## 1. Feminist Ethics: Historical Background



Feminist ethics as an academic area of study in the field of
philosophy dates to the 1970s, when philosophical journals started
more frequently publishing articles specifically concerned with
feminism and sexism (Korsmeyer 1973; Rosenthal 1973; Jaggar 1974), and
after curricular programs of Women's Studies began to be
established in some universities (Young 1977; Tuana 2011). Readers
interested in themes evident in the fifty years of feminist ethics in
philosophy will find this discussion in section (2) below,
"Themes in Feminist Ethics."



Prior to 1970, "there was no recognized body of feminist
philosophy" (Card 2008, 90). Of course, throughout history,
philosophers have attempted to understand the roles that gender may
play in moral life. Yet such philosophers presumably were addressing
male readers, and their accounts of women's moral capacities did
not usually aim to disrupt the subordination of women. Rarely in the
history of philosophy will one find philosophical works that notice
gender in order to criticize and correct men's historical
privileges or to disrupt the social orders and practices that
subordinate groups on gendered dimensions. An understanding that sex
matters 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 authors
writing in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries
discussed below explicitly address what they perceive to be moral
wrongs resulting from either oppression on the basis of sex, or
metaethical errors on the part of public intellectuals in believing
ideal forms of moral reasoning to be within the capacities of men and
not women. In the early-to-mid-twentieth century, at the same time
that *feminism* became a more popularly used term in Europe and
the Americas, more theorists argued influentially for ending unjust
discrimination on the basis of sex. Some authors concertedly argued
that philosophers and theorists erred in their understanding of what
seemed 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 published
treatises arguing that women were as rational as men and should be
afforded the education that would allow them to develop their moral
character. They argued that since females are rational, their unequal
access to learning was immoral and unjustifiable. They explored
meta-ethical questions about the preconditions for morality, including
what sorts of agents can be moral and whether morality is equally
possible for different sexes. For example, in 1694, Mary
Astell's first edition of *A Serious Proposal to the Ladies
for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest* was
published, advocating for access to education. It was controversial
enough that Astell issued a sequel three years later, *A Serious
Proposal, Part II*, that challenged "those deep background
philosophical and theological assumptions which deny women the
capacity for improvement of the mind" (Springborg,
"Introduction," in Astell 2002, 21). At the time, some
apparently attributed the first *Serious Proposal* not to
Astell, but to Damaris Cudworth Masham, a one-time companion of John
Locke, since such criticisms of the injustice of women's lot and
the background assumptions maintaining their subordinate situation
were familiar to Masham (Springborg, "Introduction," in
Astell 2002, 17). Although Masham sharply disagreed with aspects of
Astell'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 ignorance
of men" (Masham 1705, 169, quoted in Frankel 1989, 85). Masham
also deplored "the double standard of morality imposed on women
and men, especially ... the claim that women's
'virtue' consists primarily in chastity" (Frankel
1989, 85).



A century later, Mary Wollstonecraft, in her *Vindication of the
Rights of Women* ([1792] 1988), renewed attention to girls'
lack of access to education. Criticizing the philosophical assumptions
underpinning practices that denied girls adequate education,
Wollstonecraft articulated an Enlightenment ideal of the social and
moral rights of women as the equal of men. Wollstonecraft also
broadened her critique of social structures to encompass ethical
theory, especially in resistance to the arguments of influential men
that women's virtues are different from men's and
appropriate to perceived feminine duties. Wollstonecraft asserted:
"I here throw down my gauntlet, and deny the existence of sexual
virtues," adding that "women, I allow, may have different
duties to fulfil; but they are *human* duties, and the
principles that should regulate the discharge of them ... must be
the same" (51). The revolutions of the Enlightenment age
motivated some men as well as women to reconsider inequities in
education at a time when notions of universal human rights were
gaining prominence. As Joan Landes observes,
Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet was an
extraordinary advocate for the rights of women in France during the
same period who argued in 1790 for "the admission of women to
the rights of citizenship" and "woman's equal humanity on
the grounds of reason and justice" (Landes 2016). Like many
theorists of their time and places, including Catherine Macaulay
(Tomaselli 2016), Olympe de Gouges, and Madame de Stael (Landes
2016), Wollstonecraft and Condorcet granted that there were material
differences between the sexes, but advanced moral arguments against
ethical double-standards on the basis of universal humanism. Yet the
notion of universal humanism tended to prioritize virtues
traditionally seen as masculine. Wollstonecraft, for example, argued
against perceptions that women lacked men's capacities for
morality, but praised rationality and "masculinity" as
preconditions for morality (Tong 1993, 44). 


### 1.2 Nineteenth-Century Influences and Issues



In Europe and North America, nineteenth-century moral arguments
coalesced around material issues that would later be appreciated by
feminist ethicists as importantly intersecting. A remarkably diverse
array of activist women and public intellectuals advanced recognizably
feminist arguments for women's moral leadership and greater
freedoms as moral imperatives. The resistance of enslaved women and
the political activism of their descendants, the anti-slavery
organizations of women in Europe and North America, the attention to
inequity in women's access to income, property, sexual freedom,
full citizenship, and enfranchisement, and the rise of Marxist and
Socialist theories contributed to women's participation in
arguments for the reductions of militarism, unfettered capitalism,
domestic violence and the related abuse of drugs and alcohol, among
other concerns.



