## Introduction
- Advancing women's interests
- Underscoring distinctive experience and characteristics
### Preface
- Take the good wherever it is found
- If you are a feminist, "feminist ethics" is not a monolith, but a cluster of truth claims you must judge case by case
- If you are not a feminist, "feminist ethics" makes truth claims you can judge case by case
- Some of what is labeled "feminist" may be true and some may be false
- In other words, labels are not everything!
### Feminist Ethics Overview
- Downplay moral principles and traditional ethical concepts
- Focus on social and relational realities
- Familiar principles: autonomy, utility, freedom, equality, etc. are too broad and abstract
- Values and virtues in traditional moral theories skew masculine
- Concept of autonomous agent is falsely abstract
### Ethics of Care
- Rather than impartiality, specific relationships
- Rather than justice, duty, rights, etc., empathy, compassion, love, fidelity.
- Rather than duty, love
### Emotion
- Recall our discussion of Stoicism
- Caring for children is a virtue, can you "care" without "caring"?
- The role of emotion
### Feminist Ethics, Jagar
- Commitment to correct male biases in traditional ethics
- "The subordination of women is morally wrong"
- "the moral experience of women is as worthy of respect as that of men"
- Goals: To articular critiques of women's subordination
- To prescribe ways to resist
- To envision alternatives
- History: Wollestencraft, 1970's, Gilligan (443)
- Feminist Criticisms of Western Ethics (446)
- Common Misconstruals (448)
- Current Concerns (453)
### Fundamental paradox
- Women are the same as men, so differences should be refuted.
- Women are different from men in some ways, and those differences should be valued.
- Compare: not only intrinsic moral value, but intellectual ability, emotional intelligence, empathy, creativity, technical ability, homemaking, being soldiers, thinking, reasoning, etc.
- "Masculine or male associated values": independence, autonomy, intellect, will, wariness, hierarchy, etc,
- "Feminine or female-associated values": interdependence, community, connection, sharing, emotion, body, trust, absence of hiarachy, etc.
### Fundamental paradox
- "Men and women have dramatically different styles of moral decision making." (Carol Gilligan)
- True or false?
### Discussion
* Are men and women different enough to merit its own moral approach?
* [Further reading](http://nymag.com/thecut/2017/02/self-empowerment-is-just-another-word-for-narcissism.html)
## The Need for More Than Justice
- Rawls: Justice is the first virtue of social institutions
- The counter-Rawls movement argues that "justice is one virtue among many" (466)
- Can "care" supplement -- not replace -- justice?
- Is care female? Feminine? Not the prerogative of women (466)
### Maternity
- Caring is a virtue of caretakers, esp. motherhood
- Why mothers?
- Children depend on parents to avoid isolation and powerlessness
> Some find it retrograde to hail as a special sort of moral wisdom an outlook that may be the product of socially enforced restriction of women to domestic roles...
### Maternity
- Women, like blacks, use the language of "rights" to change their social position
- Yet find that Kantian notions of "rights" do not satisfy all moral dimensions
### Kohlburg
- Kohlberg followed Kant and Piaget
- Kohlberg's experiments: testing pre-conventional, conventional, post-conventional moral thinking
- Found that women were more likely to score "lower" on Kohlberg's test
- The assumption is that impartial, impersonal, "legal" thinking is morally mature
- Gilligan challenged this
### Individual Rights and Equality
- Misery is compatible with rights (469)
- Equality creates social "fractures" (470)
- Mature men and women wanted interconnection, family, friends, society rather than autonomy and being left alone
- Communitarian moral ideals are closer to "religion-linked" versions of morality than the "modern Western liberal ideal"
- Also closer to Hegel
### Gilligan's Contributions
1. Individualism (471)
2. Patriarchy (472)
3. "Equality" for equal rights
4. Rationalism (476)
### Held, Ethics of Care
- Relational ethics, ethics of love
- Potential substitute for Kantian, utilitarianism, virtue ethics
- OR a form of virtue ethics
### Features
- We are dependent for most of our lives
- Value emotion
- Avoiding bias through reason; choosing bias; (480-1)
- Re-thinking public/private
### Liberal Individualism (482)
- False picture of human persons
- False picture of human society
### Justice and Care (484)
- Justice: fairness, equality, rights
- Care: attentiveness, trust, responsiveness
>(Alternately, fairness versus justice, shalom)
### Implications for Society (487)
### Virtue Ethics (489)
- Ethics of care is "distinctive moral outlook" from virtue ethics (490)
### Implications for Society (487)