Chapter 11

1. Ethics: Discovering
Right and Wrong
Louis P. Pojman and James Fieser
8th edition

2. Chapter Eleven:
Gender and Ethics
 Today, women have the same fundamental rights as
men, but as recently as the 1960s and 1970s, this was
not so.
 Men made the moral rules of society, and the female
perspective of moral issues has been ignored in favor of
the male perspective.
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3. Alison Jaggar: Five Harms
with the Male Bias in Ethics
1. It relegates women to subservient obligations
(obedience, silence, and faithfulness).
2. It confines women to a socially isolated domestic realm
of society with little legitimate political regulation.
3. It denies the moral agency of women, claiming they
lack the capacity for moral reasoning.
4. It prefers male values over female ones (e.g.,
independence, autonomy, and intellect vs.
interdependence, community, connection, sharing, and
emotion).
5. It favors male notions of moral rules, judgments about
particular actions, impartial moral assessments, and
contractual agreements.
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4. Two Key Questions
1. How do men and women psychologically differ from
each other (if at all)?
2. Based on those psychological differences, how do men
and women morally differ from each other (if at all)?
 How we’ve answered these questions throughout history
has determined whether women have been empowered
or subjugated.
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5. Classic Views
 Discussions of gender and morality began in ancient
Greece, and opinions about women’s moral capacities
were biased.
 Aristotle: Women and natural subservience
 Rousseau: Women as objects of sexual desire
 Wollstonecraft: Gender-neutral morality
 Instinct vs. social construction
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6. Aristotle: Women and
Natural Subservience (1 of 2)
 Aristotle’s response to the psychological question: Men
are designed to command, and women to obey.
 Different capacities of the soul:
 Slave: No deliberative faculty at all
 Woman: Deliberative faculty without authority
 Child: An immature deliberative faculty
 Man: Deliberative faculty with authority
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7. Aristotle: Women and
Natural Subservience (2 of 2)
 Aristotle’s response to the moral question: All of us
acquire the full range of virtues, but men’s virtues are
tied to commanding and women’s virtues are tied to
obeying.
 There is a distinct type of female morality.
 Criticism: Aristotle’s philosophy is based on the roles of
women in ancient patriarchal societies.
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8. Rousseau: Women as Objects
of Sexual Desire (1 of 2)
 Rousseau’s response to the psychological question: Men
are strong and aggressive, and women are weak and
passive.
 Women are designed to sexually please men.
 His strength attracts her to him, and her allurement
attracts him to her.
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9. Rousseau: Women as Objects
of Sexual Desire (2 of 2)
 Rousseau’s response to the moral question: Women
should learn to entice men.
 He depends on her cooperation to satisfy his sexual
desires, and she submits to his superior strength when she
gets what she wants from him.
 Women need to be educated differently to bring out their
natural differences.
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10. Wollstonecraft: Gender-
Neutral Morality
 Wollstonecraft’s response to the psychological question:
Men and women are fundamentally the same.
 The apparent differences are the result of the gender
roles imposed on them and misguided education.
 Wollstonecraft’s response to the moral question:
 Men and women are fundamentally the same.
 Three features separate humans from animals: Reason, the
exercise of virtue, and the passion for knowledge.
 All moral duties are human duties, and there are no
special female virtues or obligations (e.g. being good at
child rearing or being subservient and sexually alluring).
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11. Instinct vs. Social Construction
(1 of 2)
 Wollstonecraft insisted on equality and justice for
women.
 Her psychological assumptions were based on her own
personal experience as a woman.
 Today, views are still driven by stereotype and
speculation.
 A toy study with rhesus monkeys suggests that boys
preferred wheeled toys over dolls and girls had no
significant preference.
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12. Instinct vs. Social Construction
(2 of 2)
 Some psychological gender differences are ingrained in
men and women.
 Are these differences instinctive or merely social
constructions?
 It may be best to avoid taking a strong stand on the
nature–nurture question.
 Some gender differences are so strong that they deserve
to be acknowledged as possible foundations for gender
differences in ethics.
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13. Female Care Ethics
 A preference for wheeled toys may translate into a male
disposition to see the social and moral world as a giant
rule-governed machine.
