Can men who dominate women nevertheless be happy or lead flourishing lives? Building on Claudia Card's exploration of moral luck, this paper considers the belief that male dominators cannot be happy. The discussion ranges over both virtue theory and empirical research into the "belief in a just world." I conclude that there are reasons to avoid believing that male dominators cannot be happy or flourish, and that feminism does not need that belief.

I evaluate the ways in which feminist philosophy intersects with the major strands of contemporary virtue ethics, especially neo-Aristotelian and sentimentalist versions of virtue ethics. I note the common strands of thought present in both feminist philosophy and virtue ethics, and I show how two important elements of feminist thought might fit within various virtue ethics frameworks. I consider whether virtue ethics can account for the full range of women's lived (...) experiences and also whether virtue ethics is capable of giving an account of justice adequate to explain the wrongness of oppression. I conclude with some speculations about the future of feminist virtue ethics. (shrink)

This paper will show that Mary Wollstonecraft developed a modern feminist version of virtue ethics. Virtue ethics is an all-encompassing moral theory which holds that the best life for individuals is commensurate with a good society. Simply, self-interest and our public duties are argued as identical and not at odds when we realize what is truly good for ourselves and for others. In the Western philosophic cannon, the most common version of virtue ethics is (...) Aristotle’s, with the Nicomachean Ethics as the definitive presentation. Wollstonecraft’s argument for the political, social, economic, and personal equality of women utilizes ideas that are reminiscent of classical virtue ethics. Her novel and effective addition is to show that the explicit inclusion of women requires a reconsideration of the duties needed for happy lives to be led and for a good society, and good families, to exist. (shrink)

The aims of this chapter are threefold. The first is to outline the importance of the tradition of virtue ethics for the origins of feminist thought. The second is to suggest a fertile avenue for the philosophical exploration of the works of late medieval and early modern women writers by considering the works of Christine de Pizan. The last aim of this chapter is to contribute to the emerging field of the history of women’s ideas in which female (...) philosophers are read not as mere appendages to the male thinkers of their period, but rather as having contributed to a distinctive strand in the history of ideas. (shrink)

In this paper I seek to distinguish a feminist virtue ethics of care from (1) justice ethics, (2) narrative ethics, (3) care ethics and (4) virtue ethics. I also connect this contemporary discussion of what makes a virtue ethics of care feminist to eighteenth and nineteenth century debates about male, female, and human virtue. I conclude that by focusing on issues related to gender - primarily those related to the systems, (...) structures, and ideologies that create and sustain patterns of male domination and female subordination - we can begin to appreciate that true care and bona-fide virtue can flourish only in societies that treat all persons with equal respect and consideration. (shrink)

The writings of women philosophers have often been neglected in the discipline of virtue ethics. In this historical survey of feminist virtue ethics, Sandrine Berges redresses the balance by focusing on key writings of important women philosophers, including Perictione, Heloise, Christine de Pizan, Mary Wollstonecraft and Sophie de Grouchy. A Feminist Perspective on Virtue Ethics first applies the findings of its historical survey to questions on the ethics of care, gender and the public (...) life, and global justice. In what follows, it is argued that the ethical theorizing of women in the past can and should be brought to bear on current philosophical debates. (shrink)

This paper argues that modern virtue ethics provides a useful background against which to read the philosophical import of Christine de Pizan’s works. By recognizing the origins of much of her thought in the Medieval tradition of virtue ethics, the paper brings out the continuity between her writing and a rich stream of contemporary ethical debate. It shows how Christine’s strand of feminism was deeply indebted to Medieval virtue ethics; both as found in (...) Boethius and in contemporary compilations on the virtues, on which Christine drew. At the same time, this tradition was subtly transformed by Christine, in order to elevate the status of women, as well as the traditional practical and worldly activities of women. Indeed, Christine’s feminism can be read as a direct application of her meditation on virtue and the good life. The paper concludes with a brief sketch of the way in which, during the three centuries subsequent to Christine, the nature of virtue and the virtues continued to provide a central focus in women’s philosophical writings. (shrink)

As the initial book in the Feminist Constructions series, Feminists Doing Ethics broaches the ideas of critiquing social practice and developing an ethics of universal justness. The essays collected within explore the intricacies and impact of reasoned moral action, the virtues of character, and the empowering responsibility that comes with morality. These and other essays were taken from Feminist Ethics Revisited: An International Conference on Feminist Ethics held in October of 1999. Waugh and DesAutels bring to (...) light in these pages work discussed at this conference that extends our understanding of morality and ourselves. Visit our website for sample chapters! (shrink)

A critically revised Aristotelian-based virtue ethics has something potentially useful to offer to those engaged in analyzing oppression and creating liberatory projects. A critical virtue ethics can help clarify one of the ways in which oppression interferes with flourishing; specifically, it helps clarify an aspect of oppression that can be called "moral damage.".

