Feminist Ethics aims “to understand, criticize, andcorrect” how gender operates within our moral beliefs andpractices (Lindemann 2005, 11) and our methodological approaches toethical theory. More specifically, feminist ethicists aim tounderstand, criticize, and correct: (1) the binary view of gender, (2)the privilege historically available to men, and/or (3) the ways thatviews about gender maintain oppressive social orders or practices thatharm others, especially girls and women who historically have beensubordinated, along gendered dimensions including sexuality andgender-identity. Since oppression often involves ignoring theperspectives of the marginalized, different approaches to feministethics have in common a commitment to better understand theexperiences of persons oppressed in gendered ways. That commitmentresults in a tendency, in feminist ethics, to take into accountempirical information and material actualities.

Not all feminist ethicists correct all of (1) through (3). Some haveassumed or upheld the gender binary (Wollstonecraft 1792; Firestone1970). They criticize and aim to correct the privileging of men as themore morally worthy half of the binary, or argue against themaintenance of a social order that oppresses others in gendered ways.More recently, feminist ethicists have commonly criticized the genderbinary itself, arguing that upholding a fixed conception of the worldas constituted only by “biological” men and womencontributes to the maintenance of oppressive and gendered socialorders, especially when doing so marginalizes those who do not conformto gender binaries (Butler 1990; Bettcher 2014; Dea 2016a). Feministethicists who are attentive to the intersections of multiple aspectsof identity including race, class, and disability, in addition togender, criticize and correct assumptions that mensimpliciter are historically privileged, as if privilegedistributes equally among all men regardless of how they are sociallysituated. They instead focus more on criticizing and correctingoppressive practices that harm and marginalize others who live atthese intersections in order to account for the distinctiveexperiences of women whose experiences are not those of members ofculturally dominant groups (Crenshaw 1991; Khader 2013). Whatever thefocus of feminist ethicists, a widely shared characteristic of theirworks is at least some overt attention to power, privilege, or limitedaccess to social goods. In a broad sense, then, feminist ethics isfundamentally political (Tong 1993, 160). This is not necessarily afeature of feminist ethics that distinguishes it from“mainstream” ethics, however, since feminist analyses ofethical theory as arising from material and nonideal contexts suggestthat all ethics is political whether its being so is recognized by thetheorist or not.

Since feminist ethics is not merely a branch of ethics, but is instead“a way ofdoing ethics” (Lindemann 2005, 4),philosophers engaged in the above tasks can be concerned with anybranch of ethics, including meta-ethics, normative theory, andpractical or applied ethics. The point of feminist ethics is, ideally,to change ethics for the better by improving ethical theorizing andoffering better approaches to issues including those involving gender.Feminist ethics is not limited to gendered issues because the insightsof feminist ethics are often applicable to analyses of moralexperiences that share features with gendered issues or that reflectthe intersection of gender with other bases of oppression. Feministphilosophical endeavors include bringing investigations motivated byfeminist ethics to bear on ethical issues, broadly conceived.

• 1. Feminist Ethics: Historical Background
  • 1.1 Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Forerunners of Feminist Ethics
  • 1.2 Nineteenth-Century Influences and Issues
  • 1.3 Twentieth-Century Influences and Issues
• 2. Themes in feminist ethics
  • 2.1 Gender binarism, essentialism, and separatism
  • 2.2 Ethic of care as a feminine or gendered approach to morality
  • 2.3 Intersectionality
  • 2.4 Feminist criticisms and expansions of traditional moral theories
  • 2.5 Rejections of absolutism: pragmatism, transnational feminism, and nonideal theory
• Bibliography
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Feminist Ethics: Historical Background

Feminist ethics as an academic area of study in the field ofphilosophy dates to the 1970s, when philosophical journals startedmore frequently publishing articles specifically concerned withfeminism and sexism (Korsmeyer 1973; Rosenthal 1973; Jaggar 1974), andafter curricular programs of Women’s Studies began to beestablished in some universities (Young 1977; Tuana 2011). Readersinterested in themes evident in the fifty years of feminist ethics inphilosophy will find this discussion in section (2) below,“Themes in Feminist Ethics.”

Prior to 1970, “there was no recognized body of feministphilosophy” (Card 2008, 90). Of course, throughout history,philosophers have attempted to understand the roles that gender mayplay in moral life. Yet such philosophers presumably were addressingmale readers, and their accounts of women’s moral capacities didnot usually aim to disrupt the subordination of women. Rarely in thehistory of philosophy will one find philosophical works that noticegender in order to criticize and correct men’s historicalprivileges or to disrupt the social orders and practices thatsubordinate groups on gendered dimensions. An understanding that sexmatters to one’s ethical theorizing in some way is necessary to,but not sufficient for, feminist ethics.

Some philosophers and writers in almost every century, however,constitute forerunners to feminist ethics. Representative authorswriting in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuriesdiscussed below explicitly address what they perceive to be moralwrongs resulting from either oppression on the basis of sex, ormetaethical errors on the part of public intellectuals in believingideal forms of moral reasoning to be within the capacities of men andnot women. In the early-to-mid-twentieth century, at the same timethatfeminism became a more popularly used term in Europe andthe Americas, more theorists argued influentially for ending unjustdiscrimination on the basis of sex. Some authors concertedly arguedthat philosophers and theorists erred in their understanding of whatseemed to be gendered differences in ethical and moral reasoning.

1.1 Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Forerunners of Feminist Ethics

In the seventeenth century, some public intellectuals publishedtreatises arguing that women were as rational as men and should beafforded the education that would allow them to develop their moralcharacter. They argued that since females are rational, their unequalaccess to learning was immoral and unjustifiable. They exploredmeta-ethical questions about the preconditions for morality, includingwhat sorts of agents can be moral and whether morality is equallypossible for different sexes. For example, in 1694, MaryAstell’s first edition ofA Serious Proposal to the Ladiesfor the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest waspublished, advocating for access to education. It was controversialenough that Astell issued a sequel three years later,A SeriousProposal, Part II, that challenged “those deep backgroundphilosophical and theological assumptions which deny women thecapacity for improvement of the mind” (Springborg,“Introduction,” in Astell 2002, 21). At the time, someapparently attributed the firstSerious Proposal not toAstell, but to Damaris Cudworth Masham, a one-time companion of JohnLocke, since such criticisms of the injustice of women’s lot andthe background assumptions maintaining their subordinate situationwere familiar to Masham (Springborg, “Introduction,” inAstell 2002, 17). Although Masham sharply disagreed with aspects ofAstell’s work, she too would later come to be credited with“explicitly feminist claims,” including objections to“the inferior education accorded women” (Frankel 1989,84), especially when such obstacles were due to “the ignoranceof men” (Masham 1705, 169, quoted in Frankel 1989, 85). Mashamalso deplored “the double standard of morality imposed on womenand men, especially … the claim that women's‘virtue’ consists primarily in chastity” (Frankel1989, 85).