Offering the first occurrence of the term *feminisme* (Offen
1988), the nineteenth century is characterized by a plurality of
approaches to protofeminist ethics, that is, ethical theorizing that
anticipated and created the groundwork for modern feminist concepts.
These include some theories consistent with the universal humanism of
Wollstonecraft and Condorcet and others emphasizing the differences
between the sexes in order to argue for the superiority of feminine
morality. The most well-known of the former in philosophy are John
Stuart Mill's *The Subjection of Women* ([1869] 1987),
which he credits Harriet Taylor Mill with co-authoring, and Harriet
Taylor Mill's essay, "The Enfranchisement of Women"
(H. T. Mill [1851] 1998). Like their Enlightenment forerunners, Mill
and Taylor argue that women ought to have equal rights and equal
access to political and social opportunities. As a utilitarian
philosopher, Mill further emphasizes the benefits to society and to
the human species of improving women's lives and social
situations. Mill expresses skepticism about claims that women are
morally superior to men, as well as claims that women have
"greater liability to moral bias," emotionality, and poor
judgment in ethical decision-making ([1869] 1987, 518 and 519). Mill
and Taylor tend to overemphasize the roles of women who are wives.
They grant some differences between men and women that are
controversial today; Mill's works especially emphasize the
benefits to family and domestic life as reasons to support the
liberation of women from subjugation. Despite these views, both argue
for the benefits of women's liberation to scholarly and
political spheres. For example, they describe differences in
achievement and behavior to be the result mainly of women's
social situations and education, making their view consistent with the
arguments of both the Enlightenment scholars noted above, and some,
but not all, of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors
discussed below.



Attitudes about the reasons for the moral goodness of such
achievements differed. Some early utopian and Socialist movements in
Europe that influenced women's rights activists in America and
would later influence British thinkers, including John Stuart Mill,
lauded feminine virtues and women's importance, but did so in
ways that would reinforce views of women as "superior"
because of innate qualities of gentleness, love, spirituality, and
sentimentality (Moses 1982). In contrast, other Socialist movements
expressed radical views of the equality of men and women not by
attributing distinctive or greater moral virtues to women, but by
challenging systems of privilege due to sex, race, and class (Taylor
1993). Although Mill and Taylor would later argue that "sexual
inequality 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 as
psychologically and essentially different, a view "according to
which female virtue is ultimately better than male virtue" (Tong
1993, 36 and 37). In the pivotal year of 1848, Frederick Douglass
insisted that "all that distinguishes man as an intelligent and
accountable being, is equally true of woman" (quoted in Davis
2011, 51). In the same year, the *Declaration of Sentiments*
was signed at a women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New
York, and socialist and anarchist revolutions took place in Europe.
The revolutionaries included public thinkers who advocated communal
property and sexual equality, and who criticized the involvement of
state and church in marriage. Their arguments about practical and
feminist ethics influenced Emma Goldman and other turn-of-the-century
thinkers.



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, the
attachment of some protofeminist thinkers to the domestic virtues
shaped their ethical recommendations. Some white and middle-class
activists argued for the end of slavery and, later, against the
subordination of emancipated women of color precisely on the grounds
that they wished to extend the privileges that white and middle-class
women enjoyed in the domestic and private sphere, maintaining the
social order while valorizing domestic feminine goodness. As Clare
Midgley says, "Women's role was discussed in terms of
family life. Emancipation would mark the end of the sexual
exploitation of women and of the disruption of family life, and the
creation of a society in which the black woman was able to occupy her
proper station as a Daughter, a Wife, and a Mother" (Midgley
1993, 351).



In contrast, some former slaves including Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B.
Wells-Barnett, and descendants of slaves including Mary Church
Terrell, grounded their work for women's rights and arguments
for women's moral and sociopolitical equality in rather
different priorities, asserting more interest in equal protection of
the laws, economic liberation, political representation, and in
Wells-Barnett's case, self-defense and the exertion of the right
to bear arms, as necessary to the very survival and liberation of
Black Americans (Giddings 2007). Cooper, who rightly criticized white
feminists for racist (and female-supremacist) statements when they
were offered as reasons to work for white women's voting rights
rather than Black men's, advanced a view of virtues and truth as
having masculine and feminine sides. A century before care ethics
would become a strain of academic feminist ethics, Cooper urged that
both masculine reason and feminine sympathy "are needed to be
worked into the training of children, in order that our boys may
supplement their virility by tenderness and sensibility, and our girls
may round out their gentleness by strength and self-reliance"
(Cooper [1892] 2000, 60). Her timeless concern for the U.S. was that a
nation or a people "will degenerate into mere emotionalism on
the one hand, or bullyism on the other, if dominated by either
exclusively" (61). Hers is a normative argument for appreciating
the contributions that both traditionally feminine and masculine
values could offer to a well-balanced ethics.



Explicitly arguing that standpoints matter to knowledge claims and
moral theorizing, Cooper insisted that historical knowledge necessary
to a nation's self-understanding depends on the representation
of Black Americans' voices, and especially the "open-eyed
but hitherto voiceless Black Woman of America" (Cooper [1892]
2000, 2; Gines 2015). Manifesting Cooper's call for
representations, Wells-Barnett determinedly included accounts of girls
and women killed by lynching along with the narratives of murdered men
and boys, and challenged the "racial-sexual apologies for
lynching to trample the twin myths of white (female) sexual purity and
black (male) sexual savagery" (James 1997, 80).
Wells-Barnett's investigative journalism led her to the blunt
suggestion that some of the sexual relationships giving rise to cover
stories of rape as justifications for lynching were consensual
relationships between white women and Black men, while rapes of Black
women and girls, "which began in slavery days, still continues
without reproof from church, state or press" (quoted in Sterling
1979, 81).


### 1.3 Twentieth-Century Influences and Issues



Like Wells-Barnett, anarchist and socialist writers, some from
working-class backgrounds, advanced frank arguments for differently
understanding women's capacities and desires as sexual beings
with their own moral agency. Leaders included Emma Goldman, whose
anarchism was developed as a response to Marx and Marxism (Fiala
2018). Goldman argued for broader understandings of love, sexuality,
and family, because she believed that traditional social codes of
morality resulted in the corruption of women's sexual
self-understanding (112). Like Wells-Barnett, Goldman coupled
arguments against feminine sexual purity with attention to the sexual
exploitation of, and trafficking in, women who did not enjoy the
state's protection (Goldman 2012). Some suffragists'
"emphasis on female morality repulsed Goldman. Yet, while she
ridiculed the claim that women were morally superior to men ...
she also emphasized that women should be allowed and encouraged to
express freely their 'true' femininity" (Marso 2010,
76).