Lisa Tessman's Burdened Virtues is a deeply original and provocative work that engages questions central to feminist theory and practice, from the perspective of Aristotelian ethics. Focused primarily on selves who endure and resist oppression, she addresses the ways in which devastating conditions confronted by these selves both limit and burden their moral goodness, and affect their possibilities of flourishing. She describes two different forms of "moral trouble" prevalent under oppression. The first is that the oppressed self may be (...) morally damaged, prevented from developing or exercising some of the virtues; the second is that the very conditions of oppression require the oppressed to develop a set of virtues that carry a moral cost to those who practice them--traits that Tessman refers to as "burdened virtues." These virtues have the unusual feature of being disjoined from their bearer's own well being. Tessman's work focuses on issues that have been missed by many feminist moral theories, and her use of the virtue ethics framework brings feminist concerns more closely into contact with mainstream ethical theory. This book will appeal to feminist theorists in philosophy and women's studies, but also more broadly, ethicists and social theorists. (shrink)

How would feminist concerns fare in the debate between Confucian role ethics and virtue ethics? Ann Pang-White sketches the contours of a non-dichotomous, role-based virtue ethics that is illuminated by a Confucian feminist account as one possible answer to this query. By reimagining the virtues of chastity and filiality that are indispensable to Confucian contexts, Pang-White seeks to develop a reading that can be useful in defending feminist values and replacing outdated understandings of gender roles (...) in societies informed by Confucian thought today. In continuing the conversation with her, Stephen Angle asks whether a modernized, relational, role-based virtue ethics can really suffice to respond to feminist concerns. Sarah Mattice proposes that Pang-White center intersectional perspectives on feminism for the latter’s project, while Lily Zhang invites her to analyze how certain ethical conflicts that arise within the framework of Confucian ethics between roles and virtues can be resolved from Pang-White’s perspective. Pang-White’s reply to the panel reiterates different aspects of her relational role-based virtue ethical reading of Confucian feminism to argue that a better appreciation of the situatedness and imperfections of morality is needed to understand the imperfections that come in with it. _ _. (shrink)

Following the revival of virtue theory, some moral theorists have argued that virtue ethics can provide the basis for a radical politics. Such a politics essentially departs from the liberal model of the moral agent as an autonomous reason-giver. It instead privileges an understanding of the agent as conditioned by her community, and in the case of social oppression and marginalization, communal virtues may become a vehicle for social change. This essay compares political appropriations of virtue (...) theory by Christian theologian Stanley Hauerwas and secular feminist thinkers Lisa Tessman and Margaret Urban Walker. Hauerwas and feminist theorists both embrace a kind of embodied vulnerability as a political virtue, arguing that it enables more genuine social recognition. The virtue feminist critique is more robust than Hauerwas's, however, insofar as it understands mutual recognition to involve acknowledgment of social difference and the concomitant pursuit of justice. (shrink)

Book review of A Feminist Perspective on Virtue Ethics by Sandrine Berges (2015).

From Black Power to Black Lives Matter, political resisters protesting systemic racism have used riots and other manifestations of outrage as a way to grasp at flourishing. Yet such a tactic seems antithetical to the core concept of flourishing as recognized within virtue ethics. Building on the work of womanist and feminist ethicists and moral philosophers who have defended anger as a morally apt, even virtuous response to injustice, we reconsider the relationship between a community’s flourishing and public (...) manifestations of anger and rage. We argue for expanding the moral response to rioting as a tactic of political resistance, and we suggest that more culturally particular understandings of both virtue and flourishing can open space to better see the role anger may play in a community’s flourishing. (shrink)

The proposal that care ethic be subsumed under the framework of virtue ethic is both promising and problematic for feminists. Although some attempts to construe care as a virtue are more commendable than others, they cannot duplicate a freestanding feminist CE. Sander-Staudt recommends a model of theoretical collaboration between VE and CE that retains their comprehensiveness, allows CE to enhance VE as well as be enhanced by it, and leaves CE open to other collaborations.