A century later, Mary Wollstonecraft, in herVindication of theRights of Women ([1792] 1988), renewed attention to girls’lack of access to education. Criticizing the philosophical assumptionsunderpinning practices that denied girls adequate education,Wollstonecraft articulated an Enlightenment ideal of the social andmoral rights of women as the equal of men. Wollstonecraft alsobroadened her critique of social structures to encompass ethicaltheory, especially in resistance to the arguments of influential menthat women’s virtues are different from men’s andappropriate to perceived feminine duties. Wollstonecraft asserted:“I here throw down my gauntlet, and deny the existence of sexualvirtues,” adding that “women, I allow, may have differentduties to fulfil; but they arehuman duties, and theprinciples that should regulate the discharge of them … must bethe same” (51). The revolutions of the Enlightenment agemotivated some men as well as women to reconsider inequities ineducation at a time when notions of universal human rights weregaining prominence. As Joan Landes observes,Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet was anextraordinary advocate for the rights of women in France during thesame period who argued in 1790 for “the admission of women tothe rights of citizenship” and “woman's equal humanity onthe grounds of reason and justice” (Landes 2016). Like manytheorists of their time and places, including Catherine Macaulay(Tomaselli 2016), Olympe de Gouges, and Madame de Staël (Landes2016), Wollstonecraft and Condorcet granted that there were materialdifferences between the sexes, but advanced moral arguments againstethical double-standards on the basis of universal humanism. Yet thenotion of universal humanism tended to prioritize virtuestraditionally seen as masculine. Wollstonecraft, for example, arguedagainst perceptions that women lacked men’s capacities formorality, but praised rationality and “masculinity” aspreconditions for morality (Tong 1993, 44).

1.2 Nineteenth-Century Influences and Issues

In Europe and North America, nineteenth-century moral argumentscoalesced around material issues that would later be appreciated byfeminist ethicists as importantly intersecting. A remarkably diversearray of activist women and public intellectuals advanced recognizablyfeminist arguments for women’s moral leadership and greaterfreedoms as moral imperatives. The resistance of enslaved women andthe political activism of their descendants, the anti-slaveryorganizations of women in Europe and North America, the attention toinequity in women’s access to income, property, sexual freedom,full citizenship, and enfranchisement, and the rise of Marxist andSocialist theories contributed to women’s participation inarguments for the reductions of militarism, unfettered capitalism,domestic violence and the related abuse of drugs and alcohol, amongother concerns.

Offering the first occurrence of the termfeminisme (Offen1988), the nineteenth century is characterized by a plurality ofapproaches to protofeminist ethics, that is, ethical theorizing thatanticipated and created the groundwork for modern feminist concepts.These include some theories consistent with the universal humanism ofWollstonecraft and Condorcet and others emphasizing the differencesbetween the sexes in order to argue for the superiority of femininemorality. The most well-known of the former in philosophy are JohnStuart Mill’sThe Subjection of Women ([1869] 1987),which he credits Harriet Taylor Mill with co-authoring, and HarrietTaylor Mill’s essay, “The Enfranchisement of Women”(H. T. Mill [1851] 1998). Like their Enlightenment forerunners, Milland Taylor argue that women ought to have equal rights and equalaccess to political and social opportunities. As a utilitarianphilosopher, Mill further emphasizes the benefits to society and tothe human species of improving women’s lives and socialsituations. Mill expresses skepticism about claims that women aremorally superior to men, as well as claims that women have“greater liability to moral bias,” emotionality, and poorjudgment in ethical decision-making ([1869] 1987, 518 and 519). Milland Taylor tend to overemphasize the roles of women who are wives.They grant some differences between men and women that arecontroversial today; Mill’s works especially emphasize thebenefits to family and domestic life as reasons to support theliberation of women from subjugation. Despite these views, both arguefor the benefits of women’s liberation to scholarly andpolitical spheres. For example, they describe differences inachievement and behavior to be the result mainly of women’ssocial situations and education, making their view consistent with thearguments of both the Enlightenment scholars noted above, and some,but not all, of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century authorsdiscussed below.

Attitudes about the reasons for the moral goodness of suchachievements differed. Some early utopian and Socialist movements inEurope that influenced women’s rights activists in America andwould later influence British thinkers, including John Stuart Mill,lauded feminine virtues and women’s importance, but did so inways that would reinforce views of women as “superior”because of innate qualities of gentleness, love, spirituality, andsentimentality (Moses 1982). In contrast, other Socialist movementsexpressed radical views of the equality of men and women not byattributing distinctive or greater moral virtues to women, but bychallenging systems of privilege due to sex, race, and class (Taylor1993). Although Mill and Taylor would later argue that “sexualinequality is an impediment to the cultivation of moral virtue,”some American activists such as Catherine Beecher forwarded a“separate-but-equal” vision of men and women aspsychologically and essentially different, a view “according towhich female virtue is ultimately better than male virtue” (Tong1993, 36 and 37). In the pivotal year of 1848, Frederick Douglassinsisted that “all that distinguishes man as an intelligent andaccountable being, is equally true of woman” (quoted in Davis2011, 51). In the same year, theDeclaration of Sentimentswas signed at a women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, NewYork, and socialist and anarchist revolutions took place in Europe.The revolutionaries included public thinkers who advocated communalproperty and sexual equality, and who criticized the involvement ofstate and church in marriage. Their arguments about practical andfeminist ethics influenced Emma Goldman and other turn-of-the-centurythinkers.

Philosophical thinkers of different backgrounds gained greater access to education and printing presses in the nineteenth century, resulting in a plurality of approaches to the project of understanding, criticizing, and correcting how gender operates within our moral beliefs and practices. For example, theattachment of some protofeminist thinkers to the domestic virtuesshaped their ethical recommendations. Some white and middle-classactivists argued for the end of slavery and, later, against thesubordination of emancipated women of color precisely on the groundsthat they wished to extend the privileges that white and middle-classwomen enjoyed in the domestic and private sphere, maintaining thesocial order while valorizing domestic feminine goodness. As ClareMidgley says, “Women’s role was discussed in terms offamily life. Emancipation would mark the end of the sexualexploitation of women and of the disruption of family life, and thecreation of a society in which the black woman was able to occupy herproper station as a Daughter, a Wife, and a Mother” (Midgley1993, 351).

In contrast, some former slaves including Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B.Wells-Barnett, and descendants of slaves including Mary ChurchTerrell, grounded their work for women’s rights and argumentsfor women’s moral and sociopolitical equality in ratherdifferent priorities, asserting more interest in equal protection ofthe laws, economic liberation, political representation, and inWells-Barnett’s case, self-defense and the exertion of the rightto bear arms, as necessary to the very survival and liberation ofBlack Americans (Giddings 2007). Cooper, who rightly criticized whitefeminists for racist (and female-supremacist) statements when theywere offered as reasons to work for white women’s voting rightsrather than Black men’s, advanced a view of virtues and truth ashaving masculine and feminine sides. A century before care ethicswould become a strain of academic feminist ethics, Cooper urged thatboth masculine reason and feminine sympathy “are needed to beworked into the training of children, in order that our boys maysupplement their virility by tenderness and sensibility, and our girlsmay round out their gentleness by strength and self-reliance”(Cooper [1892] 2000, 60). Her timeless concern for the U.S. was that anation or a people “will degenerate into mere emotionalism onthe one hand, or bullyism on the other, if dominated by eitherexclusively” (61). Hers is a normative argument for appreciatingthe contributions that both traditionally feminine and masculinevalues could offer to a well-balanced ethics.