Although early twentieth-century protofeminists differed in their
beliefs as to whether men and women were morally different in
character, they generally shared a belief in Progressive ideals of
moral and social improvement if only humankind brought fair and
rational thinking to bear on ethical issues. Progressive-era
pragmatists, including Wells-Barnett, Charlotte Perkins-Gilman, Jane
Addams, and Alice Paul, "saw the social environment as
malleable, capable of improvement through human action and philosophic
thought" (Whipps and Lake 2016). The beginning of the century
was characterized by remarkably optimistic thinking even on the part
of more radical theorists who appreciated the deep harms of oppressive
social organizations. Most of the Progressive activists and
suffragists 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 regarding
women's moral natures or how to achieve moral progress as a
nation. For example, both Goldman and pro-suffrage Charlotte
Perkins-Gilman argued for individual self-transformation and
self-understanding as keys to women's better moral characters
(Goldman 2012), while maintaining that a person's efforts were
best supported by a less individualistic and more communitarian social
and political framework (Gilman 1966). While Goldman included greater
access to birth control and reproductive choice among the morally
urgent routes to women's individual self-discovery, Gilman and
many feminists argued for women's access to contraception in
ways that reflected increasingly popular policies of eugenics in North
and South America and Europe (Gilman 1932). Eugenics-friendly white
women's contributions of feminist ethical arguments to disrupt
oppressive pronatalism or to avert the measurable costs of parenthood
in sexist societies often took the form of deepening other forms of
marginalization, 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 ethics
reached a high-water mark during the Progressive Era, moving one
magazine to write in 1914 that "The time has come to define
feminism; it is no longer possible to ignore it" (Cott 1987,
13). Unfortunately, this sentiment would decline with the start of
World War I and the consequent demise of optimistic beliefs in the
powers of human rationality to bring about moral progress. Yet
throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, as economic difficulties,
military conflicts, and wealth disparity fluctuated internationally,
women's groups and feminist activists in many countries would
advance, with some success, feminist and moral arguments for
workplace, professional, electoral, and educational access, for the
liberalization of contraception, marriage, and divorce laws, and
against militarism. Some of their gains in greater access to voting,
education, and prosperity may have contributed to the wide audience
that was receptive to Simone de Beauvoir's publications in
Europe 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 despite
having taught courses in philosophy (Card 2003, 9). Yet beginning in
the 1950s, both her *Ethics of Ambiguity* ([1947] 1976) and
*The Second Sex* ([1949] 2010) were widely read and quickly
appreciated as important to feminist ethics (Card 2003, 1). As works
of existentialist morality, they emphasized that we are not all simply
subjects and individual choosers but also objects shaped by the forces
of oppression (Andrew 2003, 37). Like the protofeminists described
above, Beauvoir focused on the embodied experiences and social
situations of women. In these pivotal works, she advanced the case
that embodiment and social situatedness are not only relevant to human
existence, but are the stuff of human existence, so crucial that
philosophy ought not ignore them (Andrew 2003, 34). In *The Second
Sex*, she argued that some men in philosophy managed the bad-faith
project of both ignoring their own sex-situatedness and yet describing
women as the Other and men as the Self. Because men in philosophy take
themselves to be paradigmatically human and take it upon themselves to
characterize the nature of womankind as different from men, Beauvoir
said 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 "the
figure 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 her
own experiences and perceptions, but "being a woman would mean
being an object, the Other" (83), that is, the objectified
recipient of the speculations and perceptions of men. Beauvoir
described a woman who would transcend this situation "as
hesitating between the role of object, of Other that is proposed to
her, and her claim for freedom" (84), that is, her freedom to
assert 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's
position is therefore so deeply ambiguous--one of navigating
"a human condition as defined in its relation with the
Other" (196)--that if one is to philosophize about women,
"it is indispensable to understand the economic and social
structure" in which women aim to be authentic or ethical,
necessitating "an existential point of view, taking into account
her total situation" (84). In other words, philosophers
speculating about women ought to take into account the obstacles to
women's opportunities for subjecthood and choice that are
created by those who constructed an oppressive situation for women to
navigate.



Beauvoir's positions--that *woman* has been defined
by men and in men's terms, that ethical theory must attend to
women's social situation and their capacity to be moral
decision-makers, and that women's oppression impedes their
knowing themselves and changing their situation--reflect the
concerns of many forerunners of feminist ethics. Beauvoir's work
profoundly shaped the emergence of feminist ethics as a subfield of
philosophy at a time when philosophers more generally had moved away
from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tendencies to describe
women as lacking morally worthy rational capacities. Instead, by the
middle of the twentieth century, some influential philosophers in
Europe and the Americas had moved toward approaches that often led to
describing both gender and ethics as irrelevant to philosophical
discourse (Garry 2017).


## 2. Themes in feminist ethics



In the fifty years that feminist ethics has been a subject of
philosophical scholarship in (initially) Western and (increasingly)
international discourse, theorists have considered metaethical,
theoretical, and practical questions. Questions that occupied scholars
in preceding centuries, especially those regarding moral agents'
natural (and gendered) capacities for moral deliberation, are
critically reconsidered in debates that arose in the 1970s and 1980s.
One main area of inquiry addresses whether and why there may be
meaningful differences in feminine and masculine priorities of care
and justice in normative theory. Concern about feminist methods of
articulating 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, transnational
feminism, queer theory, disability studies, and twenty-first century
criticisms of feminist ethics. They are of special concern whenever
feminist ethicists seem to uphold a gender binary and simplistic
conceptualizations of *woman* as a category. Questions about
the shortcomings of traditional ethical theories, about which virtues
constitute morally good character in contexts of oppression, and about
which kinds of ethical theories will ameliorate gendered oppressions
and evils generate critical scholarship in every decade.