Virtue and vice remain at the margins of feminist conceptual analysis although both establish a dualism that denies women full citizenship. To make this argument, this analysis explores the historical case of the Lowell mill girls – the first nearly all-female labour force in the United States between 1826 and 1850. Their public debate illustrates how virtue aligns some women with the economic and political status quo while society affiliates those who challenge its dominant beliefs with vice. This (...) moral location reveals the ‘virtues of vice’ or the political benefits that women may derive from vice which places them outside traditional moral and political discourse, enabling them to question existing moral paradigms, consider alternatives, and politically organize against the status quo. As such, the Lowell mill girl debate can inform contemporary feminist theory by raising serious questions about virtue and suggesting how vice opens up a critical space for ideological innovation, referred to here as a moral middle ground, that may result in a more democratic, feminist ethics. (shrink)

The proposal that care ethic be subsumed under the framework of virtue ethic is both promising and problematic for feminists. Although some attempts to construe care as a virtue are more commendable than others, they cannot duplicate a freestanding feminist CE. Sander-Staudt recommends a model of theoretical collaboration between VE and CE that retains their comprehensiveness, allows CE to enhance VE as well as be enhanced by it, and leaves CE open to other collaborations.

The primary question my dissertation aims to answer is: how might eudaimonic virtue ethics be reimagined to respond to contemporary criticisms from disability scholars, feminists, and empirical psychology? To answer this, I introduce the Eudaimonic View of Virtue, or EV, and propose a Mengzian adaptation of the EV (EV-M) in response to these criticisms. The EV captures the four core claims to which eudaimonic virtue ethical theories are committed: (i) virtues, in the sense of excellent character (...) traits or dispositions, are the foundation of ethics or ethical action (i.e., aretaicism); (ii) virtue is at least partially constitutive of human well-being/flourishing (i.e., eudaimonism); (iii) virtue or virtuous activity consists in the good performance of human function or fulfilling human nature (i.e., naturalism); and (iv) practical wisdom, in the sense of understanding how to live well, is required for achieving full virtue. For the EV, reason and emotions are both pivotal parts of virtue. However, there is disagreement among contemporary and historic eudaimonic virtue ethicists about what specific roles reason and emotion play—whether for Aristotle (the founder of the Western eudaimonic virtue ethics tradition) or in virtue ethical theory more broadly. The EV can be divided into (broadly) rational and emotional versions. I critically evaluate contemporary EV-based accounts in light of critiques from disability scholars, feminists, and psychologists, revealing rational versions’ vulnerability to the first two avenues of critique and emotional versions’ susceptibility to the third. In contrast to Aristotelian virtue ethics, which defines human nature through rational activity, Mengzi defines human nature through its potential for moral goodness; moreover, his moral psychology does not contain a rigid rational-emotional divide. This helps the Mengzian version of the EV evade criticisms from feminist and disability perspectives. Additionally, the EV-M’s emphasis on the interdependence of society and individuals—through its focus on rituals and social roles—provides an avenue of response to the psychology critique. The EV-M thus serves as a resilient foundation for an improved EV. (shrink)

In traditional analytic philosophy, critical thinking is defined along Cartesian lines as rational and linear reasoning preclusive of intuitions, emotions and lived experience. According to Michael Gilbert, this view – which he calls the Natural Light Theory (NLT) – fails because it arbitrarily excludes standard feminist forms of argumentation and neglects the essentially social nature of argumentation. In this paper, I argue that while Gilbert’s criticism is correct for argumentation in general, NLT fails in a distinctive and particularly problematic manner (...) in moral argumentation contexts. This is because NLT calls for disputants to adopt an impartial attitude, which overlooks the fact that moral disputants qua moral agents are necessarily partial to their own values and interests. Adopting the impartial perspective would therefore alienate them from their values and interests, causing a kind of “moral schizophrenia.” Finally, I urge a re-valuation of epistemic virtue in argumentation. (shrink)

In The Impossibility of Perfection, Michael Slote tries to show that the traditional Aristotelian doctrine of the unity of the virtues is mistaken. His argumentative strategy is to provide counterexamples to this doctrine, by showing that there are what he calls “partial virtues”—pairs of virtues that conflict with one another but both of which are ethically indispensible. Slote offers two lines of argument for the existence of partial virtues. The first is an argument for the partiality of a particular pair (...) of virtues: frankness and tact. The second is a kind of feminist critique. I argue that both of these lines of argument fail. In both cases, Slote fails to ask whether the apparent conflict between putatively partial virtues has arisen from a misunderstanding of the demands of those virtues. From this error I suggest we can learn an important lesson: whether in our studies thinking about the virtues or in our everyday lives trying to practice them, it is a serious mistake to focus on the relationships among virtues without considering precisely what each of these virtues demands. (shrink)

Using Alastair MacIntyre's work as a methodological guide for doing ethics in the Christian tradition, the contributors to this work offer essays on three subjects: description of MacIntyre's approach; reflections on moral issues; and selected essays on family, abortion, feminism and more.