Explicitly arguing that standpoints matter to knowledge claims andmoral theorizing, Cooper insisted that historical knowledge necessaryto a nation’s self-understanding depends on the representationof Black Americans’ voices, and especially the “open-eyedbut hitherto voiceless Black Woman of America” (Cooper [1892]2000, 2; Gines 2015). Manifesting Cooper’s call forrepresentations, Wells-Barnett determinedly included accounts of girlsand women killed by lynching along with the narratives of murdered menand boys, and challenged the “racial-sexual apologies forlynching to trample the twin myths of white (female) sexual purity andblack (male) sexual savagery” (James 1997, 80).Wells-Barnett’s investigative journalism led her to the bluntsuggestion that some of the sexual relationships giving rise to coverstories of rape as justifications for lynching were consensualrelationships between white women and Black men, while rapes of Blackwomen and girls, “which began in slavery days, still continueswithout reproof from church, state or press” (quoted in Sterling1979, 81).

1.3 Twentieth-Century Influences and Issues

Like Wells-Barnett, anarchist and socialist writers, some fromworking-class backgrounds, advanced frank arguments for differentlyunderstanding women’s capacities and desires as sexual beingswith their own moral agency. Leaders included Emma Goldman, whoseanarchism was developed as a response to Marx and Marxism (Fiala2018). Goldman argued for broader understandings of love, sexuality,and family, because she believed that traditional social codes ofmorality resulted in the corruption of women’s sexualself-understanding (112). Like Wells-Barnett, Goldman coupledarguments against feminine sexual purity with attention to the sexualexploitation of, and trafficking in, women who did not enjoy thestate’s protection (Goldman 2012). Some suffragists’“emphasis on female morality repulsed Goldman. Yet, while sheridiculed the claim that women were morally superior to men …she also emphasized that women should be allowed and encouraged toexpress freely their ‘true’ femininity” (Marso 2010,76).

Although early twentieth-century protofeminists differed in theirbeliefs as to whether men and women were morally different incharacter, they generally shared a belief in Progressive ideals ofmoral and social improvement if only humankind brought fair andrational thinking to bear on ethical issues. Progressive-erapragmatists, including Wells-Barnett, Charlotte Perkins-Gilman, JaneAddams, and Alice Paul, “saw the social environment asmalleable, capable of improvement through human action and philosophicthought” (Whipps and Lake 2016). The beginning of the centurywas characterized by remarkably optimistic thinking even on the partof more radical theorists who appreciated the deep harms of oppressivesocial organizations. Most of the Progressive activists andsuffragists of this era never described themselves with the new term,“feminist,” but as the immediate forerunners of feminism,they are described as feminists today.

Although belief in the possibilities for change seems widely shared,Progressive-era feminists did not always share common ground regardingwomen’s moral natures or how to achieve moral progress as anation. For example, both Goldman and pro-suffrage CharlottePerkins-Gilman argued for individual self-transformation andself-understanding as keys to women’s better moral characters(Goldman 2012), while maintaining that a person’s efforts werebest supported by a less individualistic and more communitarian socialand political framework (Gilman 1966). While Goldman included greateraccess to birth control and reproductive choice among the morallyurgent routes to women’s individual self-discovery, Gilman andmany feminists argued for women’s access to contraception inways that reflected increasingly popular policies of eugenics in Northand South America and Europe (Gilman 1932). Eugenics-friendly whitewomen’s contributions of feminist ethical arguments to disruptoppressive pronatalism or to avert the measurable costs of parenthoodin sexist societies often took the form of deepening other forms ofmarginalization, including those based on race, disability, and class(Lamp and Cleigh 2011).

In the U.S., the centrality of sex and gender issues in public ethicsreached a high-water mark during the Progressive Era, moving onemagazine to write in 1914 that “The time has come to definefeminism; it is no longer possible to ignore it” (Cott 1987,13). Unfortunately, this sentiment would decline with the start ofWorld War I and the consequent demise of optimistic beliefs in thepowers of human rationality to bring about moral progress. Yetthroughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, as economic difficulties,military conflicts, and wealth disparity fluctuated internationally,women’s groups and feminist activists in many countries wouldadvance, with some success, feminist and moral arguments forworkplace, professional, electoral, and educational access, for theliberalization of contraception, marriage, and divorce laws, andagainst militarism. Some of their gains in greater access to voting,education, and prosperity may have contributed to the wide audiencethat was receptive to Simone de Beauvoir’s publications inEurope and, after translations were available, in North America.

Beauvoir first self-identified as a feminist in 1972 (Schwarzer 1984,32), and consistently refused the label of a philosopher despitehaving taught courses in philosophy (Card 2003, 9). Yet beginning inthe 1950s, both herEthics of Ambiguity ([1947] 1976) andThe Second Sex ([1949] 2010) were widely read and quicklyappreciated as important to feminist ethics (Card 2003, 1). As worksof existentialist morality, they emphasized that we are not all simplysubjects and individual choosers but also objects shaped by the forcesof oppression (Andrew 2003, 37). Like the protofeminists describedabove, Beauvoir focused on the embodied experiences and socialsituations of women. In these pivotal works, she advanced the casethat embodiment and social situatedness are not only relevant to humanexistence, but are the stuff of human existence, so crucial thatphilosophy ought not ignore them (Andrew 2003, 34). InThe SecondSex, she argued that some men in philosophy managed the bad-faithproject of both ignoring their own sex-situatedness and yet describingwomen as the Other and men as the Self. Because men in philosophy takethemselves to be paradigmatically human and take it upon themselves tocharacterize the nature of womankind as different from men, Beauvoirsaid that men socially construct woman as the Other. Famously,Beauvoir said, “one is not born, but rather becomes,woman,” that is, one may be born a human female, but “thefigure that the human female takes on in society,” that of a“woman,” results from “the mediation of another[that] can constitute an individual as an Other” (Beauvoir[1949] 2010, 329). The embodied human female may be a subject of herown experiences and perceptions, but “being a woman would meanbeing an object, the Other” (83), that is, the objectifiedrecipient of the speculations and perceptions of men. Beauvoirdescribed a woman who would transcend this situation “ashesitating between the role of object, of Other that is proposed toher, and her claim for freedom” (84), that is, her freedom toassert her own subjectivity, to make her own choices as to who she is,especially when she is not defined in relation to men. A woman’sposition is therefore so deeply ambiguous—one of navigating“a human condition as defined in its relation with theOther” (196)—that if one is to philosophize about women,“it is indispensable to understand the economic and socialstructure” in which women aim to be authentic or ethical,necessitating “an existential point of view, taking into accounther total situation” (84). In other words, philosophersspeculating about women ought to take into account the obstacles towomen’s opportunities for subjecthood and choice that arecreated by those who constructed an oppressive situation for women tonavigate.

Beauvoir’s positions—thatwoman has been definedby men and in men’s terms, that ethical theory must attend towomen’s social situation and their capacity to be moraldecision-makers, and that women’s oppression impedes theirknowing themselves and changing their situation—reflect theconcerns of many forerunners of feminist ethics. Beauvoir’s workprofoundly shaped the emergence of feminist ethics as a subfield ofphilosophy at a time when philosophers more generally had moved awayfrom the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tendencies to describewomen as lacking morally worthy rational capacities. Instead, by themiddle of the twentieth century, some influential philosophers inEurope and the Americas had moved toward approaches that often led todescribing both gender and ethics as irrelevant to philosophicaldiscourse (Garry 2017).

