Feminist Ethics Essay Research Paper 113099

Feminist Ethics Essay, Research Paper

11-30-99 Feminist Ethics is not a special ethic in the manor that business,

medical, or environmental ethics are. Feminist ethics have not attempted to

determine special rules for special circumstances, rather they present the

opportunity to examine a historically neglected perspective when it comes to

traditional ethical thought. Feminist Ethics has been an attempt to revise,

reformulate, or rethink those aspects of traditional western ethics that have

historically depreciated or devalued a women’s moral experience, and a women.s

perspective on ethical thought. Among others, feminist philosopher Alison

Jaggar has faulted traditional western ethics for failing women in five related

ways. First, she argues that it shows little concern for women’s as opposed to

men’s interests and rights. Second, it dismisses as morally uninteresting the

problems that arise in the so-called private world, the realm in which women

cook, clean, and care for the young, the old, and the sick. Third, it suggests

that, on the average, women are not as morally developed as men. Fourth, it

overvalues culturally masculine traits like independence, autonomy, separation,

mind, reason, culture, transcendence, war, and death, and undervalues

culturally feminine traits like interdependence, community, connection, body,

emotion, nature, immanence, peace, and life. Fifth, and finally, it favours

culturally masculine ways of moral reasoning that emphases rules, universality,

and impartiality over culturally feminine ways of moral reasoning that emphasise

relationships, particularity, and partiality.[1]

In essence Jagger is pointing out what has been wrong with traditional ethical

thought. While it is convenient to call this feminist ethics, the term is

problematic in that it implies that there are masculine ethic.s. These are

arguably those ethical thoughts which are biased and centred on the idea of a

patriarchal world, or wrong as that old joke says about anything that comes out

of a man.s mouth. However there is a plethora of thought that is not biased and

has been spoken by men, so what is its label. For the same reason I would say

that there is a wide range of thought that women produce and can produce that

should not be labelled .feminine. and be sidelined as some feminist thought is

for that reason. For the purpose of this paper I am going to accept the term

.Feminist ethic.s. and use it, since it is an answer to what has been wrong

with the study of ethics in general, namely the lack of a feminist point of

view, and if that is to be termed feminist ethics, so be it. It is possible to

argue that the overall aim of most all feminist approaches to ethics,

irrespective of their specific labels, is to create a gender-equal ethics, a

moral theory that generates non-sexist moral principles, policies, and

practices, and it is from this position that I am going to address the issue. Feminist

approaches to ethics, as well as debates about the allegedly gendered nature of

morality, are not contemporary developments. A variety of eighteenth and

nineteenth-century thinkers. discussed

what is probably best termed "women’s morality." Each of these

thinkers pondered questions such as: Are women’s psychological feminine traits

all natural. Or is it only women’s positive

psychological feminine traits that are natural, their negative ones being somehow socially-constructed. Is there a gender

neutral standard available to separate women’s good or positive traits from

women’s bad or negative traits. As it seems to be an underlying argument that

some men.s patriarchal traits are negative. Can it not be argued that traits

which are moral virtues as well as psychological traits are connected with

one’s affective as well as cognitive dimensions, indeed with one’s physiology

as Aristotle and Aquinas suggested, shouldn’t we expect men and women to manifest

different moral virtues as well as different psychological traits. Should all

individuals be urged to cultivate precisely the same set of psychological

traits and moral virtues, or should there be room for trait and virtue

specialisation, provided that this specialisation is not split specifically

down gender lines. Or even if this specialisation is split down gender lines.

Is that a negative, or positive idea. When it comes to

the questions about "women’s morality" that have been posed above,

the eighteenth-century thinker Mary Wollstonecraft answered that women’s and

men’s moralities are fundamentally the same. Although she did not use the term

"socially-constructed gender roles," Wollstonecraft refuted the

concept that women are by nature more pleasure seeking than men.

She reasoned that if men were confined to the same societal rules and roles

women find themselves locked into, as is the case with

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