The ethics of care, adopted in much of the nursing literature, is usually framed in opposition to the Kantian ethics of principle. Irrespective of whether the ethics of care is grounded in gender, as with Gilligan and Noddings, or inscribed on Heidegger's ontology, as with Benner, Kant remains the philosophical adversary, honouring reason rather than emotion, universality rather than context, and individual autonomy rather than interdependence. During the past decade, however, a great deal of Kantian scholarship – (...) including feminist scholarship – has rendered this series of oppositions questionable, challenging the view that an ethics of care and Kant's moral law are irreconcilable. This paper therefore re‐examines Kant's writings, drawing on recent scholarship, and argues both that they provide the care ethicists with everything they require, and that they offer something beyond an ethics of care, something that repairs the deficits in philosophies of caring. It concludes by suggesting that a Kantian ethics of care has significant implications for the construction of nursing knowledge. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I argue that a feminist and multidimensional account of forgiveness must take seriously our everyday experience with forgiving, and the nature of the power relationship in which forgiver and forgiven stand. According to my model, forgiveness is a moral act with at least two dimensions, namely the choice to take up, or take seriously, a new attitude toward one's wrongdoer for moral reasons and the performative utterance to the wrongdoer of one's making this choice. It is my (...) position that and are distinct, that either can be discussed as a discreet occasion of forgiveness separately from the other, and the ethical recommendations regarding one of these dimensions can be discussed apart from ethical recommendations regarding the other. ;Mainstream accounts of forgiveness inadequately consider that forgiveness inevitably involves one's relationship with another, and that women and men have disparate experience with forgiveness in their often unequal relations. I argue for a feminist framework which holds we are constituted by our relations , and attends to women's experience with this traditionally feminine virtue. I argue that the statement, "I forgive you," is itself an instance of forgiveness; it is what J. L. Austin calls a performative utterance because more than reporting, truly or falsely, how one feels, saying "I forgive you" performs an act that sets something new in motion, and changes the relation between wrongdoer and victim. I argue for the logical possibility of third-party forgiveness , by which I mean the act of forgiving a wrongdoer for wrongs done to someone other than the forgiving agent. Although 3PF is not a substitute for the forgiveness of victims, it plays an important role in our relationships with the wrongdoers of those with whom we identify. I conclude that both third-party and group forgiveness, like the forgiveness of victims, can be ethically problematic but powerful moral acts. (shrink)

Mary Wollstonecraft's account of virtue discourse and formation, which deploys ancient and medieval ethical resources for modern purposes, challenges a prevalent narrative in Christian ethics today. Several prominent Christian virtue ethicists have left the false impression that serious reflection on the virtues depends on pre-modern traditions and the eschewal of modern resources. Troubled by skeptical quandaries and the difficulty of adjudicating conflicting claims about virtue, they are concerned with securing a pre-modern court of appeals. Many feminists (...) worry that these appeals unduly constrain because they naturalize what is contingent and fix what should be open to debate. Wollstonecraft does not share the skeptical concerns and so has no need for metaethical appeals. Adapting Edmund Burke's moral philosophy, her use of virtue discourse deploys his metaphor of “the wardrobe of the moral imagination” to more religious, radical, and democratic ends. This way of proceeding signals the possibility of a rapprochement between feminists of various stripes and those interested in deploying the discourse of the virtues for contemporary Christian ethics. (shrink)

As in many other fields of practical ethics, virtue ethics is increasingly of interest within nursing ethics. Nevertheless, the virtue ethics literature in nursing ethics remains relatively small and underdeveloped. This article aims to categorize which broad theoretical approaches to virtue have been taken, to undertake some initial comparative assessment of their relative merits given the peculiar ethical dilemmas facing nurse practitioners, and to highlight the prob- lem areas for virtue (...) class='Hi'>ethics in the nursing context. We find the most common approaches fall into care approaches grounded in sentimentalist or feminist ethics, eudaimonist approaches grounded in neo-Aristotelianism, and those grounded in MacIntyre’s practice theory. Our initial assessment is that the eudaimonist approach fares best in terms of merit and relative to criticisms of virtue ethics. But an outstanding issue concerns the motivational psychology of virtuous nursing and whether virtue ethical accounts of right action are self-effacing, i.e. justify an act on grounds that cannot function as the agent’s reason for doing it if she is to act well. One of us, Newham, believes that a virtue consequentialist approach is the best response to these issues. Some form of pluralistic theory, such as Christine Swanton’s, may be needed to explain the many competing values and goods involved in ethical nursing. (shrink)

The manuscript explores the plausibility of care-based epistemology in a comparative key. Investigating the epistemic virtue of care-giving, the work weaves together insights from care ethics, virtue epistemology and a particular reading of the Mah=abh=arata which, left to themselves, do not appear compatible with one another. Drawing on these traditions, the work goes on to provide a feminist vision of search for truth that is consistent with both ethical relations and interventions for justice.