 A preference for dolls may translate into a female
tendency to see the social and moral world as a network
of personal relationships.
 Morality from a female perspective focuses on caring for
others; the male perspective focuses on rule-following
and abstract moral duties.
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14. Kohlberg and Gilligan:
Justice vs. Care
 Kohlberg’s theory—Six stages of moral development,
which move from selfishness to impartial justice.
 Criticism of Kohlberg—His studies only used males, and
his justice view of morality was male-oriented.
 Gilligan’s theory—A woman’s moral point of view is
different from a man’s.
 Men emphasize rights and principles of justice.
 Women focus on particular relationships and the process.
 Three stages of moral development—A girl goes from
focusing too much on her own interests to focusing too
much on others’ interests to balancing her needs and
others’ needs.
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15. Care and Particularism
(1 of 2)
 Themes surrounding an ethics of care:
 Women see their personal identities as deeply
interconnected with other people.
 Women focus on specific circumstances surrounding moral
situations.
 Women see morality in the context of close personal
relationships.
 Women see morality as a function of vulnerability and
dependency.
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16. Care and Particularism
(2 of 2)
 Moral particularism—Morality always involves particular
relations with people, not lifeless abstractions.
 Classical moral theory incorporates some particularism by
recognizing obligations to family, friends, and local
community.
 Defenders of care ethics claim that traditional morality
has not gone far enough in particularizing our moral
obligations.
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17. Care and Virtues (1 of 3)
 Nel Noddings:
 Care is a component of virtue theory, where care is a
nurturing character trait that we personally internalize, as
we do other virtues.
 Care ethics is a quest for new virtues based on traditional
women’s practices.
 Gender-free morality may be impossible.
 Traditional rule-governed morality is a hostile environment
to an ethics of care.
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18. Care and Virtues (2 of 3)
 Sarah Clarke Miller:
 Care is fully compatible with general moral principles.
 General principles are an overall guide for moral decision-
making, but this is only one element of a larger process of
moral judgment.
 The female care value can be expressed as a duty and
obligation to care.
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19. Care and Virtues (3 of 3)
 Is the care value best expressed as a virtue or a duty?
 There are ways of marrying the two notions.
 Morality begins with fundamental duties of obligation that
are expressed as general rules.
 We then internalize those rules by forming virtuous habits
to act in obedience to our duties.
 We can develop the virtue of care to act in a caring way
and become caring people.
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20. Four Options Regarding
Gender and Ethics
 Male-only option
 Female-only option
 Separate-but-equal option
 Mutually inclusive option
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21. Male-Only Option
 Only the traditional male view of ethics, emphasizing
general abstract principles, is valid.
 Morality is gender-neutral, and its principles should be
applied universally to all people.
 Criticism: Advances in biology and psychology suggest
that the male-only approach to ethics seems
incomplete.
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22. Female-Only Option
 Only the female approach to morality is valid.
 There is only one conception of morality for all people
to follow, but that conception is care ethics, not rigid
rule-based systems.
 Criticisms: It is also incomplete, and the general
principles are an important part of the moral reasoning
process.
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23. Separate-but-Equal Option
 There are two equally valid domains of ethics grounded
in gender differences.
 Roy Baumeister: Women prefer one-to-one
relationships, which are critical to our immediate
survival, and men prefer larger groups, which develop
social systems and culture.
 Criticisms: Both genders have the capacity for both
types of social interaction, and this option could have
disastrous consequences for women.
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24. Mutually Inclusive Option
 Men and women should adopt both the male and female
approaches to morality.
 There are grounds for both and we cannot segregate
them.
 Women have already internalized the traditional male
approach, so the burden is on men to adjust their moral
expectations to include female values.
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25. Conclusion
 The traditional ethical theory has done a poor job of
representing women’s moral viewpoint.
 Aristotle saw women as subservient, and Rousseau saw
them as sexually appealing to men.
 Wollstonecraft saw morality as gender neutral.
 Gilligan argued for care ethics; Noddings saw the care
value as a virtue and Miller saw it as a duty.
 The best way to resolve tensions between gender-
related differences in ethics is for men and women to
adopt both the male and female approaches to morality.
 We must balance caring for others with moral rules that
guard against unjust conduct.
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