Feminist Ethics Stanford Encyclopedia
28 important questions on Feminist Ethics Stanford Encyclopedia
What is the aim of feminist ethics?
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?
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?
What are the influences and issues in the nineteenth century on the upcoming attention to feminist ethics?
- 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?
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)?
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?
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?
In short; what are Beauvoir's positions?
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?
What is the biggest mistake made in practice of philosophy?
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?
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?
What is one of the strongnessess of Contractarianism?
How does contract theory behave in a changing world with changing and adaptive preferences?
What are other weaknesses of Contractarianism?
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, 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?
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?
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?
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?
What is meant by a burdened virtue according Tessman (2005)?
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?
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?
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 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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