This paper considers whether eudaimonism is necessarily an idealizing approach to ethics. I argue, contrary to what is implied by Christine Swanton, that it is not, and I suggest that a non-ideal eudaimonistic virtue ethics can be useful for feminist and critical race theorists. For eudaimonist theorists in the Aristotelian tradition, the claim that one should aim to live virtuously assumes that there will typically be good enough background conditions so that an exercise of the virtues, in (...) conjunction with these favorable external conditions, will suffice for someone to flourish both in the sense of living virtuously and in the sense of living well or living the good life. However, under some forms of oppression the background conditions will not be good enough, and thus an exercise of the virtues will often be insufficient to constitute a flourishing life. It may seem that eudaimonism, with its foregrounding of the concept of flourishing and its assumption of a tight connection between living virtuously and living well, may function as a form of ideology that elides the ways in which non-ideal and oppressive conditions can separate virtue from well-being and can make the state of flourishing (in its dual senses) unattainable. I point out that eudaimonism can be revised to incorporate the claim that virtue and flourishing may typically be unlinked, and I advocate retaining flourishing as an unattainable end, exercising the virtues even with a sense of their absurdity, and confronting the existential states of frustration and disappointment that may result. (shrink)

Some virtues, like courage and temperance, have been part of the philosophical tradition since its inception. Others, like filial piety and female chastity, have gone out of style. Still others, like curiosity and aesthetic good taste, are upstarts. What, if anything, can be said in general about this motley collection? Are they all dispositions to respond to reasons? Do they share characteristic components, such as affect, emotion, and trust? Are they organized into a cardinal hierarchy, or is it better to (...) investigate them one by one, developing a comprehensive but unstructured catalogue? What would constitute an empirical test of the degree to which a given virtue is realized, and, to the extent that such tests have been conducted, what is their philosophical upshot? Contributions from various perspectives, including perspectives underrepresented in this context (experimental, feminist, Humean, pragmatist, phenomenological, etc.), are invited to address these and related questions. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe central hypothesis of this paper is that the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty offers significant philosophical groundwork for an ethics that honours key feminist commitments – embodiment, situatedness, diversity and the intrinsic sociality of subjectivity. Part I evaluates feminist criticisms of Merleau-Ponty. Part II defends the claim that Merleau-Ponty’s non-dualist ontology underwrites leading approaches in feminist ethics, notably Care Ethics and the Ethics of Vulnerability. Part III examines Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of embodied percipience, arguing that these offer a (...) powerful critique of the view from nowhere, a totalizing God’s-eye-view with pretensions to objectivity. By revealing the normative structure of perceptual gestalts in the intersubjective domain, he establishes the view from everywhere. Normativity is no longer deferred to higher authorities such as duty, utility or the valorized virtue, but through the perceptual gestalt it is returned to the perceiving embodied subject. This... (shrink)

Crocodile starts with Rob and Mia having a night out that ends tragically with Rob hitting and killing a cyclist. In a panic, they hide the body and don't report the accident. Years later, racked with guilt, Rob contacts Mia to tell her he's decided to anonymously report the accident so the cyclist's family can get closure. Mia panics, worried that the consequences would be dire for her, her family, and her reputation. In the rest of the episode, Mia takes (...) a series of actions to protect the life she's built. This chapter utilizes the ethical theories of Utilitarianism, Kant, Feminist Ethics of Care, and Aristotelian Virtue Ethics to determine whether Mia's actions are justifiable forms of self‐defense. (shrink)

Why is it so difficult to change our lifestyles and achieve environmental sustainability, when it is undeniable that our current model of development has a destructive ecological and social impact and that it inflicts unacceptable violence on animals? In an attempt to reduce the gap between theory and practice, Corine Pelluchon proposes a virtue ethics that was expounded in Éthique de la considération published in 2018. “ Considération and Feminism” is a chapter of this book. Ecofeminism has (...) shown that our capacity to care for others does not derive from duties but is linked to the particular bonds that tie us to them. Nevertheless, the key to environmental virtues is our relationship with ourselves and our personal experience of the incommensurable. This point, and the process of self-transformation it requires, highlight the difference between the ethics of consideration and ecofeminism, although they have much in common. (shrink)

Many feminist philosophers have been highly critical of Kant’s ethics, either because of his rationalism or because of particular claims he makes about women in his writings on anthropology and political philosophy. In this paper, I call attention to the aspects of Kant’s ethical theory that make it attractive from a feminist standpoint. Kant’s duties to oneself are rich resource for feminism. These duties require women to act in ways that show respect for themselves as rational human agents (...) by, e.g., avoiding servility, self-deception, self-mutilation, and sexual self-degradation, and cultivating their natural talents (as well as their virtue). Duties to others demand that other people treat women respectfully by requiring that they avoid mocking, degrading, or acting arrogantly toward others. Indeed, even when one sets out to promote others’ happiness, Kant’s ethics requires that one not act paternalistically. Kant’s ethics insists that every rational agent recognize the equality and dignity of all rational agents. Thus, it pushes women to respect themselves and to demand respect from others; and it pushes men to respect women as a basic moral requirement. (shrink)

