Feminist Ethics

Feminist ethics encompasses a number of philosophical approaches that aim to illuminate the moral worlds of a wide variety of women. According to feminist philosopher Alison Jaggar, proponents of feminist ethics typically fault traditional ethics for failing to take women's moral perspectives and experiences as seriously as men's. Specifically, they claim that traditional ethics has focused much more on men's interests and rights than on women's; has ignored most of women's everyday moral work, particularly their caregiving work; has suggested that men are on average more morally developed than women; has privileged phenomena considered “masculine” over phenomena considered “feminine” (so that independence is voiced over interdependence, separation over connection, mind over body, culture over nature, war over peace, and death over life); and, finally, has esteemed styles of moral reasoning associated with men rather than women, thereby overestimating reason's role in ethics and underestimating emotion's role (Jaggar 1991).

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, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, Catherine Beecher, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Anna Julia Cooper, all discussed what is probably best termed woman's morality. Each of these thinkers pondered questions such as: Are women's feminine traits the product of nature or culture? Are all of women's feminine traits desirable, or are some of them undesirable? Is there a gender-neutral standard available to separate “good” feminine and masculine traits from “bad” ones? If moral virtues as well as psychological traits are connected with one's emotional repertoire, indeed, with one's physiology as Aristotle and Aquinas suggested, should not we expect men and women to excel at different moral virtues as well as to manifest 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 specialization, provided that this specialization does not split along gender lines?

With respect to the kind of questions about women's morality posed above, Wollstonecraft and Mill disavowed the separate virtue theory according to which morality differs according to gender. They sought to develop a single humanist ethics for women as well as men. Unlike Wollstonecraft and Mill, Beecher gladly maintained a separate virtue theory for men and women with the qualification that women's virtues are no less important to society than are men's. In fact, she suggested that women's other-directed virtues are superior to men's self-oriented virtues. Building on Beecher's ideas, Gilman envisioned an all-female utopia, called “Herland,” in which it is “safe” for women to be maternal because they have full economic, political, and social power. In a similar vein, Stanton speculated that until women have the same political and economic power as men have, it is problematic for women to specialize in “Christlike” benevolence. Specifically, in reassessing Mark 12:43–44, in which Jesus praises a widow for giving her last few coins to the poor, Stanton commented [Page 276]that sometimes an oppressed group cannot afford to be entirely good—not without harming itself. Conceding that the widow's small gift was indeed a precious one, Stanton nonetheless cautioned women to realize that in a patriarchal society, few women have the political and economic means to practice benevolence without being taken advantage of by men.

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