### 2.1 Gender binarism, essentialism, and separatism



Gender binarism, which is the view that there are only two
genders--male and female--and that everyone is only one of
them (Dea 2016a, 108), is assumed by most feminist ethicists in the
1970s and 1980s (Jaggar 1974; Daly 1979). Some of these feminists
criticize male supremacy without thereby preferring female supremacy
(Frye 1983; Card 1986; Hoagland 1988). They argue that although the
categories of "men" and "women" are
physiologically distinct, the potential of feminism to liberate both
men and women from oppressive gendered social arrangements suggests
that men and women do not have different moralities or separate
realities, and that we do not need to articulate separate capacities
for ethics (Jaggar 1974; Davion 1998).



Other feminist ethicists offer radically different views. Mary Daly,
for example, argues in *Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical
Feminism* that women were traditionally defined throughout
intellectual history as being subversive of rationality, impartiality,
and morality as traditionally conceived. Daly argues that women ought
to embrace, as essential to women's natures and good, some of
the very qualities that she says men have ascribed to women as
essential to women's natures and bad. Daly suggests valuing both
women's capacities for childbearing and birth (as opposed to
capacities to engage in war and killing) and women's
emotionality (versus rationality) (Daly 1979).



Radical feminists and lesbian feminists who disagree with Daly as to
whether women's moral natures are innately better than
men's agree with Daly in arguing either for essentialism
(Griffin 1978; *cf.* Spelman 1988 and Witt 1995) or for
women's separation from men (Card 1988; Hoagland 1988). Some of
them argue that separatism allows a setting in which to create
alternative ethics, rather than merely responding to the
male-dominated ethical theories traditionally discussed in the
academy. They also argue that separatism better fosters women's
increased connection to each other and denies men the access to women
that men might expect (Daly 1979; Frye 1983; Hoagland 1988).



In deep disagreement, philosophers such as Alison Jaggar argue against
separatism as being in any way productive of a different and morally
better world. Jaggar maintains that "what we must do instead is
to create a new androgynous culture which incorporates the best
elements of both ..., which values both personal relationships
and efficiency, both emotion and rationality. This result cannot be
achieved through sexual separation" (Jaggar 1974, 288). Related
arguments for androgynous approaches to ethics are influential in
arguments supporting androgyny, gender bending, and gender-blending
that are prevalent in the 1990s (Butler 1990; Butler 1993), and
gender-eliminativist and humanist approaches to feminist ethics and
social philosophy that are prevalent in the twenty-first century
(LaBrada 2016; Mikkola 2016; Ayala and Vasilyeva 2015; Haslanger
2012).



One criticism of gender binarism is that its assumption marginalizes
nonconforming individuals. In efforts described as promoting coalition
between trans activists and non-trans feminists, some feminists argue
that we ought to examine the gender privilege inherent in presuming a
binary that reflects one's own experience better than the
experiences of others (Dea 2016a; Bettcher 2014). Yet such
"beyond-the-binary" approaches, in turn, have been
cautioned against as well-intentioned but, at times, invalidating
trans identities, "by invalidating the self-identities of trans
people who do not regard their genitals as wrong" or "by
representing all trans people as problematically positioned with
regard to the binary" (Bettcher 2013). Recognition of
"reality enforcement" and its interconnection with racist
and sexist oppression may better defray the harms of normalizing a
gender 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 polarity
which transcends the physiological distinction" (Jaggar 1974,
283). The work of psychologist Carol Gilligan therefore has great
influence on philosophers interested in just such evidence for
substantial sex differences in moral reasoning, despite the fact that
Gilligan herself does not describe these differences as polar. In her
landmark work, *In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and
Women's Development* (1982), Gilligan disputes accounts of
moral development that do not take into account girls' moral
experiences (18-19), or that describe women as stuck at an
interpersonal stage short of full moral development as in the theories
of Lawrence Kohlberg (30). Gilligan argues that Kohlberg wrongly
prioritizes a "morality of rights" and independence from
others as better than, rather than merely different from, a
"morality of responsibility" and intimate relationships
with others (19).



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



Philosophers who apply Gilligan's empirical results to ethical
theory differ about the role that a care perspective should play in
normative 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 as
both feminine and, as she later says explicitly, feminist (Noddings
2013, xxiv), orienting moral agents to focus on the needs of those one
cares for in relational contexts rather than on abstract, universal
principles. Like her historical predecessors discussed above, Noddings
emphasizes the feminine "to direct attention to centuries of
experience more typical of women than men" (xxiv), in part to
correct the extent to which "the mother's voice has been
silent" (1). Noddings's normative theory endorses the
moral value of partiality that justifies prioritizing interpersonal
relationships over more distant connections. Virginia Held's
(1993; 2006) and Joan Tronto's (1993) different applications of
the perspective of care endorse care as social and political rather
than limited to interpersonal relationships, and suggest that an ethic
of care provides a route to realizing better societies as well as
better treatment of distant others. Both Held and Sara Ruddick (1989)
urge societal shifts to prioritize children's vulnerabilities
and the perspectives of mothers as necessary correctives to moral and
political neglect of policies that would ensure the well-being of
vulnerable people in relationships requiring care. This concern is
further elaborated in Eva Feder Kittay's attention to caregivers
as "secondarily" or "derivatively dependent"
(1999). In normative theory and applied ethics, care-work and caring
in workplace relationships have come to receive more attention in
twenty-first century philosophy than previously, as appreciation for
the ethical demands of relational support-provision and
client-centered or helping professions come to be influenced by
variations 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 the
dominant approach in feminist ethics and so feminist discussions of
virtue" (2017b, 574). Although the ethic of care continues to be
strongly associated with feminist ethics, Gilligan's work in
psychology and Noddings's work in philosophy were immediately
contested (Superson 2012). Some feminist ethicists have argued that
the ethic of care valorizes the burdened history of femininity
associated with caring (Card 1996). The complex history of femininity
and caregiving practices were shaped in contexts of oppression that
may permit "moral damage" to women's agency (Tessman
2005). If that burdened feminine history includes attention to
particular relationships at the expense of attention to wider social
institutions and systematic political injustice, then the ethic of
care runs the risk of lacking a feminist vision for changing
systematic and institutional forms of oppression (Hoagland 1990; Bell
1993). Further worries about the ethic of care include whether
unidirectional caring enables the exploitation of caregivers (Houston
1990; Card 1990; Davion 1993), and whether such caring excludes moral
responsibilities to strangers and individuals we may affect without
meeting interpersonally (Card 1990), thereby risking an insular ethic
that ignores political and material realities (Hoagland 1990). Another
concern is whether we risk generalizing some women's
prioritizing caring to all women, which disregards the complex
pluralism of many women's voices (Moody-Adams 1991). Finally,
preoccupation with women's kinder and gentler feelings may
prevent or distract from attention to women's capacities for
harm and injustice, especially the injustices borne of racial and
class privilege (Spelman 1991).