Two key themes structure the work of French philosopher of science Gilbert Simondon: the processes of individuation and the nature of technical objects. Moreover, these two themes are also at the heart of contemporary debates within Ethics and Bioethics. Indeed, the question of the individual is a key concern in both Virtue Ethics and Feminist Ethics of Care, while the hyper-technical reality of the present stage of medical technology is a key reason for both the urgency (...) for and the success of the field of Bioethics. And yet, despite its potential for thinking about these issues, Simondon’s philosophy remains largely unknown. Rather than exploring Simondon’s complex ontology for itself, the aim of this paper is to establish what contribution his work can make in Ethics and Bioethics on two essential questions: the relational structure of the self and the nature of the human-technology relation. I argue that Simondon’s re-conceptualization of the individual harmonizes with perspectives in Feminist Bioethics (particularly the Ethics of Care) and points toward what I call an “open” Virtue Ethics that takes relations to be essential. In order to establish this connection, I explore at length the relational approach to Feminist Bioethics offered by Susan Sherwin’s work. I argue that a Simondonian account of technology and of the individual furthers the relational understanding of the self, offers a characterization of Virtue Ethics that is in harmony with the Ethics of Care, and clarifies a notion of responsibility that is implicated in the complex reality of the modern technological milieu. (shrink)

For the purpose of advancing the feminist commitment to inclusion and nonliberal articulations of pluralism, in this essay I conceptualize the Native account of individual autonomy that itself evolves from a commitment to pluralism. I demonstrate that Native individual autonomy is concurrently strong and feminist in nature—what I call “radical-cum-relational.” That is, Native autonomy is more radical than the traditional liberal conception and is simultaneously grounded in relationality, which is the basis of much of feminist ethics. I demonstrate that (...) the Native conception of autonomy is radical and promotes the highest degree of individual self-determination and independence qua individuality and particularity. Yet this radical self-determination depends on intense social interdependency. The grounding metaphysics and epistemology of the Native framework are conceived entirely in terms of ethical relationships between and responsibilities to other individuals, animals, and the Earth. That is, no part of the Native paradigm can be understood outside of the ethical connections persons have by virtue of their primary position as community members. It is by situating radical autonomy against a background of ethical social interdependence, together with thebackground condition of gender equality of Native practices, that the radical construal of Native individual freedom is feminist. To shore up and illustrate the connection between Native autonomy and feminism, I argue that an identification between the Native social practice of gifting and feminist reciprocity can be made, specifically Iris Marion Young’s notion of asymmetrical reciprocity. Finally, I argue that this connection avoids the problem of incommensurability and so is theoretically possible, responsible, and fits the criterion of respectfulness also at the foundation of the Native framework. Broadly speaking, the problem of incommensurability is concerned with theorists’ inability to recognize foundational incompatibilities between paradigms and their forced attempts to mergethem, often at the price of ignoring inconsistencies, inaccuracies, and contradictions that result from impossible translations and conversions. Historically and to the present day, Western philosophy has been egregiously guilty of distorting Native theories and practices. In this essay I argue that since translation takes place at the level of praxis rather than at the level of language, my argument circumvents problems that arise from failed attempts to map cultural concepts onto others that do not share similar foundations. (shrink)

Introduction -- Feminism and partial values -- The impossibility of perfection -- Alternative views -- Perfection, moral dilemmas, and moral cost -- Connections with care ethics and romanticism -- Relational profiles of goods and virtues -- Conclusion -- Appendix. Men's philosophy, women's philosophy.

I will treat feminist ethical theory as a distinct type of theory. Although some feminists are skeptical about the need for theory as distinct from cultivating practices of being morally perceptive and sensitive, many others argue for the theory they see as needed. Feminist ethical theory usually includes, but is not limited to, the concerns that have been developed under the heading of ‘the ethics of care’ or ‘care ethics’. Care ethics are usually contrasted with ethics (...) of justice, such as Kantian and utilitarian moral theories. Instead of being a theory primarily focused on right action, an ethic of care seeks moral evaluations of relations between persons, and reinterprets both personal and political relations in light of the value of care. I will show how feminist ethical theory differs from virtue theory as well as from Kantian and utilitarian theories. (shrink)