2. Themes in feminist ethics

In the fifty years that feminist ethics has been a subject ofphilosophical scholarship in (initially) Western and (increasingly)international discourse, theorists have considered metaethical,theoretical, and practical questions. Questions that occupied scholarsin preceding centuries, especially those regarding moral agents’natural (and gendered) capacities for moral deliberation, arecritically reconsidered in debates that arose in the 1970s and 1980s.One main area of inquiry addresses whether and why there may bemeaningful differences in feminine and masculine priorities of careand justice in normative theory. Concern about feminist methods ofarticulating ethical theories arise during this time and continue.These debates can be found in the scholarship of intersectionality,Black feminist thought and women of color feminism, transnationalfeminism, queer theory, disability studies, and twenty-first centurycriticisms of feminist ethics. They are of special concern wheneverfeminist ethicists seem to uphold a gender binary and simplisticconceptualizations ofwoman as a category. Questions aboutthe shortcomings of traditional ethical theories, about which virtuesconstitute morally good character in contexts of oppression, and aboutwhich kinds of ethical theories will ameliorate gendered oppressionsand evils generate critical scholarship in every decade.

2.1 Gender binarism, essentialism, and separatism

Gender binarism, which is the view that there are only twogenders—male and female—and that everyone is only one ofthem (Dea 2016a, 108), is assumed by most feminist ethicists in the1970s and 1980s (Jaggar 1974; Daly 1979). Some of these feministscriticize male supremacy without thereby preferring female supremacy(Frye 1983; Card 1986; Hoagland 1988). They argue that although thecategories of “men” and “women” arephysiologically distinct, the potential of feminism to liberate bothmen and women from oppressive gendered social arrangements suggeststhat men and women do not have different moralities or separaterealities, and that we do not need to articulate separate capacitiesfor ethics (Jaggar 1974; Davion 1998).

Other feminist ethicists offer radically different views. Mary Daly,for example, argues inGyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of RadicalFeminism that women were traditionally defined throughoutintellectual history as being subversive of rationality, impartiality,and morality as traditionally conceived. Daly argues that women oughtto embrace, as essential to women’s natures and good, some ofthe very qualities that she says men have ascribed to women asessential to women’s natures and bad. Daly suggests valuing bothwomen’s capacities for childbearing and birth (as opposed tocapacities to engage in war and killing) and women’semotionality (versus rationality) (Daly 1979).

Radical feminists and lesbian feminists who disagree with Daly as towhether women’s moral natures are innately better thanmen’s agree with Daly in arguing either for essentialism(Griffin 1978;cf. Spelman 1988 and Witt 1995) or forwomen’s separation from men (Card 1988; Hoagland 1988). Some ofthem argue that separatism allows a setting in which to createalternative ethics, rather than merely responding to themale-dominated ethical theories traditionally discussed in theacademy. They also argue that separatism better fosters women’sincreased connection to each other and denies men the access to womenthat men might expect (Daly 1979; Frye 1983; Hoagland 1988).

In deep disagreement, philosophers such as Alison Jaggar argue againstseparatism as being in any way productive of a different and morallybetter world. Jaggar maintains that “what we must do instead isto create a new androgynous culture which incorporates the bestelements of both …, which values both personal relationshipsand efficiency, both emotion and rationality. This result cannot beachieved through sexual separation” (Jaggar 1974, 288). Relatedarguments for androgynous approaches to ethics are influential inarguments supporting androgyny, gender bending, and gender-blendingthat are prevalent in the 1990s (Butler 1990; Butler 1993), andgender-eliminativist and humanist approaches to feminist ethics andsocial philosophy that are prevalent in the twenty-first century(LaBrada 2016; Mikkola 2016; Ayala and Vasilyeva 2015; Haslanger2012).

One criticism of gender binarism is that its assumption marginalizesnonconforming individuals. In efforts described as promoting coalitionbetween trans activists and non-trans feminists, some feminists arguethat we ought to examine the gender privilege inherent in presuming abinary that reflects one’s own experience better than theexperiences of others (Dea 2016a; Bettcher 2014). Yet such“beyond-the-binary” approaches, in turn, have beencautioned against as well-intentioned but, at times, invalidatingtrans identities, “by invalidating the self-identities of transpeople who do not regard their genitals as wrong” or “byrepresenting all trans people as problematically positioned withregard to the binary” (Bettcher 2013). Recognition of“reality enforcement” and its interconnection with racistand sexist oppression may better defray the harms of normalizing agender binary (Bettcher 2013).

2.2 Ethic of care as a feminine or gendered approach to morality

Jaggar argues against separatism or separate gendered realities,noting that there is no reason “to believe in a sexual polaritywhich transcends the physiological distinction” (Jaggar 1974,283). The work of psychologist Carol Gilligan therefore has greatinfluence on philosophers interested in just such evidence forsubstantial sex differences in moral reasoning, despite the fact thatGilligan herself does not describe these differences as polar. In herlandmark work,In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory andWomen’s Development (1982), Gilligan disputes accounts ofmoral development that do not take into account girls’ moralexperiences (18–19), or that describe women as stuck at aninterpersonal stage short of full moral development as in the theoriesof Lawrence Kohlberg (30). Gilligan argues that Kohlberg wronglyprioritizes a “morality of rights” and independence fromothers as better than, rather than merely different from, a“morality of responsibility” and intimate relationshipswith others (19).

Gilligan’s research follows Nancy Chodorow’s in suggestingthat for boys and men, “separation and individuation arecritically tied to gender identity” (Gilligan 1982, 8). Further,the development of masculinity typically involves valuing autonomy,rights, disconnection from others, and independence, while seeingother persons and intimate relationships as dangers or obstacles topursuing those values. This perspective is referred to as the“perspective of justice” (Held 1995; Blum 1988). Women, inGilligan’s studies, were as likely to express the perspective ofjustice as they were to express a perspective that valued intimacy,responsibility, relationships, and caring for others, while seeingautonomy as “the illusory and dangerous quest” (Gilligan1982, 48), in tension with the values of attachment. This perspectiveis known as the perspective of “care” (Friedman 1991;Driver 2005).

Philosophers who apply Gilligan’s empirical results to ethicaltheory differ about the role that a care perspective should play innormative recommendations. Nel Noddings’s influential work,Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education(1984), argues for the moral preferability of a care perspective asboth feminine and, as she later says explicitly, feminist (Noddings2013, xxiv), orienting moral agents to focus on the needs of those onecares for in relational contexts rather than on abstract, universalprinciples. Like her historical predecessors discussed above, Noddingsemphasizes the feminine “to direct attention to centuries ofexperience more typical of women than men” (xxiv), in part tocorrect the extent to which “the mother’s voice has beensilent” (1). Noddings’s normative theory endorses themoral value of partiality that justifies prioritizing interpersonalrelationships over more distant connections. Virginia Held’s(1993; 2006) and Joan Tronto’s (1993) different applications ofthe perspective of care endorse care as social and political ratherthan limited to interpersonal relationships, and suggest that an ethicof care provides a route to realizing better societies as well asbetter treatment of distant others. Both Held and Sara Ruddick (1989)urge societal shifts to prioritize children’s vulnerabilitiesand the perspectives of mothers as necessary correctives to moral andpolitical neglect of policies that would ensure the well-being ofvulnerable people in relationships requiring care. This concern isfurther elaborated in Eva Feder Kittay’s attention to caregiversas “secondarily” or “derivatively dependent”(1999). In normative theory and applied ethics, care-work and caringin workplace relationships have come to receive more attention intwenty-first century philosophy than previously, as appreciation forthe ethical demands of relational support-provision andclient-centered or helping professions come to be influenced byvariations on the ethic of care (Kittay 1999; Feder and Kittay 2002;Tronto 2005; Lanoix 2010; Reiheld 2015).

