Recent Work in Feminist Ethics

Abstract

No longer primarily a critique of mainstream moral philosophy, feminist ethics is now a mature and well-established subdiscipline within the broader field of moral philosophy. Feminist philosophers are making positive contributions to matters of urgent moral concern as well as developing increasingly sophisticated alternative moral theories. The independence of feminist ethics as a field is marked by a range of standard texts in the area (Card 1991; Tong 1993; Cole and Coultrap-McQuin 1992; Frazer, Hornsby, and Lovibond 1992; Kittay and Meyers 1987; and more recent anthologies by Meyers 1997a; Jaggar 1994; and DiQuinzio and Young 1997); a broadening of the range of concerns taken up by feminist ethicists, such as the application of feminist thinking to family justice (Nelson 1997; Minow and Shanley 1996) and to matters of global justice (Nussbaum and Glover 1995); and an increasing theoretical sophistication (see work by Walker 1998; Card 1996). At the same time as feminist ethics has become established as an area in its own right within the study of ethics, there has also been a blurring of the boundaries between feminist ethics and the rest of ethics. A number of factors have contributed to this move. First, there is now a body of work by prominent women moral philosophers who have written on feminist ethics—Annette Baier, Onora O’Neill, and Jean Hampton, for example. Second, there are also a number of women, known primarily as feminist philosophers, who have turned their attention to more mainstream or traditional problems— Claudia Card on moral luck and Margaret Urban Walker on Sidgwick’s ethics, for example. Third, there are male moral philosophers—such as Laurence Thomas (1989), Michael Stocker (1990), and Owen Flanagan (1991)— who have moved in directions advocated by feminist moral theorists. Fourth, it has been suggested that work by women working in the main