The figure of the mistress is undoubtedly controversial provoking intense reactions, ranging from fear, to disgust and revulsion, to excitement and titillation, to sadness and perhaps to some, love. The mistress is conventionally depicted as a threat to moral living and someone whose sexuality is 'defective' and 'toxic'. Of course, she is a woman that you would not have as your friend, and certainly not your wife, since her 'ethical sense', if she even has one, is dubious at best. This (...) book subverts these traditional judgements offering an unflinching look at the lived experience of the mistress and recasts her as a potentially loving, free, intimate 'other' woman. Drawing upon feminist philosophy, contemporary sexual ethics and the current cultural moment of #MeToo, Mistress Morality moves beyond a narrative of 'infidelity', conventional judgment, the safeguarding of monogamy and conventional heterosex that permeates our society. It asks what happens when we let go of our insecurities, judgments and moralistic relationship philosophies and opt, instead, for an ethics of kindness. A kindness underpinned by engaging with those deemed 'other' and learning from mistresses, both straight and queer, new ways of thinking about ethics and sex, meaning we have better sex, and can be better to each other. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hypatia 17.4 (2002) 238-243 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle. Edited by Cynthia A. Freeland. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. This volume consists of twelve essays, mostly newly published, on a variety of topics in Aristotelian scholarship ranging from the theoretical to the practical and productive parts of the corpus. The volume divides the papers into one group addressing (...) topics in Aristotle's metaphysics, physics, epistemology, biology, and logic on one hand, and his ethics, politics, poetics, and rhetoric on the other. The contributors include established scholars in ancient philosophy, such as Cynthia Freeland, Deborah Modrak, Martha Nussbaum, and Charlotte Witt, and younger scholars such as Angela Curran, as well as those in disciplines outside ancient philosophy, including literature, law, and political science. The latter group of essays includes a chapter by Luce Irigaray on Book IV of Aristotle's Physics from her work, An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1993), Freeland's interpretation of Irigaray's essay, as well as papers on Aristotelian political emotion, the historiography of Aristotle's rhetoric, and his political anthropology from Texas Law Review (1992). The very range of methodological perspective that lends breadth to the volume presents difficulties for an overview, in light of which four papers were selected for detailed comment, those on Aristotle's logic, Freeland's essay on Irigaray's reading of Physics IV, Aristotelian virtue ethics, and Aristotelian political emotion. Feminism and Aristotelian Logic While it is familiar to cite the inherent biases of theoretical disciplines like the social sciences and philosophy, it is less common to read how areas like mathematics and logic are similarly biased. It seems hard to see how a system of proof with rules, axioms, and formal notation is inherently biased against any one group. Yet feminists like Andrea Nye, Valerie Plumwood, and Luce Irigaray have criticized formal logic on the ground that it is antithetical to women's experience and interests. 1 In "Feminist Readings of Aristotelian Logic" (1998), Marjorie Hass takes on criticisms of Aristotle's logic, including three main objections: his logic is motivated by unequal relations of power, uses binary [End Page 238] truth-value, and ignores the concrete and the subjective in experience. In being thus characterized, Aristotle's logical theory represents a "gendered" way of reasoning, and should be avoided. Hass does well in replying to these objections with one exception. The first objection, that logic masks unequal power relations, is answered by Hass noting that logic and logical systems (in mathematics and philosophy) have arisen among various cultures and classes worldwide, and are not the domain of an elite group of men. Hass's further point that attaining logical skill can be liberatory to women needs to be underscored: it is surely politically loaded for feminists to argue that women cannot, or should not, do logic. Hass rightly responds to the third objection concerning the need for concrete experience on two grounds: first, for Aristotle the end of logical argument is in part the illumination of observed experience, not its dissolution, and second, that it is impossible to conceive of a language without any abstraction. We cannot construct a feasible language without abstract terms or categories, as Nye's criticism suggests.Hass's response to the second criticism, that bivalence is noxious, is correct but incomplete. The ground of this objection stems from the idea that in classical logic the laws of excluded middle and noncontradiction obtain such that given two contradictory propositions, only one can be true, and this fact implies inequality to feminist critics. But, as Hass points out, this objection does not acknowledge Aristotle's notion of contrariety in which both sentences are false—the point being that contrariety does not yield the same results as negation. Still, Hass admits, the "fluid" form of negation sought for by thinkers like Irigaray is not forthcoming in Aristotle's logic. 2 Here Hass overlooks what Aristotle has to say about future contingents in De Interpretatione 9, that statements about the future are neither true nor false: "it is not necessary that of every affirmation... (shrink)

This response to Dobson and White’s call for a feminine firm argues that such a concept is based on amisinterpretation of Gilligan’s research. Moreover, virtue ethics and feminine ethics do not share a common approach to nurturing relationships or the moral orientation of care. Acknowledging the worthwhile goals of Dobson and White’s endeavor, the feminist firm is presented as offering greater potential to achieve these goals.