Robin Dillon observes that, “Care ethics was for some time thedominant approach in feminist ethics and so feminist discussions ofvirtue” (2017b, 574). Although the ethic of care continues to bestrongly associated with feminist ethics, Gilligan’s work inpsychology and Noddings’s work in philosophy were immediatelycontested (Superson 2012). Some feminist ethicists have argued thatthe ethic of care valorizes the burdened history of femininityassociated with caring (Card 1996). The complex history of femininityand caregiving practices were shaped in contexts of oppression thatmay permit “moral damage” to women’s agency (Tessman2005). If that burdened feminine history includes attention toparticular relationships at the expense of attention to wider socialinstitutions and systematic political injustice, then the ethic ofcare runs the risk of lacking a feminist vision for changingsystematic and institutional forms of oppression (Hoagland 1990; Bell1993). Further worries about the ethic of care include whetherunidirectional caring enables the exploitation of caregivers (Houston1990; Card 1990; Davion 1993), and whether such caring excludes moralresponsibilities to strangers and individuals we may affect withoutmeeting interpersonally (Card 1990), thereby risking an insular ethicthat ignores political and material realities (Hoagland 1990). Anotherconcern is whether we risk generalizing some women’sprioritizing caring to all women, which disregards the complexpluralism of many women’s voices (Moody-Adams 1991). Finally,preoccupation with women’s kinder and gentler feelings mayprevent or distract from attention to women’s capacities forharm and injustice, especially the injustices borne of racial andclass privilege (Spelman 1991).

The above criticisms tend to proceed from a view that it isproblematic that an ethic of care is predicated on seeing femininityas valuable. They suggest that critical feminist perspectives requireus to doubt the value of femininity. However, it remains controversialwhether femininity is necessarily defined in relationship tomasculinity and is thereby an inauthentic or insufficiently criticalperspective for feminist ethics, or whether femininity is adistinctive contribution of moral and valuing agents to a feministproject that rejects or corrects some of the errors and excesses oflegacies of masculinity (Irigaray 1985; Harding 1987; Tong 1993;Bartky 1990).

2.3 Intersectionality

One way that some philosophers offer to resolve the possible tensionbetween conceptions of femininity and feminism is to bringintersectional approaches to the question as to whose femininity isbeing discussed. Concerns that femininity is antithetical to acritical feminist perspective seem to presuppose a conception offemininity as passive, gentle, obedient, emotional, and dependent, incontrast with a conception of masculinity as its opposite. In aphilosophical tradition dominated by white and masculine philosophers,describing femininity as necessarily the opposite of one’sconception of masculinity in a gender binary makes limited sense.Scholars of intersectionality point out, however, that identities arenot binary: “the masculinity and femininity in play here are notracially unmarked (if only for the reason that gender is neverracially unmarked)” (James 2013, 752). The insights ofphilosophers of Black Feminism, intersectionality, queer theory,critical race theory, disability studies, and transfeminism, amongothers, contribute to a view that there is no universal definition offemininity or of the category of woman that neatly applies to allwomen. Some of these philosophers suggest that the distinctive moraland valuing experiences of women and individuals of all genders may beunjustly ignored or denied by a conception of women or femininity thatturns out to be white, ableist, and cisgender (Crenshaw 1991; Collins1990; Wendell 1996; hooks 1992; Tremain 2000; Serano 2007; McKinnon2014). Intersectional approaches reject binaries such as“masculinity/femininity” that tend to take the socialpositions of privileged people as generic. Minimally,intersectionality is “the predominant way of conceptualizing therelation between systems of oppression which construct our multipleidentities and our social locations in hierarchies of power andprivilege,” offering a remedy to histories of exclusions infeminist theory (Carastathis 2014, 304).

Although intersectional insights can be found in the works of writerseven from the distant past, the predominance of intersectionality infeminist ethics today is largely owed to Black feminists and criticalrace theorists, who were the first to argue for the significance ofintersectionality (Crenshaw 1989; Collins 1990; Gines 2014; Bailey2009). Kimberlé Crenshaw describes intersectionality indifferent senses: as an experience, an approach, and a problem(Crenshaw 1989; Crenshaw 1991). Crenshaw’s description ofintersectionality as an experience includes the phenomena ofoppressive practices and harms that occur at, and because of,intersections of aspects of identity. For example, when Black men, butnot any women, were permitted to work on a General Motors factoryfloor, and white women, but not any Black persons, were permitted towork in the General Motors secretarial pool, then Black women werediscriminated against as Black women. That is, they were not permittedto have any job at General Motors due to living at an intersection ofcategories of identity that are treated separately in the law(Crenshaw 1989). Crenshaw’s description of intersectionality asan approach includes centering the lives and testimony of those whoseexperiences with living at intersections of oppressions have beenignored or denied in traditional philosophical and political theories(Crenshaw 1989; Crenshaw 1991; hooks 1984; Dotson 2014; Lorde 1990;Lugones 1987; Lugones 2014). Crenshaw’s description ofintersectionality as a problem includes disrupting the traditionaloverlooking of Black women’s experiences, and offering theexperiences and the approaches described above as challenges to thedoctrine that discrimination occurs only along one axis of identity(Crenshaw 1989, 141). Intersectionality is pursued in the interests ofexpanding understandings of differences and accounting for theexperiences of people previously spoken for, if addressed at all,rather than consulted.

Not all philosophers who embrace appreciation of the insights ofintersectionality agree on whether it yields a distinct methodology,or a starting point for better inquiry, or a better conception ofexperiences of oppression (Khader 2013; Garry 2011). Serene Khadersuggests that intersectional theories “are united by a critiqueof what Crenshaw (1991) calls ‘additive’ models ofidentity” that assume that individuals at intersections oftraditionally oppressed identity categories are “necessarilyworse off than the individual facing a single oppression,” as ifeach dimension on which one can be oppressed is easily separable incategories traditionally conceived in isolation (Khader 2013, 75).Instead, “intersectional theorists argue that the oppressionsfacing multiply oppressed women co-constitute one another and situatethose women such that attempts to advance the interests of ‘allwomen’ may fail to advance theirs” (Khader 2013, 75).

