Rosemarie Tong. Encyclopedia of Social Theory. Editor: George Ritzer, Volume 1, Sage Reference, 2005.
Feminist ethics encompasses a number of philosophical approaches that aim to illuminate the moral worlds of a wide variety of women. According to feminist philosopher Alison Jaggar, proponents of feminist ethics typically fault traditional ethics for failing to take women’s moral perspectives and experiences as seriously as men’s. Specifically, they claim that traditional ethics has focused much more on men’s interests and rights than on women’s; has ignored most of women’s everyday moral work, particularly their caregiving work; has suggested that men are on average more morally developed than women; has privileged phenomena considered “masculine” over phenomena considered “feminine” (so that independence is voiced over interdependence, separation over connection, mind over body, culture over nature, war over peace, and death over life); and, finally, has esteemed styles of moral reasoning associated with men rather than women, thereby overestimating reason’s role in ethics and underestimating emotion’s role (Jaggar 1991).
Feminist approaches to ethics, as well as debates about the allegedly gendered nature of morality, are not contemporary developments. A variety of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, Catherine Beecher, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Anna Julia Cooper, all discussed what is probably best termed woman’s morality. Each of these thinkers pondered questions such as: Are women’s feminine traits the product of nature or culture? Are all of women’s feminine traits desirable, or are some of them undesirable? Is there a gender-neutral standard available to separate “good” feminine and masculine traits from “bad” ones? If moral virtues as well as psychological traits are connected with one’s emotional repertoire, indeed, with one’s physiology as Aristotle and Aquinas suggested, should not we expect men and women to excel at different moral virtues as well as to manifest different psychological traits? Should all individuals be urged to cultivate precisely the same set of psychological traits and moral virtues, or should there be room for specialization, provided that this specialization does not split along gender lines?
With respect to the kind of questions about women’s morality posed above, Wollstonecraft and Mill disavowed the separate virtue theory according to which morality differs according to gender. They sought to develop a single humanist ethics for women as well as men. Unlike Wollstonecraft and Mill, Beecher gladly maintained a separate virtue theory for men and women with the qualification that women’s virtues are no less important to society than are men’s. In fact, she suggested that women’s other-directed virtues are superior to men’s self-oriented virtues. Building on Beecher’s ideas, Gilman envisioned an all-female utopia, called “Herland,” in which it is “safe” for women to be maternal because they have full economic, political, and social power. In a similar vein, Stanton speculated that until women have the same political and economic power as men have, it is problematic for women to specialize in “Christlike” benevolence. Specifically, in reassessing Mark 12:43-44, in which Jesus praises a widow for giving her last few coins to the poor, Stanton commented that sometimes an oppressed group cannot afford to be entirely good—not without harming itself. Conceding that the widow’s small gift was indeed a precious one, Stanton nonetheless cautioned women to realize that in a patriarchal society, few women have the political and economic means to practice benevolence without being taken advantage of by men.
Subsequent to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, feminist ethicists have developed not one, but several approaches to ethics, including those sometimes labeled “feminine,” “maternal,” “political,” and “lesbian.” Feminine approaches to ethics stress the value of human relationships and put a premium on moral virtues that tend to strengthen people’s commitments to each other. Maternal approaches to ethics focus on the value of one type of human relationship in particular, namely, the mother-child relationship. Political approaches to ethics emphasize the task of eliminating socioeconomic, political, and cultural systems and institutions that maintain male domination and female subordination in the public and private domains. Each of these feminist approaches to ethics brings feminist ethicists closer to their joint goal of creating a gender-equal ethics. Finally, lesbian approaches to ethics use feminine, maternal, and political lenses to explore territory previously unexplored: the moral domain of women who love women exclusively or primarily.
Feminine Approaches
Of the various approaches to feminist ethics developed in the twentieth century, those labeled “feminine” most clearly maintain that biological and/or cultural differences between men and women are the foundation of men’s and women’s respectively different moral identities, behaviors, and styles of reasoning. Moral psychologist Carol Gilligan is a key figure in the development of a feminist feminine ethics that recognizes the disadvantages as well as advantages of being a person who cares (Gilligan 1995). Gilligan has claimed that because women have traditionally focused on the needs of others, they have developed an ethics of care that stresses the importance of creating and sustaining a strong network of human relationships. In contrast, because men have traditionally focused on competing in the public world, where people often are tempted to “get ahead” by unfair means, they have developed a language of justice that emphasizes adherence to agreed-upon rules or contracts (Gilligan 1982). According to Gilligan, widely accepted scales of moral development, for example, Lawrence Kohlberg’s Six-Stage Scale, are constructed to recognize and validate the voice of justice but not the voice of care. As a result, those who speak the language of care (typically women and members of other subordinated groups) do not generally reach beyond Kohlberg’s third stage of moral development, in which people confuse being moral with pleasing people. On the other hand, those who speak the language of justice (typically men) routinely rise to Kohlberg’s fifth stage of moral development, in which people make and keep promises, or even the sixth, in which people adopt universal ethical principles. Not surprisingly, Gilligan has recommended that Kohlberg recalibrate his scale of moral development to weigh women’s morality as accurately as men’s.
