the relationship of the belief system or ideology to ethical issues in society Flashcards
Ethics definition
Ethics: Good/Bad - Morals, Values etc → guide the actions and beliefs of society
A definition from the syllabus : “Ethics are defined as the moral principles that govern a person’s behaviour or the conducting of an activity”
Feminist Ethics
Feminist Ethics: Feminist Ethics is an attempt to revise, reformulate, or rethink traditional ethics to the extent it depreciates or devalues women’s moral experience (No author, 1998 - written in Feminist Ethics essay
Why was feminist ethics created
Feminist philosopher Alison Jaggar (Feminist Ethics 1992) posits that feminist ethics was created from a backlash against traditionally male-dominated ethics for letting down women in five different ways:
It shows less concern for women as opposed to men’s issues and interests
Trivialises the moral issues that arise in the so-called “private world”
Implies that women are generally not as morally mature/deep as men
Overrates culturally masculine traits (e.g. independence, autonomy, intellect, will, hierarchy, domination, etc.), while underrating culturally feminine traits like interdependence, community, emotion, trust, joy, peace, etc
It favours “male” ways of moral reasoning that emphasise rules, rights, universality, and impartiality over “female” ways of moral reasoning that emphasise relationships, responsibilities, particularity, and partiality
Characteristics of feminist ethics
addresses one or more of the five ways traditional ethics has failed or neglected women
Aims “to understand, criticise and correct” how gender operates within our moral beliefs and practices (Lindemann)
The binary views of gender
The privilege historically available to men
The ways that views about gender maintain oppressive social orders or practices that harm others, especially girls and women who historically have been subordinated, along gendered dimensions including sexuality and gender-identity.
How can feminism and ethics be explored
Feminism and Ethics can be explored in two ways:
Examining and deconstructing feminist approaches to ethics and debates about the gendered nature of morality.
To look at what ethical issues are occuring in society that are central to feminist ideology.
Traditional ethics
When discussing women in traditional ethics, it often portrays them in a domestic light - separating them from men.
An example of undermining female morality is Kohlberg’s moral ladder
Care Ethics vs Status Oriented Ethics:
Care-focused and status-focused feminist approaches to ethics do not impose a single normative standard on women.
Feminists developing care-focused and status-focused approaches to ethics may safely argue that they are trying to do what traditional ethicists should have done in the first place
Care ethics
Care-focused feminist ones are highly attune to gender inequalities and issues.
Carol Gilligan, a care-focused feminist critiques Kohlberg’s moral ladder (a theory which describes moral development from infancy to adulthood from stages 1 to 6) as Kohlberg believed that women rarely climb past Stage Three, whereas men routinely make it to Stages Four or even Five.
1st wave
Slavery (feminists were part of the abolitionist movement)
Property rights
(New York) Married Women’s Property Act (1860) that legalised property ownership for women.
Right to vote (Suffrage)
Equal rights for education→ this also perpetuated the social construct around seeing women as being incapable of being moral (as they were uneducated)
Men’s morality was considered to be human morality and went unchallenged in the first wave. Even Mary Wollstonecraft reasoned women had to act like men to become moral agents
Workplace equality
Unequal pay + legally forced to give up job at marriage/pregnancy
Rights within marriage
Equal protections under law
Peace (anti-war)
Temperance from alcohol
Aimed to limit or prohibit the consumption of alcohol and as women were deemed as the ‘moral authorities of their households’, drinking was considered a threat to the stability of their homes
Practical clothing
Rights over their own body
‘Whereas parents teach boys morals, they teach girls manners,’ - (Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, p. 105)
Campaigning for women’s morality which viewed women as fragile, and needed to be protected.
Mary Wollstonecraft concluded that moral virtue is unitary
2nd wave
Reproductive rights
→ rights over own body, contraception pill, abortion
Workplace equality
→ post WWII
→ maternity leave
→ Sexual harassment
→ Equal pay
Anti - Racism (starts)
→ Belle Hooks
Violence against women
→ first women’s refuge (Elsie formed by Anne Summers)
→ “Take back the Night” walks
Peace movement
→ Anti-war
→ Vietnam war
Dress reforms
The experiences and perspectives of what were seen as the universal or neutral perspective is usually aligned with the white male perspective
Traditional ethics were charged/challenged as favouring male ways of moral reasoning (rigid, rules, impartiality)
In The Second Sex, men’s philosophy would ignore their own sex-situatedness but describe women as the “Other” and men as the “Self”.
Other and Self concept
Because men in philosophy take themselves to be paradigmatically human and take it upon themselves to characterise the nature of womankind as different from men, Beauvoir said that men socially construct women as the Other.
- Breakdown of Gender Roles and Norms:
→ Women
Care-focused and status-focused feminist approaches to ethics do not impose a single normative standard on women.
Feminists developing care-focused and status-focused approaches to ethics may safely argue that they are trying to do what traditional ethicists should have done in the first place
3rd wave
Violence against women
→ #MeToo movement
→ police ignorance
→ sexual harassment, violence and assault
→ domestic violence/murder - intimate partners
The pink tax
→ the commercialisation of feminine products
Racism
→ “Double encumbrance” of race and gender
Technology - cyberfeminism
→ deep fakes, trolling
→ technology perpetuates prevailing negative stereotypes/myths about women
Beauty/beauty standards
→ damaging impacts on young girls/women’s self confidence and esteem
→ Commercialisation of feminism into fashion items and products
Intersectionality
→ begins to include women from different classes and experiences (a critique on past waves’ focus on middle class Western women)
→ Critiques Western superiority/ignorance, the assumption that “women are better off in the West”
Female sexuality
→ gender, sexuality
→ Discrimination against LGBTQI + community
Gendered language
→ (eg. womyn instead of women)
Peace
Rights over body
→ freedom
→ #freethenip
→ Slut Walks
→ Raunch culture
→ Pop culture icons = Spice Girls, Madonna
→ dress reform
(women taking back their femininity/dress like bimbos but claim male privilege + attitude : a backlash against second wave feminism’s strict dress reform. For third wave feminists, the idea is that instead being objects of a sexist patriarchy, they define feminine beauty for themselves)
Work rights
→ equal pay
→ equal opportunity
Sexuality - freedom to be an individual and not confined to the socially constructed views of being a women
