The Ethics of Gender

In previous lectures, you would have been exposed to the views of varying philosophers and
milieus on women, including Plato – only a small number of women can attain high positions in
society; Aristotle – women are inferior to men who are their rulers; J.S. Mill – the inequality of
women to men is not morally justified and gender equality is a utilitarian ideal (although Mill
should have argued that whether it was utilitarian should not be the point but that it is the right thing
to do); Immanuel Kant – women and non-white males are inferior to white males, despite his
commitment to universal freedom.

As such, scholars have criticised traditional moral philosophy of being exclusionary – excluding
women’s voices and issues

Traditional approaches to ethics have been critiqued for their primary focus on patriarchal values,
such as autonomy, impartiality, and neutrality, offering in that sense, Ethics of Justice/principles
rather than one focused on concrete caring relationships as seen in Care Ethics

The Ethics of Care

Traditional approaches to morality have revolved around the search for a simple, uniform approach
to morality and a single foundational moral principle e.g. the Golden Rule/Principle of
Utility/Categorical Imperative

Virtue Ethics stands out from the crowd with its recognition that you cannot always make precise
determinations in moral concerns and the best approach is develop a virtuous character which is
able to make moral judgements in contextual matters

Care ethics emphasises Virtue Ethics’ recognition of ‘contextual circumstances’, holding that there
is no a supreme moral rule

Care Ethics holds that moral decision-making is made in the context of relatedness, with caring and
compassion as core values, in contrast to traditional beliefs in impartial moral reasoning

Care ethicists like Nel Noddings emphasise the relationship between virtue and care ethics by
noting care ethics’ interest in helping people know how to make moral judgements rather than
providing a list of moral instructions one must follow at all times

Traditional ethical theories differ from both by their abstract nature which makes them difficult to
understand and apply, thus, implying that only a limited ‘elite’ group can understand and apply
them

This ‘elite’ group is typically composed of white, male, literate persons, and can therefore not be
seen as universal through its contrasting of male (principle/rule) and female moral reasoning and
the privileging of the former (care)

Carol Gilligan’s Hypothetical Situation

Gilligan poses a hypothetical situation to two eleven year- old children, Jake and Amy in the
attempt to explain the difference between male and female moral reasoning. A man - Heinz’s wife,
is extremely ill and in danger of dying. A certain drug might save her life, but Heinz cannot afford
it, in part because the druggist had set an unreasonably high price for it. Should Heinz steal the
drug?

While Jake answers yes, based on the reason that his wife’s life is worth more than the drug’s value,
Amy wondered what would happen to both the man and his wife if he stole the drug. “If he stole the
drug, he might save his wife then, but if he did, he might have to go to jail, and then his wife might
get sicker again.” She concludes by noting that if Heinz and his wife talk about it, they might be
able to think of some other way out of the dilemma.

One interesting thing about this case is the very different ways in which the two children tried to
determine the right thing to do in this situation.

Jake used a calculation (principle) in which he weighed and compared values from a neutral
standpoint.

Amy spoke about the possible effects of the proposed action on the two individuals and their
relationship. Her method did not give the kind of definitive answer that is apparent in Jake’s
method.

This highlights the distinction between traditional ethical theories and the ethics of care – following
a principle/rule vs engaging in thinking premised on concern about particular people and their
relations and how they will be affected by some action.

The latter’s concern with relatedness distinguishes it from virtue ethics – virtue ethic’s focuses on
the individual agent rather than his/her relation with others

Noddings maintains that we all have a natural desire to be cared for—and that we have the ability to
provide care. This is true whether we are male or female, even though evolution and culture tend to
make us think that care is more female than male.

For Noddings, the core of a moral relationship is an emotion (caring for others) that is best
exemplified by that of loving mothers toward their children. We act morally to the extent that we
approximate this relation to others. Rather than stand on our rights, insist on justice, promote the
welfare of all alike, or look out for Number One, morality counsels us to care for others with a
steadfast heart.

She emphasizes that care is not a voluntary act of free and equal parties who enter into social
contracts. Rather, we find ourselves already embedded in family and social contexts that create
networks of care. These networks and relationships are not primarily governed by abstract rules;
rather, they depend upon the needs and relations of the individuals.

In this sense, caring is not a sacrifice or a demand, it is a natural desire which once satisfied, adds
value to life, distinct from caregiving which can be undertaken in an impersonal manner
Implies that emotions come into play, as opposed to neutrality/impartiality, with Nodding’s
emphasis on how facial expressions and behaviour can give insight into what a person is thinking
and how emotions are at the heart of moral experiences

In suggesting a difference between men’s and women’s morality, Carol Gilligan was taking aim at
one of the dominant points of view about moral development, namely, that of the psychologist
Lawrence Kohlberg.

According to Kohlberg, the highest stage of moral development is the stage in which an adult can
be governed not by social pressure, but by personal moral principles and a sense of justice. Based
on these principles, adults come to regard other people as moral equals and manifest an impartial
and universal perspective.

In his own research, Kohlberg found that women did not often reach this stage of development. He
thus, judged them to be morally underdeveloped/immature or morally deficient, with their
emotion/care laden perspectives. Of course, his conclusions were not totally surprising because he
had used an all-male sample in working out his theory. After deriving his principles from male
subjects, he then used them to judge both male and female moral development

Gilligan’s analysis has exposed a crucial nature of traditional moral reasoning – there is no room for
relationality, everything is impartial.