Nel Noddings, a philosopher of education, has also endorsed a brand of feminine ethics that emphasizes care as a benchmark of moral development. In her estimation, it is in striving to provide care and in being sincerely grateful for receiving care that we achieve our full moral potential. Although there is much to recommend Noddings’s ethics of care, including its emphasis on the role of feelings, needs, impressions, invitations, and ideals in the moral life, it is not clear that it unambiguously serves the best interests of women. Although Noddings insists that caregiving is a fundamental human activity, virtually all of the caregivers she praises are women, some of whom seem to care too much—that is, to the point of imperiling their own identities, integrity, and even survival in the service of others. Moreover, although Noddings claims that the one caring needs to care for herself, she sometimes conveys the impression that self-care is legitimate only insofar as it enables the one caring to be a better carer. Finally, Noddings suggests that relationships are so important that ethical diminishment is almost always the consequence of breaking a relationship, even a bad one (Noddings 1984).
Maternal Approaches
Closely related to feminine approaches to ethics are maternal approaches to ethics. These approaches regard the conceptual, metaphorical, and imaginative ideal of the practice of mothering as exemplifying human moral reasoning at its highest level. Sara Ruddick, Virginia Held, Caroline Whitbeck, and Eva Kittay are four recognized maternal thinkers. In one way or another, each claims that if everyone thought in the manner in which “good” mothers think about their children’s survival, growth, and social acceptability, our relationships in both the private and public world would be much improved.
There are several problems with maternal approaches to ethics, however. First, not all mothers are good mothers. Some of them are very bad mothers whose moral reasoning falls very short of any recognized ideal. Second, maternal approaches to ethics sometimes imply that biological mothers are the “best” kind of mothers, thereby devaluing nonbiological mothers and/or men who mother. Third, and probably most significantly, the mother-child relationship is fundamentally asymmetrical, and modeling all human relationships, particularly those between adults, on the mother-child relationship may not serve the human community well. In fact, the features that tend to make a mother-child relationship work are often the ones that may damage or destroy a relationship between two adults. For an adult relationship to work, both parties must be responsible for each other; neither must presume to know the other’s “good” better than the self knows it; and both must behave equally well, since the manipulations, name-callings, and temper tantrums parents expect from children are not ones that one adult should display unchallenged toward another adult (Grimshaw 1986:251).
Political Approaches
Unlike feminine and maternal approaches to ethics, political approaches to ethics focus not so much on questions of goodness as of power. They emphasize the ways in which traditional approaches to ethics maintain a status quo oppressive to women. Finally, and most important, they produce specific guidelines for action intended to weaken rather than strengthen the present systematic subordination of women.
Among other feminists, liberal, radical, Marxist-socialist, multicultural, global, and ecological feminists have provided different explanations and solutions for this state of affairs. Liberal feminists have charged that the main cause of female subordination is a set of informal rules and formal laws that block women’s entrance and/or success in the public world. To the degree that women are not permitted to flourish in places such as the academy, the forum, the marketplace, and the health care arena, women will not be able to achieve their actual potential. Therefore, women will not become men’s full equals until society accords women the same opportunities it accords men.
Radical feminists have insisted that women’s lack of adequate educational, occupational, and political opportunities does not fully explain female subordination. Rather, women’s reproductive and sexual roles and responsibilities best explain why women are relatively powerless and largely confined to the private or domestic realm. As radical feminists see it, all systems and structures that in any way restrict women’s sexual and procreative choices must be eliminated in order to truly liberate women from male control. Unless women are truly free to have or not have children, to have or not have sex with men, “Woman” will remain the “second sex,” subservient to the will of the “first sex”: that is, “Man.”
In contrast to liberal and radical feminists, Marxist and socialist feminists have claimed women cannot achieve equality with men in a society where the wealth produced by the powerless many ends up in the hands of the powerful few. The capitalist system is the primary enemy of women and must be replaced with a socialist system if women are ever to be liberated. No longer economically dependent on the powerful few, the once-powerless many (a class to which far more women than men belong) will be free to pursue life plans that serve their own best interests.