Intersectionality is not without its critics in feminist ethics. Forexample, Naomi Zack (2005) argues that an intersectional approach toconcepts such as that ofwoman successfully demonstratesproblems with essentialism with respect to women’s natures, butdegrades the category of woman, “multiplying axes of analysisand thus gender categories beyond necessity” (Bailey 2009, 21)to an extent that may thereby fragment attempts to advocate for women(Zack 2005; Ludvig 2006; Sengupta 2006). Some feminists who supportintersectionality have responded to Zack’s concerns by arguingthat everyday concepts such aswoman include an array ofidentities, including distinct gender identities that bear a familyresemblance and include a range of manifestations (Garry 2011). Otherfeminists have responded to Zack’s concerns for feministmovement or solidarity by arguing for the possibilities of working incoalitions that do not require widely shared commonality, working tolearn from and about positions of difference, and cultivating morehumility and less arrogance in theorizing (Lorde 1984; Lugones 1987;Reagon 2000; Bailey 2009; Carastathis 2014; Sheth 2014; Ruízand Dotson 2017). Other feminist ethicists raise tensions inintersectional theory that are not intended to undermine the approachbut to ask for elaboration of its details, including its verydefinition (Nash 2008). The appeal for these clarifications, however,may reflect traditions that intersectionality is dedicated todisrupting, since it is made in the context of the pursuit ofjustification, habits of opposition, and a narrow sense ofdefinitional work that is typical in philosophy, a field that has areputation for lacking appreciation for diverse practitioners (Dotson2013).

2.4 Feminist criticisms and expansions of traditional moral theories

If there is a commonality between all of the above feminist ethicists,it is their interest in provoking reconsideration of ethical theoriesthat failed either to notice or to care when the perspective of thephilosopher so criticized was taken for either a generic truth aboutmoral theory or a gender-specific and false description of humannature. Elena Flores Ruíz observes that “professionalphilosophysleepwalks; its somnambulatory practices strollsilently, policing checkpoints without the burden of consciousness ofits actions and practices” (2014, 199). In other words,philosophers have at times presumed that they speak for many withoutsufficient attention to their own presumptions. Ruíz’sclaim is akin to Rosemarie Tong’s observation made decadesearlier, that traditional ethical theory demonstrates “a sleepyinattentiveness to women’s concerns” (1993, 160). Theprovocation to alertness is evident in feminist critiques oftraditional ethical theories such as deontology, consequentialism,social contract theory, and virtue ethics. Some feminist ethicistssympathetically extend canonical work to concerns that male theoristsdid not address, while other feminist ethicists resoundingly rejecttraditional ethical theories because the theories rely on a conceptionof moral agency or moral value with which they disagree.

2.4.1 Deontology, rights, and duties

Some feminist ethicists endorse deontological moral theories on thegrounds that granting women—who have been subordinated inprivate and public spheres—the same rights routinely granted tomen in positions of power would enable women’s freedom andflourishing, especially in contexts of political liberalism. Feministethicists have long argued that we should acknowledge women’sequal capacities for moral agency and extend human rights to them(Astell 1694; Wollstonecraft 1792; Stanton [1848] 1997; Mill [1869]1987; Nussbaum 1999; Baehr 2004; Stone-Mediatore 2004; Hay 2013).While building on existing frameworks of liberalism, rights theory,and deontology, feminist ethicists have argued for granting rightswhere they have been previously neglected (Brennan 2010). They haveargued for rights in the issues of enfranchisement (Truth [1867]1995), reproduction (Steinbock 1994), abortion (Thomson 1971), bodilyintegrity (Varden 2012), women’s and non-heterosexualpeople’s sexuality (Goldman 2012; Cuomo 2007), sexual harassment(Superson 1993), pornography (Easton 1995), violence against women(Dauer and Gomez 2006), rape (MacKinnon 2006), and more. Whilerecognizing limits to the universality of women’s experiences,feminist philosophers have argued for global human rights as a remedyfor gendered oppression and dehumanization (Cudd 2005; Meyers2016).

Feminist criticism of duty-centered frameworks, or, deontology,include those articulated by authors of the ethic of care, who argueagainst an ethic of duty, especially Kantian ethics, on severalgrounds. First, they claim that it proceeds from absolutist anduniversal principles which are unduly prioritized over considerationof the material contexts informing embodied experiences,particularities, and relationships. Second, they claim that itinaccurately separates capacities for rationality from capacities foremotion, and that it wrongly describes the latter as morallyuninformative or worthless most likely because of their traditionalassociation with women or femininity (Noddings 1984; Held 1993; Slote2007). Moreover, an ethic of duty is likely to overly idealize moralagents’ capacities for rationality and choice (Tronto 1995;Tessman 2015). Some feminist ethicists embrace forms of obligation yetreject Kantian deontology when it denies the possibility of moraldilemmas (Tessman 2015). Feminists who argue that duties are sociallyconstructed, rather than a priori, ground the nature of obligations inthe normative practices of the nonideal world (Walker 1998; Walker2003).

Transnational feminists, scholars of intersectionality, andpostcolonial feminists argue that feminist advocates of global humanrights routinely impose their own cultural expectations and regionalpractices upon the women who are purportedly the objects of theirconcern (Mohanty 1997; Narayan 1997; Narayan 2002; Silvey 2009;Narayan 2013; Khader 2018a; Khader 2018b). Critical analyses of somefeminist deontologists’ concerns include arguments thatuniversal morals, rights, and duties are not the best bulwark againstrelativist condonation of any and all possible treatments of women andsubordinated people (Khader 2018b) and suggest that advocacy of humanrights is perhaps well-intentioned but “entangled withimperialist precommitments in the contemporary West” (Khader2018a, 19).

2.4.2 Consequentialism and utilitarianism

Since John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill argued both forutilitarianism and against the subjection of women, one could say thatthere have been feminists as long as there have been utilitarians. InThe Subjection of Women ([1869] 1987), Mill argues that thedesirable outcome of human moral progress generally is hindered bywomen’s legal and social subordination. He adds that not onlyeach woman’s, but each man’s personal moral character isdirectly harmed by the injustice of unequal social arrangements (Okin2005). Mill expresses special concern that “the object of beingattractive to men had … become the polar star of feminineeducation and formation of character,” an immoral“influence over the minds of women” (Mill [1869] 1987,28–29), as well as an immoral influence on the understandings ofthe boys and girls that such women raise. Consistent with theutilitarian principle that everyone counts equally and no singleperson’s preferences count more than another’s, Millargues that men and women are fundamentally equal in their capacitiesfor higher and lower pleasures and, arguably, in theirresponsibilities and interests (Mendus 1994). Harriet Taylor likewiseargues inThe Enfranchisement of Women for the moralimprovement of humankind generally and “the elevation ofcharacter [and] intellect” that would permit each woman and manto be both morally better and happier, which are overlapping andimportant considerations to Taylor (1998, 65).

Contemporary feminist ethicists who address utilitarianism eithercritique Mill’s work in particular (Annas 1977; Mendus 1994;Morales 2005), or defend a feminist version of consequentialism(Driver 2005; Gardner 2012), or apply consequentialist aims tofeminist issues (Tulloch 2005; Dea 2016b). Some consequentialistfeminists provide reasons for thinking that utilitarianism canaccommodate feminist aims because it is responsive to empiricalinformation, can accommodate the value of relationships in good lives,and is appreciative of distinctive vulnerabilities (Driver 2005).

