Feminist Ethics Part 1: A Brief History - MGTOW

A brief history of the development of feminist ethics. This new series will cover the care-focused and status approaches to feminist ethics. Also, maybe lesbian ethics.

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Feminist Ethics is an attempt to revise, reformulate, or rethink traditional ethics to the extent it depreciates or devalues women's moral experience. Feminists believe that traditional models of ethics let down women in 5 ways.

1) First, it shows less concern for women's as opposed to men's issues and interests.

2) Second, traditional ethics views as trivial the moral issues that arise in the so-called private world, the realm in which women do housework and take care of children, the infirm, and the elderly.

3) Third, it implies that, in general, women are not as morally mature or deep as men.

4) Fourth, traditional ethics overrates culturally masculine traits like “independence, autonomy, intellect, will, wariness, hierarchy, domination, culture, transcendence, product, asceticism, war, and death,” while it underrates culturally feminine traits like “interdependence, community, connection, sharing, emotion, body, trust, absence of hierarchy, nature, immanence, process, joy, peace, and life.”

5) Fifth, and finally, it favors “male” ways of moral reasoning that emphasize rules, rights, universality, and impartiality over “female” ways of moral reasoning that emphasize relationships, responsibilities, particularity, and partiality.

Now, right out the gate we can immediately see the relationship between feminist ethics and the contents of my two previous series on feminism. For those who have not watched my other two series, I strongly recommend you turn off this video and watch Feminism Part 1: Women’s Way of Knowing, followed by Feminist Epistemology Part 1: The Situated Knower. Once you have watched those videos, please return and once again listen to the 5 points I have just listed. Point 5 is clearly a call towards the division between vertical and lateral thinking. Points 2 and 4 are clearly referring to the situated knower as presented in feminist epistemology.

In this series, I will cover two feminist ethical approached; Care – Focused approaches to feminist ethics, and Status – Focused approached to feminist ethics. I may also decide to cover Lesbian ethics as the last part of this series. And yes, there is such a thing as lesbian ethics.

Now, in this video I will be covering an overview of ethics and a brief history of feminist ethical thought. At the root of it, each feminist ethical approach attempts to address one or more of the 5 points I had listed above.

Now, ethics is a core area of philosophy. In fact, ethics is the most important concern of philosophers such as Plato and Nietzsche; it is the investigation of how human beings ought to behave and not merely an attempt of describing how human beings in fact do behave. Ethics can be broken down into specific areas which in turn encompass certain types of questions. Meta-ethics, for example concerns itself with the nature of the good, and the ontological status of ethical values whatever form they may take.

Normative ethics, on the other hand is concerned with ethical systems that are developed based on certain commitments to meta-ethical claims. The three most prominent normative ethical systems are virtue ethics, which was developed and defended by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and much of Roman thought. Virtue ethics is governed by the cultivation of the cardinal virtues of prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude.

Deontology, which is a rules based system fleshed out by Kant governed by the categorical imperative; namely, behave in such a way as that you wish your actions become a universal rule. And finally, Utilitarianism, which was developed by Bentham and Mill. Utilitarianism is concerned with maximizing happiness for the greatest number. Consequentialism is another normative ethical model but is not as prominent as the three mentioned so far.
Lower than normative ethics, we have applied ethics. Applied ethics concerns itself with answering practical questions in relation to a normative ethical system. Politics and much discourse on the internet are usually engaged with applied ethics. A question in applied ethics would be as follows; is abortion morally right in terms of virtue ethics, or in terms of deontology, or in terms of utilitarianism.

Finally, we have descriptive ethics. Descriptive ethics is merely the activity of cataloging ethical systems and values of different cultures and time periods. It is something that anthropologists engage in and serves as background information to fuel higher order ethical thought found in normative and meta-ethical discourse....