Ch 10: The Ethics of Diversity:

Gender

Rethinking the History of Ethical Theory

• Women’s voices have been excluded from the canon.• Autonomous man – an ethics of strangers, odd from

a feminist perspective.• Social contract theory – disadvantages women, glue

of society is not contract but family• Impartiality and Universality – invalidates moral

priority of intimate relationships• Absence of embodiment – res cogitans not

embodied beings

Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development

Preconventional morality: early childhood:• Stage One: desire to avoid punishment• Stage Two: Tit for tatConventional morality: adolescence and adulthood• Stage three: Good boy/ nice girl orientation• Stage four: Rule followingPost conventional morality: rarely reached• Stage five: social construct orientation• Stage six: universal justice, reciprocity, equality and

respect

The Ethics of Care

• Carol Gilligan – began research on moral development with draft resisters then shifted to female subjects on the subject of abortion when the draft ended in 1973.

• Metaphor of voice – instead of theory or perspective.• Women’s voices didn’t fit Kohlberg’s stages: care rather

than justice• Women emerge as more concerned about relationships,

emotional connectedness and caregiving. Voice varies internally regarding masculine and feminine approaches to morality, as well as between the genders.

Rethinking the Foundations of Ethics

• Ethics as conversation: conversation not argument.

• Inclusive conversation: women and people of color need to be involved.

• New issues emerge: domestic violence, child abuse, family leave, responsibilities toward elderly parents.

• Caution against using morality to justify violence: honor, domestic violence, suppression.

Caring and Act Utilitarianism

• Both are consequentialist and address pleasures and pains.

• Care ethic calculates differently:1. Extent to which people might be hurt by a

particular decision2. Degree to which a particular decision might

diminish the sense of connectedness among participants of the situation.

• Emotions more important.

Feminine and Feminist Ethics• Feminine ethics: emphasize women’s moral voices, often an ethics

of care, following Gilligan.• Feminist ethics focusses on women’s oppression and argues for

policies to rectify past injustices.• Power and inequality stressed.• Conditions for feminist ethics from Alison Jagger:1. Sensitive to gender inequalities2. Understand individual actions in the context of broader social

practices.3. Provide guidance on issues traditionally seen as private, e.g.,

personal relationships and family.4. Take the moral experience of women seriously

Public and Private Realms

• Feminist ethics emphasizes moral scrutiny in the private realm generally confined to women, children persons or color and persons with disabilities.

• Family issues – equal treatment of men and women at home, in workplace.

• Power issues: patriarchy, rape, reproductive freedom, sexism in language, harassment, pornography, poverty.

Queer and Transgender Theories

• Reconsider the notion of gender identity and sexual orientation and domination entailed.

• Reconsider “the natural.”• Reconsider dichotomous thinking:

male/female• Emergence of transgender theory.