Although multicultural feminists have affirmed the general thrust of liberal, radical, and Marxist-socialist feminist thought, they have also faulted these theories to the degree that they are inattentive to issues of race and ethnicity. For example, in the United States, the oppression of African American, Native American, Asian American, and Latina/Hispanic women differs from that of white women. Commenting on how racial and ethnic inequities compound gender inequities, philosopher María Lugones, an Argentinean woman who has lived in the United States for several years, observes that Hispanic women have to participate in the Anglo world whereas Anglos do not have to participate in the Hispanic world. An Anglo woman can go to a Hispanic neighborhood for a festival, and if she finds the celebration overwhelming or otherwise displeasing, she can simply leave and write off the evening as a “waste” of time (Lugones and Spelman 1992:382-83). There is no way, however, that a Hispanic woman, particularly a poor one “without papers,” can so easily escape Anglo culture. Like it or not, the dominant Anglo culture sets the terms for her survival as one of its minority members. Only when the dominant Anglo culture voluntarily or involuntarily gives up its power over the so-called Other will a Hispanic woman have the same choices and rights an Anglo woman has.
Although global feminists have found multicultural feminists’ discussions of women’s oppression persuasive, they have nonetheless added that even this enriched discussion remains incomplete. All too often, feminists in one nation fail to look beyond their own borders. For example, U.S. feminists have not always been aware of how extensively women in some other countries are oppressed. While U.S. feminists struggle to formulate laws to prevent sexual harassment and date rape, thousands of women in some other countries are being sexually tortured on account of their own, their fathers’, or their husbands’ political beliefs. Similarly, while U.S. feminists debate the extent to which contraceptives ought to be funded by the government or distributed in public schools, women in some other countries have no access to contraception or family-planning services whatsoever.
Ecofeminists have concurred with global feminists that it is important for all feminists to understand how women in developed nations sometimes inadvertently contribute to the oppression of women in developing nations. When a wealthy U.S. woman seeks to adopt a Central American child, her desire might prompt profiteering middlemen to prey on pregnant Central American women, the poorest of whom are receptive to the argument that their children would be better off in the arms of wealthy U.S. women. What ecofeminists add to this analysis is that in wanting to give her child the best of everything, an affluent woman might close her eyes to the ways in which the human desire for “more” can and does damage not only the less fortunate segments of the human community but also many members of the greater animal community and the environment in general. The bigger and “better” one’s home, the more natural resources and animal products are probably necessary to maintain it. Thus, ecofeminists urge women to frame their considerations of power relations between men and women globally rather than locally, since we are all involved as world citizens in everything from international trade to environmental responsibility.
Finally, and much in contrast to ecofeminists, postmodern feminists have concluded that all attempts to provide a single explanation for women’s oppression are doomed to fail because there is no one entity, “Woman,” upon whom a label may be fixed. Women are individuals, each with a unique story to tell about a particular self. Women must, in the estimation of postmodern feminists, reveal their differences to each other so that they can better resist the patriarchal tendency to center, congeal, and cement thought into a rigid “truth” that always was, is, and forever will be.
Lesbian Approaches
Lesbian approaches to ethics are to be distinguished not only from feminine and maternal approaches to ethics but also from (heterosexist) political approaches to ethics. Lesbian feminists have generally regarded feminine and maternal approaches to ethics as espousing types of caring that contribute to women’s oppression. They have insisted that lesbians should engage only in the kinds of caring that will not bog them down in a quicksand of female duty and obligation from which there is no escape. Lesbian feminists have also taken exception to those political approaches to ethics that represent heterosexual relationships as generally ethically acceptable even in a society where men dominate women. As they see it, heterosexism in particular, rather than sexism in general, is the primary cause of women’s subordination to men, and distancing themselves from men is the best course of action for women who wish to develop themselves as moral agents.
Although lesbian feminists want power, they claim they do not want the kind of power that has enabled small, elite groups to impose their self-serving “morality” upon the masses. On the contrary, they want the kind of moral power that would permit even the most vulnerable and imperiled individuals to make free choices. Specifically, lesbian ethicist Lucia Hoagland has claimed that although a lesbian cannot always control the situations in which she finds herself, neither is she doomed to fall victim to them. She can instead affect them, if only by changing her attitude toward them. For Hoagland, a fully feminist approach to ethics does not involve people making rules for other people to follow. Nor does it involve some people sacrificing themselves on other people’s behalf. Instead, says Hoagland, a fully feminist approach to ethics has to do with people making their own choices, no matter the constraints of their situation, refusing either to dominate or to be dominated (Hoagland 1989).
While feminist approaches to ethics are all women centered, they do not impose a single, normative standard on women (or others). Nor do they offer a unitary interpretation of what constitutes a voluntary and intentional choice, an illegitimate or legitimate exercise of control, or a healthy or a pathological relationship. Rather, feminist approaches to ethics offer women (and men) a variety of accounts that validate women’s moral experiences in a way that points to both the weaknesses and strengths of women’s traditional “feminine” values and virtues. In addition, they suggest a variety of means, some of them more feasible than others, to achieve the essential goal of feminism, namely, gender equality. By revisioning the moral world, feminist ethicists have made up for some of the gaps, primarily the gender gaps in traditional ethics. Moreover, they have challenged others to see the holes they have missed and to fill them with the kind of insights that will contribute to the shaping of an ethics that serves all human beings equally well.