Ethics, Maternal

Virginia Held, Sara Ruddick, and Caroline Whit-beck are feminist philosophers advocating the concept of maternal ethics, or the idea that the majority of human relationships are held between unequal persons. Rather than building ethics on the idea that there is no substantial difference between one persona and another, these three philosophers claim that ethics needs to fit life, and that the relation between a mother and a child forms the essential basis for an ethics. Several criticisms of this approach to morality exist, including the idea that the theory idealizes motherhood and that not all mothers behave in an ethical manner toward their children (i.e., cases of neglect or abuse).