The above criticisms tend to proceed from a view that it is
problematic that an ethic of care is predicated on seeing femininity
as valuable. They suggest that critical feminist perspectives require
us to doubt the value of femininity. However, it remains controversial
whether femininity is necessarily defined in relationship to
masculinity and is thereby an inauthentic or insufficiently critical
perspective for feminist ethics, or whether femininity is a
distinctive contribution of moral and valuing agents to a feminist
project that rejects or corrects some of the errors and excesses of
legacies of masculinity (Irigaray 1985; Harding 1987; Tong 1993;
Bartky 1990).


### 2.3 Intersectionality



One way that some philosophers offer to resolve the possible tension
between conceptions of femininity and feminism is to bring
intersectional approaches to the question as to whose femininity is
being discussed. Concerns that femininity is antithetical to a
critical feminist perspective seem to presuppose a conception of
femininity as passive, gentle, obedient, emotional, and dependent, in
contrast with a conception of masculinity as its opposite. In a
philosophical tradition dominated by white and masculine philosophers,
describing femininity as necessarily the opposite of one's
conception of masculinity in a gender binary makes limited sense.
Scholars of intersectionality point out, however, that identities are
not binary: "the masculinity and femininity in play here are not
racially unmarked (if only for the reason that gender is never
racially unmarked)" (James 2013, 752). The insights of
philosophers of Black Feminism, intersectionality, queer theory,
critical race theory, disability studies, and transfeminism, among
others, contribute to a view that there is no universal definition of
femininity or of the category of woman that neatly applies to all
women. Some of these philosophers suggest that the distinctive moral
and valuing experiences of women and individuals of all genders may be
unjustly ignored or denied by a conception of women or femininity that
turns out to be white, ableist, and cisgender (Crenshaw 1991; Collins
1990; Wendell 1996; hooks 1992; Tremain 2000; Serano 2007; McKinnon
2014). Intersectional approaches reject binaries such as
"masculinity/femininity" that tend to take the social
positions of privileged people as generic. Minimally,
intersectionality is "the predominant way of conceptualizing the
relation between systems of oppression which construct our multiple
identities and our social locations in hierarchies of power and
privilege," offering a remedy to histories of exclusions in
feminist theory (Carastathis 2014, 304).



Although intersectional insights can be found in the works of writers
even from the distant past, the predominance of intersectionality in
feminist ethics today is largely owed to Black feminists and critical
race theorists, who were the first to argue for the significance of
intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989; Collins 1990; Gines 2014; Bailey
2009). Kimberle Crenshaw describes intersectionality in
different senses: as an experience, an approach, and a problem
(Crenshaw 1989; Crenshaw 1991). Crenshaw's description of
intersectionality as an experience includes the phenomena of
oppressive practices and harms that occur at, and because of,
intersections of aspects of identity. For example, when Black men, but
not any women, were permitted to work on a General Motors factory
floor, and white women, but not any Black persons, were permitted to
work in the General Motors secretarial pool, then Black women were
discriminated against as Black women. That is, they were not permitted
to have any job at General Motors due to living at an intersection of
categories of identity that are treated separately in the law
(Crenshaw 1989). Crenshaw's description of intersectionality as
an approach includes centering the lives and testimony of those whose
experiences with living at intersections of oppressions have been
ignored 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 of
intersectionality as a problem includes disrupting the traditional
overlooking of Black women's experiences, and offering the
experiences and the approaches described above as challenges to the
doctrine that discrimination occurs only along one axis of identity
(Crenshaw 1989, 141). Intersectionality is pursued in the interests of
expanding understandings of differences and accounting for the
experiences of people previously spoken for, if addressed at all,
rather than consulted.



Not all philosophers who embrace appreciation of the insights of
intersectionality agree on whether it yields a distinct methodology,
or a starting point for better inquiry, or a better conception of
experiences of oppression (Khader 2013; Garry 2011). Serene Khader
suggests that intersectional theories "are united by a critique
of what Crenshaw (1991) calls 'additive' models of
identity" that assume that individuals at intersections of
traditionally oppressed identity categories are "necessarily
worse off than the individual facing a single oppression," as if
each dimension on which one can be oppressed is easily separable in
categories traditionally conceived in isolation (Khader 2013, 75).
Instead, "intersectional theorists argue that the oppressions
facing multiply oppressed women co-constitute one another and situate
those women such that attempts to advance the interests of 'all
women' may fail to advance theirs" (Khader 2013, 75).



