Notes for Class Twenty-Five: Feminist Ethics

Just as masculine and feminine ways of knowing might differ, so also masculine and feminine forms of ethical reasoning might differ. For example, according to typically masculine models, we should make ethical decisions based on ethical principles, rationality, impartiality, justice, and objectivity. In the feminine model, however, we balance reason with a sense of how circumstances affect what is appropriate, and we make moral judgments based on how behavior expresses care for others and promotes interpersonal communication and development.

I. The Ethics of Justice: Some people think that this latter (feminine) way of making ethical judgments is inferior to masculine strategies, because it fails to treat people justly or impartially (that is, regardless of their circumstances or relations to those passing the judgment). Such a view is supported by the work of Lawrence Kohlberg (1927-1987). Kohlberg argues that ethical development occurs in three stages, moving from self-centered thinking to abstract principles:

(1) In preconventional morality we are guided either by what those in power say is good or by what will satisfy some need we have: values are based on pleasure and pain.
(2) In conventional morality we act to please others; we obey rules or follow traditions because other people expect us to respect authority and law and order.
(3) At the postconventional level, we adopt moral principles not because we are told to do so but rather because we recognize how they promote a rational, objective, and impartial respect for human beings by emphasizing individual rights, fairness, and a sensitivity to the common good.

II. The Ethics of Care: Some theorists point out that most women do not go beyond the stage of conventional morality's concern for others. Carol Gilligan, for example, points out that by studying only males, Kohlberg limited his account of moral development to how our society thinks males should be brought up to be independent. It overlooks the fact, she says, that females are taught to be loving caretakers of other members of their groups (even if it means violating abstract moral principles). For women, moral development consists not in becoming more abstract and less caring, but rather more sensitive to how care and compassion can be extended to more people and refined to accommodate different circumstances. Instead of thinking of ethics in terms of impersonal, abstract moral principles (with right and wrong answers), women think of ethics in terms of personal moral responsibilities and conflicts that need to be resolved in order to maintain stable interpersonal relationships.

Sarah Hoagland makes a similar point by saying that traditional ethical positions (such as utilitarianism) are concerned with social organization, control, domination and subordination. By focusing on such antagonistic relations, it undermines moral ability and legitimates oppression through making people slaves to rules and principles. The Kantian emphasis on duty sees ethics as a matter of sorting out competing claims, in which our choices are considered matters of sacrifice and compromise rather than creations of new values, and our care for one another is legitimated only if it is authorized through the dictates of reason as our duty.

By contrast, in feminist ethics, caring (not duty) is central to morality. Doing one's moral duty (e.g., treating someone fairly or justly) does not mean that we should ignore the circumstances, people, or future interpersonal impact of our judgments. Instead, we must take such things into account if we are to avoid the mistakes of traditional ethics (the ethics of justice).

As Hoagland remarks: "(1) The focus and direction of traditional ethics, indeed its function, has not been individual integrity and agency (ability to make choices and act) but rather social organization and control. (2) The values around which traditional ethics revolves are antagonistic, the values of dominance and subordination. As a result, (3) traditional ethics undermines rather than promotes individual moral ability and agency. And (4) these aspects of traditional ethics combine to legitimize oppression by redefining it as social organization. Appeal to rules and principles is at the heart of this endeavor."

In short, the masculine ethics of justice is rational, objective, and impersonal--and that is what makes it inhuman. A truly human ethics would be based on care and a sense of responsibility and obligation to others. Or to put this in terms of feminist epistemology, true objectivity consists in recognizing how emotional involvement in making moral judgments is not only proper but necessary in order to identify exactly what action is done. We can be objective without losing our sense of humanity because being objective means being obligated to try to identify with the person doing an action in order to understand exactly what he or she is doing, thinking, or feeling.

In Gilligan's account, moral development would thus have three stages:

(1) a person cares only about and for himself or herself;
(2) he or she recognizes a responsibility to care for others;
(3) he or she accepts the principle of care as a universal ethical criterion and acknowledges that that requires sensitivity to the different needs of individuals in different situations.

III. The problem with this is that society is set up to encourage competition among individuals who are self-interested. In an environment in which competition and independent self-interest are basic assumptions, masculine preferences for fairness, equality, and impartiality seem to be more appropriate. But in an environment which cultivates relationships with other people, an ethics of care and responsibility is more important than one of justice. So in order to foster such an ethics, it is important to promote a social environment that is based not on marketplace competition or contracts between rational, self-interested economic agents, but on family relations such as those between a caretaker and a child.

Philosophizing about the nature of reality or morality has often tried to discover an objective truth that would be independent of any particular gender bias. But feminist thought indicates how even the pursuit of objectivity (using standards of rationality that minimize the importance of intuition and emotion) already endorses distinctly masculine ideals. According to the feminist perspective, philosophy should not be guided by the masculine model of confrontation and rigorous criticism of competing positions. Instead, philosophy should be guided by feminine strategies of mutual communication which try to appreciate sympathetically alternative ways of thinking rather than to decide on which position is the right one.