Feminist ethics

Feminist ethics is an approach to ethics that builds on the belief that traditionally ethical theorising has under-valued and/or under-appreciated women's moral experience and it therefore chooses to reimagine ethics through a holistic feminist approach to transform it.

Feminist philosophers critique traditional ethics as pre-eminently focusing on men's perspective with little regard for women's viewpoints. Caring and the moral issues of private life and family responsibilities were traditionally regarded as trivial matters. Generally, women are portrayed as ethically immature and shallow in comparison to men. Traditional ethics prizes masculine cultural traits like “independence, autonomy, intellect, will, wariness, hierarchy, domination, culture, transcendence, product, asceticism, war, and death,” and gives less weight to culturally feminine traits like “interdependence, community, connection, sharing, emotion, body, trust, absence of hierarchy, nature, immanence, process, joy, peace, and life.” Traditional ethics has a “male” orientated convention in which moral reasoning is viewed through a framework of rules, rights, universality, and impartiality. The “female” approaches to moral reasoning emphasise relationships, responsibilities, particularity, and partiality.

Feminist ethics developed from Mary Wollstonecraft’s 'Vindication of the Rights of Women' published in 1792. With the new ideas from the Enlightenment, individual feminists being able to travel more than ever before, generating more opportunities for the exchange of ideas and advancement of women’s rights. With new social movements like Romanticism there developed unprecedented optimistic outlook on human capacity and destiny. This optimism was reflected in John Stuart Mill’s essay The Subjection of Women (1869). Feminist approaches to ethics, were further developed around this period by other notable people like Catherine Beecher, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton with an emphasis on the gendered nature of morality, specifically related to 'women's morality'.

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