Intersectionality is not without its critics in feminist ethics. For
example, Naomi Zack (2005) argues that an intersectional approach to
concepts such as that of *woman* successfully demonstrates
problems with essentialism with respect to women's natures, but
degrades the category of woman, "multiplying axes of analysis
and 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 support
intersectionality have responded to Zack's concerns by arguing
that everyday concepts such as *woman* include an array of
identities, including distinct gender identities that bear a family
resemblance and include a range of manifestations (Garry 2011). Other
feminists have responded to Zack's concerns for feminist
movement or solidarity by arguing for the possibilities of working in
coalitions that do not require widely shared commonality, working to
learn from and about positions of difference, and cultivating more
humility and less arrogance in theorizing (Lorde 1984; Lugones 1987;
Reagon 2000; Bailey 2009; Carastathis 2014; Sheth 2014; Ruiz
and Dotson 2017). Other feminist ethicists raise tensions in
intersectional theory that are not intended to undermine the approach
but to ask for elaboration of its details, including its very
definition (Nash 2008). The appeal for these clarifications, however,
may reflect traditions that intersectionality is dedicated to
disrupting, since it is made in the context of the pursuit of
justification, habits of opposition, and a narrow sense of
definitional work that is typical in philosophy, a field that has a
reputation for lacking appreciation for diverse practitioners (Dotson
2013).


### 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 theories
that failed either to notice or to care when the perspective of the
philosopher so criticized was taken for either a generic truth about
moral theory or a gender-specific and false description of human
nature. Elena Flores Ruiz observes that "professional
philosophy *sleepwalks*; its somnambulatory practices stroll
silently, policing checkpoints without the burden of consciousness of
its actions and practices" (2014, 199). In other words,
philosophers have at times presumed that they speak for many without
sufficient attention to their own presumptions. Ruiz's
claim is akin to Rosemarie Tong's observation made decades
earlier, that traditional ethical theory demonstrates "a sleepy
inattentiveness to women's concerns" (1993, 160). The
provocation to alertness is evident in feminist critiques of
traditional ethical theories such as deontology, consequentialism,
social contract theory, and virtue ethics. Some feminist ethicists
sympathetically extend canonical work to concerns that male theorists
did not address, while other feminist ethicists resoundingly reject
traditional ethical theories because the theories rely on a conception
of moral agency or moral value with which they disagree.


#### 2.4.1 Deontology, rights, and duties



Some feminist ethicists endorse deontological moral theories on the
grounds that granting women--who have been subordinated in
private and public spheres--the same rights routinely granted to
men in positions of power would enable women's freedom and
flourishing, especially in contexts of political liberalism. Feminist
ethicists have long argued that we should acknowledge women's
equal 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 rights
where they have been previously neglected (Brennan 2010). They have
argued for rights in the issues of enfranchisement (Truth [1867]
1995), reproduction (Steinbock 1994), abortion (Thomson 1971), bodily
integrity (Varden 2012), women's and non-heterosexual
people'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. While
recognizing limits to the universality of women's experiences,
feminist philosophers have argued for global human rights as a remedy
for gendered oppression and dehumanization (Cudd 2005; Meyers
2016).



Feminist criticism of duty-centered frameworks, or, deontology,
include those articulated by authors of the ethic of care, who argue
against an ethic of duty, especially Kantian ethics, on several
grounds. First, they claim that it proceeds from absolutist and
universal principles which are unduly prioritized over consideration
of the material contexts informing embodied experiences,
particularities, and relationships. Second, they claim that it
inaccurately separates capacities for rationality from capacities for
emotion, and that it wrongly describes the latter as morally
uninformative or worthless most likely because of their traditional
association with women or femininity (Noddings 1984; Held 1993; Slote
2007). Moreover, an ethic of duty is likely to overly idealize moral
agents' capacities for rationality and choice (Tronto 1995;
Tessman 2015). Some feminist ethicists embrace forms of obligation yet
reject Kantian deontology when it denies the possibility of moral
dilemmas (Tessman 2015). Feminists who argue that duties are socially
constructed, rather than a priori, ground the nature of obligations in
the normative practices of the nonideal world (Walker 1998; Walker
2003).



Transnational feminists, scholars of intersectionality, and
postcolonial feminists argue that feminist advocates of global human
rights routinely impose their own cultural expectations and regional
practices upon the women who are purportedly the objects of their
concern (Mohanty 1997; Narayan 1997; Narayan 2002; Silvey 2009;
Narayan 2013; Khader 2018a; Khader 2018b). Critical analyses of some
feminist deontologists' concerns include arguments that
universal morals, rights, and duties are not the best bulwark against
relativist condonation of any and all possible treatments of women and
subordinated people (Khader 2018b) and suggest that advocacy of human
rights is perhaps well-intentioned but "entangled with
imperialist precommitments in the contemporary West" (Khader
2018a, 19).


#### 2.4.2 Consequentialism and utilitarianism



Since John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill argued both for
utilitarianism and against the subjection of women, one could say that
there have been feminists as long as there have been utilitarians. In
*The Subjection of Women* ([1869] 1987), Mill argues that the
desirable outcome of human moral progress generally is hindered by
women's legal and social subordination. He adds that not only
each woman's, but each man's personal moral character is
directly harmed by the injustice of unequal social arrangements (Okin
2005). Mill expresses special concern that "the object of being
attractive to men had ... become the polar star of feminine
education 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 of
the boys and girls that such women raise. Consistent with the
utilitarian principle that everyone counts equally and no single
person's preferences count more than another's, Mill
argues that men and women are fundamentally equal in their capacities
for higher and lower pleasures and, arguably, in their
responsibilities and interests (Mendus 1994). Harriet Taylor likewise
argues in *The Enfranchisement of Women* for the moral
improvement of humankind generally and "the elevation of
character [and] intellect" that would permit each woman and man
to be both morally better and happier, which are overlapping and
important considerations to Taylor (1998, 65).



