“Doing Ethics: Moral Reasoning, Theory, and Contemporary Issues”: Feminist Ethics Essay

Feminist ethics is founded on the views that women’s subordination is morally inappropriate and that women’s moral experiences are as valuable as men’s. Vaughn (2019) states that the following are the practical aims of feminist ethics. Firstly, feminist ethics express moral critiques of behaviors and attitudes that reinforce women’s rights. Consequently, the vital goal is to provide morally reasonable means to oppose such behaviors and practices. Ultimately, feminist ethics’ objective is to imagine a morally good alternative that promotes female empowerment. Feminist ethical argument resurfaced in the late 1960s, first among the general public and then in academic discourse, as part of a broader rebirth of feminist ethical questions. On issues like abortion, fairness and equality, domestic work, sexual violence, and obligatory heterosexuality, the first academic feminist ideas were expressed. Nonetheless, the term ‘feminist ethics’ did not become widely used until the late 1970s or early 1980s (Vaughn, 2019). Traditional ethics, feminists speculated, was more thoroughly male-biased and required more radical reconsideration.

Moreover, feminism is continuously engaged in ethical thought and discussion. According to Vaughn (2019), feminism is primarily a normative viewpoint, and feminists themselves regularly challenge its meaning. Lack of care for women’s interests, disregard for women’s concerns, rejection of women’s moral agency, devaluation of feminine ideals, and depreciation of women’s experience are all manifestations of feminist obstacles. Putting women’s interests first, considering women as ethical experts or authorities, exchanging male for female values, or extrapolating directly from women’s moral experience are all illustrations of how feminist ethics has been stereotyped and viewed. Essentially, these stereotypes are widespread and inaccurate; feminist ethics is significantly more extensive and more open than the misinterpretations suggest. To summarize, modern feminists are experimenting with new methods of thinking about moral themes that are attentive to their specific particularity and inherent shared worth, such as shared humanity, fairness, and impartiality.

Reference

Vaughn, L. (2019). Doing ethics: Moral reasoning, theory, and contemporary issues (5^th ed.). W. W. Norton & Company.