However, relationality does affect moral reasoning and impartial approaches are therefore not just
exclusionary but also incomplete

Gilligan’s position sometimes regarded as degrading to women because:

1. It essentialises feminine reasoning, just like the criticised traditional approaches. In its most
extreme form, could be taken to imply that women cannot approach moral concerns in a
rational manner
2. Its essentialisation could also lead to women being restricted to care jobs in the private
sphere leading to a possible self-sacrificiall altruism

Essentialisation is well analysed in feminist distinctions between sex, a biological category, and
gender, a (fluid) social phenomenon.

Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex traces how the socialisation process indoctrinates men and
women into different social roles, with behaviours characterised as “masculine” and “feminine. The
fact that men can exhibit ‘feminine’ traits and women, ‘masculine’ ones proves that these
delineations are not natural

Gilligan also notes that the men can adopt the ethics of care and women the ethics of principle to
show that there is no extreme essentialisation.

Do women in fact think and act in the ways Gilligan described above?
There is no universally accepted response, but it is true that both sexes believe that their think
differently from their counterparts, possibly from the gender schemas we have been socialised into
stereotyping

Power, Privilege and Diversity

Has the ethics of care been effective in changing women’s subjection/oppression?

Obviously not, in the light of its ‘essentialising’ nature

What is also obvious is the need to depend on the ethics of principle to achieve gender equality (e.g.
the notion of justice)

Three areas that must be addressed to achieve this include:

1. How society is organised that disadvantages women(laws that disadvantage women)

2. The moral standards of contemporary period and how they are approached(e.g. that it is
immoral for women to participate in public polity)
3. Philosophical tradition which has privileged one form of moral reasoning over others

While many challenges in these areas have been addressed, there are still subtle issues which
militate against women, e.g. motherhood and its challenges for a career-oriented woman; other
forms of discrimination; sexual violence/harassment, issues where even when illegal, violations are
taken with levity; little wonder that long before care ethics, feminist scholars had advocated for
rethinking the approaches to morality, arguing that traditional approaches that justified women’s
subjection could not be utilised as tools of liberation

Isn’t it possible that these traditional approaches could be effective but have not been utilised
properly/in their full capacity? What if they are built on false assumptions about women’s interests?

This explains attempts at inculcating women in traditional theories including Jean Hampton and
Susan Moller Okin’s re-imagined Rawlsian SC in which women are explicit equal with men; Carol
Hay’s Kantian in which women are not just members of the moral community, they also have a
Kantian duty to themselves to resist their oppression out of self- respect.

These attempts still fall short of inculcating women’s lived experiences using the right terms and
reducing the level of abstraction e.g. sexual harassment was incorporated into lived experiences in
the 1970s to describe being hounded out of a workplace by extreme sexual pressure as opposed to
voluntary exit

Thus, the need for more tools to ensure this incorporation, tools that can identify the frameworks
that create and sustain these discriminatory practices

Marilyn Frye uses the metaphor of a birdcage to explain this framework where each wire alone
cannot cage the bird
A need to identify and remove all the wires e.g. pornography – an obscene phenomenon(?), used to
commit sexual assaults that encourages sexual deviance (immorality) and sustain the belief that
women are objects for men’s pleasures

Is it only pornography that does this? What of adverts, movies and social life in general?

Thus, the birdcage analogy.

Other Wires:

Science – male dominated, utilised to exaggerate anatomical differences between men and women
(various ‘diseases’ e.g. hysteria, accruing from women’s biology) and present ‘scientific accounts
of women’s nature; all to justify women’s oppression

Science is thereby debunked as an objective enterprise, and seen as one where research and
hypotheses are driven by various motivations = social practice that reinforces prevailing power
relations (see exclusion of Africa’s ‘trado-medical’ research)

Morality can also be seen as such a tool, like Rousseau, Marx and Nietzsche espouse

For feminist moral philosophy, it has been used to reinforce the power relations between men and
women with the feminisation of certain virtues essential for a subservient position and the
masculinisation of those essential for public leadership

Traditional moral philosophy is also inherently gendered – how many of the philosophers that we
know are women?

Philosophy – moral and feminist – seem inhospitable to women; where prominent works that were
written by women are either dismissed or taken less seriously or even published under other names
(e.g. J.S. Mill and his wife, Simone de Beauvoir and Satre etc)

It took the arrival of prominent female philosophers like Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot
among others to see women take the lead in moral philosophy, an area that should have taken up the
injustice against women earlier but that excluded women with its impartial use of reason and
calculation

Bioethics and Applied ethics, fields where many of the moral issues affect women have also been
opportunities for female philosophers to prove their mettle

Gilligan’s position rests on two assumptions: 1) there is a clear distinction between male and female
and 2) members of the same sex have essential characteristics such that we can talk of the
characteristics of moral reasoning of any particular sex

These assumptions are easily debunked:

1. human life transcends male/female biological categories (intersex and trans)

2. Gender also transcends feminine/masculine
3. Humans diversity also transcends sex and gender, e.g wealth, health, disability, race such
that those who share these categories have more in common than those of their same
 sex/gender. Intersectionality was coined to explain persons who belong to two or more of
these other categories which disadvantage them and how they interact e.g. Sojourner Truth,
a black woman slave

Intersectionality at this point seems to have thrown a wrench at the problem of moral reasoning –
how then can we arrive at a singular approach that would address all moral concerns?