Contemporary feminist ethicists who address utilitarianism either
critique 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 to
feminist issues (Tulloch 2005; Dea 2016b). Some consequentialist
feminists provide reasons for thinking that utilitarianism can
accommodate feminist aims because it is responsive to empirical
information, 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 the
expectation of utilitarian impartiality, insofar as impartiality in
decision-making ignores emotional connections or personal
relationships with particular beings. Feminists have advanced
criticisms of impartiality from the points of view of care ethics
(Noddings 1984; Held 2006; Ruddick 1989), ecofeminist or environmental
ethics (Adams 1990; Donovan 1990; George 1994; Warren 2000), and
analytical social ethics (Baier 1994; Friedman 1994). Impartiality may
yield implausible requirements to value the well-being of all equally
regardless of one's commitments, material circumstances in a
nonideal world, or obligations of caring (Walker 1998; Walker 2003).
Impartiality as a desirable quality of moral agents may overly
idealize moral agency (Tessman 2015) or tacitly presume a biased
perspective in favor of adult, racially privileged, masculine agents
in a formal or public sphere whose decisions are unencumbered by
relationships of unequal power (Kittay 1999).



Some feminists criticize consequentialism for failing to capture the
qualitatively problematic nature of oppressions that are not reducible
to harms (Frye 1983; Card 1996; Young 2009). For example, Card argues
that even if certain behavior does not produce more harm than good,
its symbolism could violate one's dignity. Her example is the
case of women being barred from Harvard's Lamont Law library
even when helpful male classmates provided them photocopies of course
readings (2002, 104-105). Card also objects on Rawlsian grounds
that the wrongness of slavery was not the balance of benefits and
harms, contra consequentialism, but the fact that trade-offs could
never justify slavery (2002, 57).



Anti-imperialist and non-Western feminists argue that Mill's
views in particular purport to be universal but include "Western
European biases and instrumental reasoning" that establish
"problematic rhetorical models for women's rights
arguments" (Botting and Kronewitter 2012). For example, Eileen
Botting and Sean Kronewitter argue that *The Subjection of
Women* contains several examples of primitivist and Orientalist
rhetorical moves, such as associating "the barbarism of
patriarchal marriage with Eastern cultures and religions" (2012,
471). They also object that Mill offers instrumental arguments for
women's rights, such as favoring the reduction of men's
selfishness and the increase in men's intellectual stimulation
in marriage, as well as doubling mental resources for the higher
service of humanity (2012, 470), suggesting that women's
liberation is secondary to greater purposes.


#### 2.4.3 Moral contractarianism



Some feminist ethicists argue for forms of contractarian ethics, that
is, the view "that moral norms derive their normative force from
the idea of contract or mutual agreement" (Cudd and Eftekhari
2018). Contractarian ethics permit moral agents to critically assess
the value of any relationship, especially family relationships that
may be oppressive on gendered dimensions (Okin 1989; Hampton 1993;
Sample 2002; Radzik 2005). Other feminist contractarians appreciate
Hobbes's social contract theory for its applicability to women
in positions of vulnerability. For example, Jean Hampton endorses
Hobbes's view that "you are under no obligation to make
yourself prey to others" (Hampton 1998, 236). Hampton combines
insights of both Kant and Hobbes in her version of feminist
contractarianism, "building in the Kantian assumption that all
persons have intrinsic value and thus must have their interests
respected" (Superson 2012; see also Richardson 2007).
Contractarianism arguably corrects gross injustices and inequities
traceable to gendered oppressions and the most serious evils that are
socially constructed (Anderson 1999; Hartley and Watson 2010).



Some feminists argue for the usefulness of contractarian ethics to
evaluate one's adaptive preferences, that is, "preferences
formed in unconscious response to oppression" (Walsh 2015, 829).
For example, Mary Barbara Walsh argues that social contract theory
models "the conditions of autonomous choice, independence and
dialogical reflection," and therefore "exposes preferences
that fail to meet" the conditions of autonomy. Feminist
contractarianism may thereby generate new understandings of social
contracts grounded in appreciation of material conditions,
commitments, and consent (Stark 2007; Welch 2012). Feminist
contractarians whose moral theories are influenced by John
Rawls's political philosophy suggest that his methodology, which
involves reasoning from behind a veil of ignorance to decide which
rules persons are rational to agree to, promotes critical appraisal of
preferences that one would not hold in a better world (Richardson
2007, 414).



Feminist critics of contractarianism also raise concerns about
adaptive preferences. In the actual, nonideal conditions in which
individuals and groups develop, dominant perspectives and oppressive
social arrangements can make persons come to prefer things that they
would not otherwise prefer, such that the resultant preferences, when
satisfied, are not for the agent's own good, and may even
contribute to her group's oppression (Superson 2012). Feminists
who are concerned that not all moral agents can meaningfully consent
to contracts point to examples of women who are denied access to the
public sphere, the market, education, and information (Held 1987;
Pateman 1988). Others point out that traditionally, social contract
theory has not attended to the inclusion of the needs of children,
disabled community members, or their caregivers (Held 1987; Kittay
1999; Edenberg and Friedman 2013). Feminist critics of
contractarianism tend to argue both for full consideration of needs
born of differences between bodies and social locations, and against
describing gender, embodiment, or dependency as a mere secondary
characteristic irrelevant to what a body in need of care requires to
flourish and thus what a "reasonable man" would choose
behind a veil of ignorance (Nussbaum 2006; Pateman and Mills
2007).