ABSTRACT This article seeks to “contaminate” an ethics of care with three different but interrelated theoretical interventions: the expansion of the care ethic beyond interpersonal relations, ecofeminism, and feminist political theory. This makes care theoretically resilient: durable enough to have grounded meaning but flexible enough for situational application. This also makes care a primary concept capable of subsuming some aspects of the traditional ethical theories of deontology, consequentialism, and virtue ethics. This holds vast implications for journalists as (...) they seek new ways to delineate and articulate their service to democracy in an ever-changing mediascape. Furthermore, this ethic of care engenders media literacy and enables an active public to critically question media content and influence. This theoretical explication is thus not an abstract exercise but intentionally focused to aid the difficult work of worldmaking. (shrink)

This paper aims to evaluate thechallenges posed to traditional ethical theoryby the ethics of feminism, multiculturalism,and environmentalism. I argue that JamesSterba, in his Three Challenges to Ethics,provides a distorted assessment by trying toassimilate feminism, multiculturalism, andenvironmentalism into traditional utilitarian,virtue, and Kantian/Rawlsian ethics – which hethus seeks to rescue from their alleged``biases.'''' In the cases of feminism andmulticulturalism, I provide an alternativeaccount on which these new critical discourseschallenge the whole paradigm or conception ofethical inquiry (...) embodied in the tradition.They embrace different questions, goals, toolsof analysis, and wider audiences, typicallyignored or marginalized by traditionalethicists.I illustrate my argument through briefinterpretations of writers such as Susan Okin,Catharine Mackinnon, Sandra Bartky, JohnStoltenberg, Richard Wasserstrom, AnthonyAppiah, Charles Mills, Will Kymlicka, CharlesTaylor, and Martha Nussbaum. In many of thesecases, I suggest that they provide us with newways of being ethicists.In the case of environmentalism, I defend amore conservative and negative assessment.Sterba embraces authors such as Peter Singer,Tom Regan, and Paul Taylor in order to advancean environmentalist ethic of ``speciesequality/impartiality'''' and ``biocentricpluralism.'''' Here I argue that the traditionalKantian/Rawlsian ethics – which Sterba hopesto accommodate – actually provides compellingmoral reasons for rejecting his principles of``species impartiality'''' and biocentricpluralism. Moreover, Rawlsian ethics canprovide a more coherent, consistent, andplausible account of environmental issues thanSterba''s brand of environmental ethics. Iargue that in practice, his ethics concedeswhat it denies in theory – namely, the specialvalue which inheres in human beings.As such, environmental ethics, unlike feminismand multiculturalism, poses very little in theway of a credible challenge or alternative totraditional ethics. (shrink)

Practitioners’ ethical orientation and responses vary between practice settings. Yet, currently, the ethics for midwifery practice that is explicit in the literature and which provides the ideals of socialization into practice, is that of bio(medical)ethics. Traditional bioethics, developed because of World War II atrocities and increased scientific research, is based on moral philosophy, normative theory, abstract universal principles and objective problem solving, all of which focus on right and wrong ‘action’ for resolving dilemmas. They exclude context and relationship. (...) Personal narratives of mothers and midwives contest the appropriateness of these accepted values and systems for childbirth because they induce conflict between work-place/service provider ethics and personal/professional midwifery ethics. In contrast to the disembedded and disembodied approach of biomedical ethics, an ethically adequate response in midwifery practice resonates more with the ethics of intimates, such as feminist virtue ethics. (shrink)

As the boundaries of health care continually expand, health care ethics are continually challenged and developed. Ethics is a dynamic conversation among people who live and work together in community. As participants in discussions about health care ethics, nurses discover that individual and communities draw upon a variety of ethical concepts and traditions. This book explores three traditions: Rule Based Ethics, Virtue Ethics, and Feminist Ethics. The text presents the historical-cultural contexts from which (...) each emerged, how each theory frames primary questions of ethics, and how each approaches ethical decision making. Chapters present each ethical theory, followed by extended application of each theory to the context of nursing. A concluding chapter provides a comparative analysis of the care for the frail elderly using all three theories. (shrink)

This concise anthology collects important historical and contemporary readings on the central ethical theories, including Divine Command Theory, Consequentialism, Deontology, Virtue Ethics, and Feminist Ethics. Each section includes two or three of the most important contributions to the field, together with brief introductions from the editors. This new third edition offers expanded coverage of meta-ethics through the addition of thought-provoking readings from Susan Wolf, Gilbert Harman, and others. The number of selections from women authors has also (...) increased. (shrink)