Critics of utilitarianism include those who specifically resist theexpectation of utilitarian impartiality, insofar as impartiality indecision-making ignores emotional connections or personalrelationships with particular beings. Feminists have advancedcriticisms of impartiality from the points of view of care ethics(Noddings 1984; Held 2006; Ruddick 1989), ecofeminist or environmentalethics (Adams 1990; Donovan 1990; George 1994; Warren 2000), andanalytical social ethics (Baier 1994; Friedman 1994). Impartiality mayyield implausible requirements to value the well-being of all equallyregardless of one’s commitments, material circumstances in anonideal world, or obligations of caring (Walker 1998; Walker 2003).Impartiality as a desirable quality of moral agents may overlyidealize moral agency (Tessman 2015) or tacitly presume a biasedperspective in favor of adult, racially privileged, masculine agentsin a formal or public sphere whose decisions are unencumbered byrelationships of unequal power (Kittay 1999).

Some feminists criticize consequentialism for failing to capture thequalitatively problematic nature of oppressions that are not reducibleto harms (Frye 1983; Card 1996; Young 2009). For example, Card arguesthat even if certain behavior does not produce more harm than good,its symbolism could violate one’s dignity. Her example is thecase of women being barred from Harvard’s Lamont Law libraryeven when helpful male classmates provided them photocopies of coursereadings (2002, 104–105). Card also objects on Rawlsian groundsthat the wrongness of slavery was not the balance of benefits andharms, contra consequentialism, but the fact that trade-offs couldnever justify slavery (2002, 57).

Anti-imperialist and non-Western feminists argue that Mill’sviews in particular purport to be universal but include “WesternEuropean biases and instrumental reasoning” that establish“problematic rhetorical models for women’s rightsarguments” (Botting and Kronewitter 2012). For example, EileenBotting and Sean Kronewitter argue thatThe Subjection ofWomen contains several examples of primitivist and Orientalistrhetorical moves, such as associating “the barbarism ofpatriarchal marriage with Eastern cultures and religions” (2012,471). They also object that Mill offers instrumental arguments forwomen’s rights, such as favoring the reduction of men’sselfishness and the increase in men’s intellectual stimulationin marriage, as well as doubling mental resources for the higherservice of humanity (2012, 470), suggesting that women’sliberation is secondary to greater purposes.

2.4.3 Moral contractarianism

Some feminist ethicists argue for forms of contractarian ethics, thatis, the view “that moral norms derive their normative force fromthe idea of contract or mutual agreement” (Cudd and Eftekhari2018). Contractarian ethics permit moral agents to critically assessthe value of any relationship, especially family relationships thatmay be oppressive on gendered dimensions (Okin 1989; Hampton 1993;Sample 2002; Radzik 2005). Other feminist contractarians appreciateHobbes’s social contract theory for its applicability to womenin positions of vulnerability. For example, Jean Hampton endorsesHobbes’s view that “you are under no obligation to makeyourself prey to others” (Hampton 1998, 236). Hampton combinesinsights of both Kant and Hobbes in her version of feministcontractarianism, “building in the Kantian assumption that allpersons have intrinsic value and thus must have their interestsrespected” (Superson 2012; see also Richardson 2007).Contractarianism arguably corrects gross injustices and inequitiestraceable to gendered oppressions and the most serious evils that aresocially constructed (Anderson 1999; Hartley and Watson 2010).

Some feminists argue for the usefulness of contractarian ethics toevaluate one’s adaptive preferences, that is, “preferencesformed in unconscious response to oppression” (Walsh 2015, 829).For example, Mary Barbara Walsh argues that social contract theorymodels “the conditions of autonomous choice, independence anddialogical reflection,” and therefore “exposes preferencesthat fail to meet” the conditions of autonomy. Feministcontractarianism may thereby generate new understandings of socialcontracts grounded in appreciation of material conditions,commitments, and consent (Stark 2007; Welch 2012). Feministcontractarians whose moral theories are influenced by JohnRawls’s political philosophy suggest that his methodology, whichinvolves reasoning from behind a veil of ignorance to decide whichrules persons are rational to agree to, promotes critical appraisal ofpreferences that one would not hold in a better world (Richardson2007, 414).

Feminist critics of contractarianism also raise concerns aboutadaptive preferences. In the actual, nonideal conditions in whichindividuals and groups develop, dominant perspectives and oppressivesocial arrangements can make persons come to prefer things that theywould not otherwise prefer, such that the resultant preferences, whensatisfied, are not for the agent’s own good, and may evencontribute to her group’s oppression (Superson 2012). Feministswho are concerned that not all moral agents can meaningfully consentto contracts point to examples of women who are denied access to thepublic sphere, the market, education, and information (Held 1987;Pateman 1988). Others point out that traditionally, social contracttheory has not attended to the inclusion of the needs of children,disabled community members, or their caregivers (Held 1987; Kittay1999; Edenberg and Friedman 2013). Feminist critics ofcontractarianism tend to argue both for full consideration of needsborn of differences between bodies and social locations, and againstdescribing gender, embodiment, or dependency as a mere secondarycharacteristic irrelevant to what a body in need of care requires toflourish and thus what a “reasonable man” would choosebehind a veil of ignorance (Nussbaum 2006; Pateman and Mills2007).

2.4.4 Virtue ethics

Some feminist ethicists contend that virtue ethics, which focuses onliving a good life or flourishing, offers the best approach toensuring that ethical theory correctly represents the conditionspermitting vulnerable bodies to flourish in oppressive contexts.Although virtue ethics is most notably associated with Aristotle,whose idealized and masculine agent is not generally consideredparadigmatically feminist (Berges 2015, 3–4), feminists andtheir forerunners have engaged critically for several centuries withquestions about which virtues and qualities of character would promotea good life in the context of what we now describe as women’ssubordination. Philosophers who argue for feminist ethical virtuesraise concerns that sexist oppression presents challenges to theexercise of virtues on the part of women and gender non-conformingpeople. Robin Dillon observes that feminist virtue ethics“identifies problems for character in contexts of domination andsubordination and proposes ways of addressing those problems, and itidentifies problems of unreflective theory and proposespower-conscious alternatives” (2017a, 381). Because the historyof traditional virtue ethics is freighted with past characterizationsof virtues as either gendered or as universal but less accessible towomen, Dillon proposes what she calls “feminist criticalcharacter ethics” as an alternative to feminist virtue ethics(2017a, 380). Advocates of feminist virtue ethics and criticalcharacter ethics consider the relationships of gender to accounts ofcharacter, virtues, vices, and good lives (Baier 1994; Card 1996;Cuomo 1998; Calhoun 1999; Dillon 2017a; Snow 2002; Tessman 2005; Greenand Mews 2011; Berges 2015; Broad 2015; Harvey 2018).

