Feminist Ethics

Description and Development of Feminist Ethics

All ethical theories examine the nature, consequences and motives of action and establish principles for adjudicating between competing ethical claims. Feminist ethical theories build on and extend traditional ethical theories by challenging assumptions and offering alternative perspectives.

There are diverse and multiple feminist theories that inform feminist ethics, including liberal, Marxist, radical, relational and postmodern. Despite the differences among them, five common themes reveal agreements across these theories that define feminist ethics: (1) women and their experiences have moral significance; (2) attentiveness and subjective knowledge can illuminate moral issues; (3) ethical practitioners should engage in an analysis of the power dynamics inherent in each context; (4) the critique of patriarchal distortions of reality must be accompanied by a critique of racist, classist, and homophobic distortions and (5) ethical psychological practice (in research, therapy, teaching, etc.) requires action directed at achieving social [Page 341]justice. Each theme is discussed below and applied to the practice of PAR.

Feminist ethicists assert that women and their experiences have moral significance. This theme grows out of the fundamental feminist observation that most of Western thought has been deeply rooted in patriarchy. Under patriarchy, male experience is privileged and women are assigned rigid, narrow roles (the virgin/whore dichotomy), reducing the complexity of women's experiences to simple caricatures. The feminist ethical enterprise is an effort to eradicate the misrepresentation, distortion and oppression of women. Feminist ethicists reassert the value of women and claim that examining women's experiences provides a more adequate understanding of human experience. Mothering, friendships, peacemaking and so on are important areas for identifying ethical concerns and illuminating ethical virtues. When feminists have researched the experiences of women, they have articulated virtues and values: attentive love, connectedness, responsibility for others and the ethic of care. Feminist ethicists claim that these virtues must be included in a more comprehensive understanding of ethics.

Carol Gilligan described the ethic of care as a moral orientation that she identified through research on the moral dilemmas women and girls face. Gilligan and other relational philosophers, including Nel Noddings and Sara Ruddick, argued that because women and girls are assigned to the roles of caretakers as mothers, they develop a moral self characterized by the ability to form human connections and a heightened concern for others. Originally, Gilligan and other relational feminists argued that the ‘feminine voice’ was significantly different from the ‘masculine voice’, which is concerned with abstract rules of justice, an autonomous rather than a connected self and a moral compass characterized by justice rather than care.

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