Concept
Feminist philosophers critique traditional ethics as pre-eminently focusing on men's perspective with little regard for women's viewpoints. Caring and the moral issues of private life and family responsibilities were traditionally regarded as trivial matters. Generally, women are portrayed as ethically immature and shallow in comparison to men. Traditional ethics prizes masculine cultural traits like “independence, autonomy, intellect, will, wariness, hierarchy, domination, culture, transcendence, product, asceticism, war, and death,” and gives less weight to culturally feminine traits like “interdependence, community, connection, sharing, emotion, body, trust, absence of hierarchy, nature, immanence, process, joy, peace, and life.” Traditional ethics has a “male” orientated convention in which moral reasoning is viewed through a framework of rules, rights, universality, and impartiality. The “female” approaches to moral reasoning emphasise relationships, responsibilities, particularity, and partiality.
Read more about this topic: Feminist Ethics
Famous quotes containing the word concept:
“One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics; I am speaking of the infinite.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)
“The concept of a person is logically prior to that of an individual consciousness. The concept of a person is not to be analysed as that of an animated body or an embodied anima.”
—Sir Peter Frederick Strawson (b. 1919)
“The heritage of the American Revolution is forgotten, and the American government, for better and for worse, has entered into the heritage of Europe as though it were its patrimony—unaware, alas, of the fact that Europe’s declining power was preceded and accompanied by political bankruptcy, the bankruptcy of the nation-state and its concept of sovereignty.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)