#### 2.4.4 Virtue ethics



Some feminist ethicists contend that virtue ethics, which focuses on
living a good life or flourishing, offers the best approach to
ensuring that ethical theory correctly represents the conditions
permitting vulnerable bodies to flourish in oppressive contexts.
Although virtue ethics is most notably associated with Aristotle,
whose idealized and masculine agent is not generally considered
paradigmatically feminist (Berges 2015, 3-4), feminists and
their forerunners have engaged critically for several centuries with
questions about which virtues and qualities of character would promote
a good life in the context of what we now describe as women's
subordination. Philosophers who argue for feminist ethical virtues
raise concerns that sexist oppression presents challenges to the
exercise of virtues on the part of women and gender non-conforming
people. Robin Dillon observes that feminist virtue ethics
"identifies problems for character in contexts of domination and
subordination and proposes ways of addressing those problems, and it
identifies problems of unreflective theory and proposes
power-conscious alternatives" (2017a, 381). Because the history
of traditional virtue ethics is freighted with past characterizations
of virtues as either gendered or as universal but less accessible to
women, Dillon proposes what she calls "feminist critical
character ethics" as an alternative to feminist virtue ethics
(2017a, 380). Advocates of feminist virtue ethics and critical
character ethics consider the relationships of gender to accounts of
character, virtues, vices, and good lives (Baier 1994; Card 1996;
Cuomo 1998; Calhoun 1999; Dillon 2017a; Snow 2002; Tessman 2005; Green
and Mews 2011; Berges 2015; Broad 2015; Harvey 2018).



Like the ethic of care, virtue ethics is often described as offering a
theory that is not beholden to abstract and universal principles
(Groenhout 2014), but instead acknowledges "that moral reasoning
might be an extraordinarily complex phenomenon ..., a view on
which what the ethical life requires of us cannot be codified or
reduced to a single principle or set of principles" (Moody-Adams
1991, 209-210). A further commonality between care and virtue
that is of interest to feminists is that "virtue theory, like
care ethics, rejects a simplistic dichotomy between reason and
emotion, and does not begin from the assumption that all human beings
are essentially equal" (Groenhout 2014, 487). Ethical theories
of virtue or character tend to appreciate the importance of emotions
and interpersonal relationships to a person's moral development.
Some virtue ethics also focus on what opportunities for virtue are
available to agents in particular social contexts, which is useful in
feminist ethics when it comes to delineating our responsibilities as
relational beings and as characters who may exhibit vices resulting
from oppression (Bartky 1990; Potter 2001; Bell 2009; Tessman 2009a;
Slote 2011; Boryczka 2012).



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



Virtue ethics provides wider opportunities for feminist ethics to
attend to virtues such as integrity and courage in oppressive contexts
that the ethic of care tends not to prioritize (Davion 1993;
Sander-Staudt 2006). Resistance itself may be a "burdened
virtue," which is Lisa Tessman's term for virtues that
allow moral agents, even ones damaged by oppression, to endure and
resist oppression, permitting a form of nobility that falls short of
*eudaimonia* (Tessman 2005). Tessman argues that when agents
live under conditions of systemic injustice, their opportunities to
flourish are blocked and their pursuits may even be hopeless. She
suggests that "the burdened virtues include all those traits
that make a contribution to human flourishing--if they succeed in
doing so at all--only because they enable survival of or
resistance to oppression ..., while in other ways they detract
from their bearer's well-being, in some cases so deeply that their
bearer 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 in
nonideal circumstances in which vulnerability is fundamental to the
nature of a moral agent (Nussbaum 1986; Card 1996; Walker 2003). For
example, feminists have argued for distinctive virtues in contexts
such 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 its
emphasis on the personal as potentially problematic when it comes to
"accounting for the possibility of social criticism and
resistance on the part of the self who is constituted by the very
social relationships and cultural traditions that would be the target
of her resistance" (Friedman 1993). Virtue ethics may also
include intrusive requirements to self-evaluate one's every
feeling or practice to an extent that an ethic of duty, for example,
would not require (Conly 2001). Some care ethicists, most notably Nel
Noddings (1984), argue that virtue ethics can be overly self-regarding
rather than attentive to the point of view of another, and that it
locates moral motivation in rational, abstract, and idealized
conceptions of the good life rather than in the natural well-spring of
moral motivation that is generated by encounters with particular
persons.


### 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 or
anti-essentialist. Some feminist work is authored by members of
privileged groups, while other feminist work is written by and attends
to concerns of those in marginalized groups. Some feminists have
located solidarity in commonality, while others advocate coalition in
the presence of intersectionality. The different approaches of
feminists to ethics raise questions as to whether feminist ethics can
be either universalist or absolutist. Feminists have observed that
just as some men in the history of philosophy have falsely
universalized from their own experience to describe the experiences of
all humans, some feminists have presumed false universal categories of
women or feminists that elide differences between women or presume to
speak for all women (Grimshaw 1996; Herr 2014; Tremain 2015).
Relatedly, some feminist philosophers have criticized absolutism in
ethical theory, that is, the prioritization of rigorous applications
of principles to ethical situations regardless of the particularities
of context or the motivations of the individuals affected, in part
because 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 rights
as liberating for all women have been criticized by other feminists as
engaging in absolutism in ways that may prescribe solutions for women
in different locations and social situations rather than attending to
the perspectives of the women described as needing such rights (Khader
2018b; 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 canonical
absolutist theorists, might lead to a perception that feminist ethics
is fundamentally opposed to universalism and absolutism in ethics.
This perception, however, is not built into the nature of feminist
ethics, which has been employed to understand, criticize, and correct
the role of gender in our moral beliefs and practices by
deontologists, utilitarians, contractarians, and virtue ethicists, who
hold some universal principles or absolute requirements to be basic to
their views. However, it is evident that the preponderance of
scholarship in feminist ethics tends to prioritize all of the
following: the moral contexts in which differently situated and
differently gendered agents operate, the testimony and perspectives of
the situated agent, the power relationships and political
relationships manifest in moral encounters, the vulnerabilities of
embodied actors that yield a plurality of approaches to ethical
situations, and the degrees of agency or capacity that are shaped by
experiences with oppression and misogyny. Such priorities tend not to
result in relativism, though they certainly depart from rigid forms of
absolutism. 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; Norlock
2016), and disability theory (Wendell 1996; Garland-Thomson 2011;
Tremain 2015).



The following sub-entries included under "feminism
(topics)" in the
 Table of Contents
 to this *Encyclopedia* are relevant to the multiplicity of
applications 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.