Feminist Ethics

Care Focused
Considers women’s distinctive moral perspective.

Power Focused
Seeks to oppose oppression.

Gilligan
•	replaces Kohlberg’s 6-stage account with an attention to the 3 understandings of the self-other relationship that women move in and out of in moral decisions (1. self, 2. other, 3. balance b/w self and other).  
•	juxtaposes male emphasis on rights/rules with female emphasis on relationships/responsibilities.  
•	Problem:  does casting women as caring in this way perpetuate gender stereotypes?) 

Noddings
•	characterizes ethics as being about relationship b/w “one-caring” and “cared-for.” 
•	Problem:  too much on successful caring relationships?  What about lopsided relations?

Baier 
•	care-focused ethics as “ethics of love and responsibility based on trust” (396).  
•	bridges gap between male emphasis on obligation, female emphasis on love.  
•	“appropriate trust” account moves closer to power-focused ethics.  
•	vs. Hobbes: trust more natural than distrust.

Held
•	maternal approach.
•	contract model not really gender neutral.  Male experience of equality vs. female experience of inequality.
•	other differences:  non-voluntary, permanent/non-replaceable, positive rather than negative rights, holistic rather than atomistic.
•	some kinds of power ok. 
•	Problem:  why universalize this particular relationship?  Friendship as alternative model.

Jaggar
•	ethics should (1) critique actions and practices that subordinate women, (2) prescribe ways of resisting these, (3) consider alternatives that will promote women’s emanicipation, (4) extend this project to classism, ethnocentrism, heterosexism, ableism, etc.

Daly
•	lesbian power ethics
•	Nietzschean inversion: what the patriarchy calls evil (in women) is good; what it calls good is bad.
•	“Nemesis”:  only false justice is blind; the antidote to this – “Rage”.

Hoagland
•	replace “Am I good?”, “Is this good?” with “Does this contribute to my self-creation, freedom and liberation?” (403).
•	an ethics need not be universal.

Frye
•	non-feminist ethical emphasis on universality a kind of authoritarianism.  In fact, these ethicists have a stake in dictating which ethical precepts others should adopt.  Universality is not neutrality.  
•	“playfulness”.