to abstract and universal principles, but instead acknowledges that moral reasoning might be an extraordinarily complex phenomenon ... A view on which what the ethical life requires of us cannot be codified or reduced to a single principle or set of principles.
Virtue ethics, like care-ethics rejects a simplistic dichotomy between reason and emotion, and does not begin from the assumption that all human beings are essentially equal.

What are the tendencies and the opportunities of virtue ethics?

It tends to appreciate the importance of emotions and interpersonal relationships to a person's moral development.

Some also focus on what opportunities for for virtue are available to agents in particular social contexts, when oppressing results in exhibiting vices.

Combining care-ethics and virtue ethics can result in different aspects. What are these sides of combination?

1. Feminist ethic of care is just a form or subset of virtue ethics; They overlap and integrate.
2. Care and virtue ethics should inform each other and should be compatible with each other.
3. Lumping together might render the complexity of moral experiences and available moral responses less understandable, rather than more articulate.
4. This consolidation might overlook important theoretical distinctions, including the capacity for virtue ethics to be gender-neutral.

What is the distinction between virtue ethics and care ethics?

Ethic of care maintains a commitment to embodied, particular, and gendered experiences.
Virtue ethics is more active in encourage virtues as courage, dignity and integrity in suppressing contexts, which ethic of care tends not to prioritize.

What is the critique of care-ethicist Nel Noddings about virtue ethics?

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.

What is meant by a burdened virtue according Tessman (2005)?

It is a virtue that comes out and flourishes trough suppressing conditions of systemic injustice, even if the person is harmed hereby. This person  endures and resist oppression, permitting a form of nobility that falls short of eudaimonia. She suggests that the burdened virtues include all those traits that make a contribution to human flourishing - if they succeed in doing so at all - only because they enable survival of or resistance to oppression. Verbs 30:33
Resistance for example is a burdened virtue as whistleblowing and ecological of political activism.

What is a main difference in deontology and virtue-ethics, regarding to responsibility for the other and the social environment?

Virtue ethics include intrusive requirements to self-evaluate one's every feeling or practice to an extent that deontology would not require.
There is a weakness in virtue ethics, when it comes to criticism and also resistance to the society and other persons - because the inner self is constituted by the very social relationships and cultural traditions, that would be the target of the particular person's resistance.

Why isn't feminist ethics monolithic?

Feminists have sometimes clashed over being essentialist or anti-essentialist;
Authors can be members of privileged groups
Authors can attend to concerns of those in marginalized groups
Some have located solidarity in commonality
Others advocate coalition in the presence of intersectionality
Different approaches raise questions whether it can be either universalist or absolutist
Some men have falsely universalized from their own experience to describe the experiences of all humans
Some feminists have presumed false universal categories and elide differences or presume to speak for all women

What does feminist ethics prioritize in particular?

The moral contexts in which differently situated and differently gendered agents operate;
The testimony and perspectives of the situated agent;
The power relationships and political relationships manifest in moral encounters
The vulnerabilities of embodied actors that yield a plurality of approaches to ethical situations
The degrees of agency or capacity that are shaped by experiences with oppression and misogyny.

Such priorities tend not to result in relativism, though they certainly depart from rigid forms of absolutism.
Feminist ethics is often expressed in morally plural ways;
Pragmatism, transnationalism, non ideal theory and disability theory.

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