Like the ethic of care, virtue ethics is often described as offering atheory that is not beholden to abstract and universal principles(Groenhout 2014), but instead acknowledges “that moral reasoningmight be an extraordinarily complex phenomenon …, a view onwhich what the ethical life requires of us cannot be codified orreduced to a single principle or set of principles” (Moody-Adams1991, 209–210). A further commonality between care and virtuethat is of interest to feminists is that “virtue theory, likecare ethics, rejects a simplistic dichotomy between reason andemotion, and does not begin from the assumption that all human beingsare essentially equal” (Groenhout 2014, 487). Ethical theoriesof virtue or character tend to appreciate the importance of emotionsand interpersonal relationships to a person’s moral development.Some virtue ethics also focus on what opportunities for virtue areavailable to agents in particular social contexts, which is useful infeminist ethics when it comes to delineating our responsibilities asrelational beings and as characters who may exhibit vices resultingfrom oppression (Bartky 1990; Potter 2001; Bell 2009; Tessman 2009a;Slote 2011; Boryczka 2012).

Indeed, the ethic of care bears so many important similarities tovirtue ethics that some authors have argued that a feminist ethic ofcare just is a form or a subset of virtue ethics (Groenhout 1998;Slote 1998; McLaren 2001; Halwani 2003). Others believe that at aminimum, care and virtue ethics should inform each other and arecompatible with each other (Benner 1997; Sander-Staudt 2006). Here,too, however, feminist ethicists disagree. Some contend that lumpingtogether care and virtue might render the complexity of moralexperiences and available moral responses less understandable ratherthan more articulate (Groenhout 2014). Others suggest that thisconsolidation might overlook important theoretical distinctions,including the capacity for virtue ethics to be gender-neutral whilethe ethic of care maintains a commitment to embodied, particular, andgendered experiences (Sander-Staudt 2006).

Virtue ethics provides wider opportunities for feminist ethics toattend to virtues such as integrity and courage in oppressive contextsthat the ethic of care tends not to prioritize (Davion 1993;Sander-Staudt 2006). Resistance itself may be a “burdenedvirtue,” which is Lisa Tessman’s term for virtues thatallow moral agents, even ones damaged by oppression, to endure andresist oppression, permitting a form of nobility that falls short ofeudaimonia (Tessman 2005). Tessman argues that when agentslive under conditions of systemic injustice, their opportunities toflourish are blocked and their pursuits may even be hopeless. Shesuggests that “the burdened virtues include all those traitsthat make a contribution to human flourishing—if they succeed indoing so at all—only because they enable survival of orresistance to oppression …, while in other ways they detractfrom their bearer's well-being, in some cases so deeply that theirbearer may be said to lead a wretched life” (Tessman 2005, 95).Feminist ethicists have explored virtues that permit the sort of“conditioned flourishing” that Tessman describes (2009,14), extending discussion of the virtues to specific applications innonideal circumstances in which vulnerability is fundamental to thenature of a moral agent (Nussbaum 1986; Card 1996; Walker 2003). Forexample, feminists have argued for distinctive virtues in contextssuch as whistleblowing and organizational resistance (DesAutels 2009),healthcare (Tong 1998), and ecological activism (Cuomo 1998).

Feminist criticisms of the limits of virtue ethics point to itsemphasis on the personal as potentially problematic when it comes to“accounting for the possibility of social criticism andresistance on the part of the self who is constituted by the verysocial relationships and cultural traditions that would be the targetof her resistance” (Friedman 1993). Virtue ethics may alsoinclude intrusive requirements to self-evaluate one’s everyfeeling or practice to an extent that an ethic of duty, for example,would not require (Conly 2001). Some care ethicists, most notably NelNoddings (1984), argue that virtue ethics can be overly self-regardingrather than attentive to the point of view of another, and that itlocates moral motivation in rational, abstract, and idealizedconceptions of the good life rather than in the natural well-spring ofmoral motivation that is generated by encounters with particularpersons.

2.5 Rejections of absolutism: pragmatism, transnational feminism, and nonideal theory

As is evident from the foregoing, feminist ethics is not monolithic.Feminists have sometimes clashed over being essentialist oranti-essentialist. Some feminist work is authored by members ofprivileged groups, while other feminist work is written by and attendsto concerns of those in marginalized groups. Some feminists havelocated solidarity in commonality, while others advocate coalition inthe presence of intersectionality. The different approaches offeminists to ethics raise questions as to whether feminist ethics canbe either universalist or absolutist. Feminists have observed thatjust as some men in the history of philosophy have falselyuniversalized from their own experience to describe the experiences ofall humans, some feminists have presumed false universal categories ofwomen or feminists that elide differences between women or presume tospeak for all women (Grimshaw 1996; Herr 2014; Tremain 2015).Relatedly, some feminist philosophers have criticized absolutism inethical theory, that is, the prioritization of rigorous applicationsof principles to ethical situations regardless of the particularitiesof context or the motivations of the individuals affected, in partbecause absolutism, like universalism, takes the absolutists’priorities to be rational for all (Noddings 1984; Baier 1994).Feminist ethicists who have endorsed visions of universal human rightsas liberating for all women have been criticized by other feminists asengaging in absolutism in ways that may prescribe solutions for womenin different locations and social situations rather than attending tothe perspectives of the women described as needing such rights (Khader2018b; Herr 2014).

The predominant association of feminist ethics with an ethic of care,which is dichotomous with traditional ethical theories on many levels,together with decades of feminist critiques of the work of canonicalabsolutist theorists, might lead to a perception that feminist ethicsis fundamentally opposed to universalism and absolutism in ethics.This perception, however, is not built into the nature of feministethics, which has been employed to understand, criticize, and correctthe role of gender in our moral beliefs and practices bydeontologists, utilitarians, contractarians, and virtue ethicists, whohold some universal principles or absolute requirements to be basic totheir views. However, it is evident that the preponderance ofscholarship in feminist ethics tends to prioritize all of thefollowing: the moral contexts in which differently situated anddifferently gendered agents operate, the testimony and perspectives ofthe situated agent, the power relationships and politicalrelationships manifest in moral encounters, the vulnerabilities ofembodied actors that yield a plurality of approaches to ethicalsituations, and the degrees of agency or capacity that are shaped byexperiences with oppression and misogyny. Such priorities tend not toresult in relativism, though they certainly depart from rigid forms ofabsolutism. Feminist ethics is often expressed in morally plural ways,including pragmatism (Hamington and Bardwell-Jones 2012),transnationalism (Jaggar 2013; Herr 2014; McLaren 2017; Khader 2018b),nonideal theory (Mills 2005; Schwartzman 2006; Tessman 2009b; Norlock2016), and disability theory (Wendell 1996; Garland-Thomson 2011;Tremain 2015).

The following sub-entries included under “feminism(topics)” in theTable of Contents to thisEncyclopedia are relevant to the multiplicity ofapplications of feminist ethics:

• feminist perspectives on autonomy
• feminist perspectives on class and work
• feminist perspectives on disability
• feminist perspectives on globalization
• feminist perspectives on objectification
• feminist perspectives on power
• feminist perspectives on rape
• feminist perspectives on reproduction and the family
• feminist perspectives on science
• feminist perspectives on sex and gender
• feminist perspectives on sex markets
• feminist perspectives on the body
• feminist perspectives on the self
• feminist perspectives on trans issues

See also the entries in the Related Entries section below.

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Acknowledgments

This entry exists thanks to the steady work of Research AssistantCollin Chepeka and the funds of the Kenneth Mark Drain Chair in Ethicsat Trent University. Thanks to Noëlle McAfee for helpful commentson a first draft, and thanks to Anita Superson for extensive commentson every section of this entry.