Feminist ethics is an approach to ethics that builds on the belief that traditionally ethical theorizing has undervalued and/or underappreciated women's moral experience, which is largely male-dominated, and it therefore chooses to reimagine ethics through a holistic feminist approach to transform it.Tong, R. and Williams N., Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Feminist Ethics, First published Tue May 12, 1998; substantive revision Mon May 4, 2009.
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,"Jaggar, "Feminist Ethics," 1992 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." Should women embody or use any traditionally masculine cultural traits they are seen as other or as an attempt to be more like men.Hooks, B. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, New York:Routledge. Google Scholar. Traditional ethics has a "male" orientated convention in which moral reasoning is viewed through a framework of rules, rights, universality, and impartiality and becomes the standard of a society. The "female" approaches to moral reasoning emphasizes relationships, responsibilities, particularity, and partiality.
Historical background Feminist ethics developed from Mary Wollstonecraft's 'Vindication of the Rights of Women' published in 1792. With the new ideas from the Enlightenment, individual feminists being able to travel more than ever before, generating more opportunities for the exchange of ideas and advancement of women's rights. With new social movements like Romanticism there developed unprecedented optimistic outlook on human capacity and destiny. This optimism was reflected in John Stuart Mill's essay The Subjection of Women (1869). Feminist approaches to ethics, were further developed around this period by other notable people like Catherine Beecher, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton with an emphasis on the gendered nature of morality, specifically related to 'women's morality'.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman The American writer and sociologist Charlotte Perkins Gilman imagined a fictional "Herland". In this male-free society, women produce their daughters through parthenogenesis and live a superior morality. This women-centered society valued both industriousness and motherhood while discouraged individualistic competitive approaches to life. Gilman thought that in such a scenario women could relate cooperatively as there would be no requirement to dominate each other. Herland cultivates and combines the best "feminine" virtues and the best "masculine" virtues together as co-extensive with human virtue. If a society wants to be virtuous, according to Gilman, it should exemplify the fictional utopia of Herland. However so long as women are dependent on men for economic support, women will continue to be known for their servility and men for their arrogance. Women need to be men's economic equals before they can develop truly human moral virtue, this is a perfect blend of pride and humility that we call self-respect.
Feminist care ethics
Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings are exponents of a feminist care ethics which criticize traditional ethics as deficient to the degree they lack, disregard, trivialize or attack women's cultural values and virtues.Noddings, N., Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. In the 20th-century feminist ethicists developed a variety of care focused feminist approaches to ethics in comparison to non-feminist care-focused approaches to ethics, feminist ones tend to appreciate the impact of gender issues more fully.Gilligan, C., In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press., 1982 Feminist care-focused ethicists note the tendencies of patriarchal societies not to appreciate the value and benefits of women's ways of loving, thinking, working and writing and tend to view females as subordinate. This is why some social studies make a conscious effort to adopt feminist ethics, rather than just the traditional ethics of studies. An example of this was Roffee and Waling's 2016 study into microaggressions against the LGBTIQ community. Even though it was focused on the LGBTIQ community the feminist ethics were better suited, as they are more considerate to the vulnerabilities and needs of the participants. Medical fields also fail to recognize that ethics plays an often negative part in the LGBTIQ community in how they receive treatment and what treatments are given as options to them. As well as how women are also treated within medical fields.
Feminist matrixial ethics The 'metafeminist' theory of the matrixial gaze and the matrixialEttinger, Bracha L., "Matrix and Metramorphosis." In: Differences. Vol. 4, nº 3, 1992.Ettinger, Bracha L., Proto-ethica Matricial, Gedisa, 2019. time-space, coined and developed by artist, philosopher and psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger since 1985,Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Gaze. Fine Art, Leeds University, 1995.Bracha L. Ettinger, "Trans-Subjective Transferential Borderspace." In: Mazin, V., Tourkina, O., and Seppala, M., eds. Doctor and Patient. Memory and Amnesia. Ylojarvi: Pori Art Museum Publications, 1997. Reprinted: Brian Massumi, ed. A Shock to Thought. Routledge, 2002Bracha L. Ettinger, "Wit(h)nessing Trauma and the Gaze." In: Vandenbroeck, P. et al eds. The Fascinating Face of Flanders. Through Art and Society (English, Portuguese, Flemish). Stad Antwerpen, 1998Bracha L. Ettinger, Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics. Vol 1: 1990-2000. Ed. by Griselda Pollock. Pelgrave Macmillan 2020 articulates a revolutionary philosophical approach that, in "daring to approach", to use Griselda Pollock's description of Ettinger's ethical turn,Pollock, Griselda. "Aesthetic Wit(h)nessing in the Era of Trauma." In: EurAmerica vol 40 n. 4, December 2010 <http://www.ea.sinica.edu.tw/eu_file/12929220264.pdf>Pollock, Griselda. Generations and Geographies. Routledge, 1996. "the prenatal with the pre-maternal encounter", violence toward women at war, and the Shoah, has philosophically established the rights of each female subject over her own reproductive body, and offered a language to relate to human experiences which escape the phallic domain.Ettinger, Bracha L., "Beyond the Death-drive, Beyond the Life-drive—Being-toward-Birthing with Being-toward-Birth. Copoiesis and the Matrixial Eros—Metafeminist Notes." in: Aberrant Nuptials. Edited by P. de Assis & P. Giudici. Leuven Univ. Press. 2019. Ettingerian matrixial sphere is both a matricial space of encounter in archaic corporeality and a symbolic ethical and aesthetic field - feminine/maternal and prenatal/prematernal conceptual-psychoanalytical field with a psychic and symbolic dimension that the 'phallic' language and regulations cannot control. Thus, Ettinger offers a language to talk about the female rights over her reproductive body while revolutionizing philosophy and psychoanalysis through matrixiality where feminine sexuality and symbolic responsibility coexist. In Ettinger's model, the relations between self and other are of neither assimilation nor rejection but 'coemergence'. Feminine sexuality is not foreclosed when maternality emerges, matrixial desire is a mixture of both, thus the contradiction between them established by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan recedes. The feminine is not an absolute alterity (the alterity established by Jacques Lacan and Emmanuel Levinas) and we are offered a language to rethink the archaic mother and the source of humanized life. With the 'originary response-ability', 'wit(h)nessing', 'borderlinking', 'communicaring', 'com-passion', 'seduction into life'"Communicaring". In: PostGender: Sexuality and Performativeivity in Japanese Culture. Ed. Ayelet Zohar. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010Mandeville, Kat, Seduction into Life. NY: Antropos, 2016. and other processes invested by affects that occur in the Ettingerian matrixial time-space, (each process of transformation is named 'metamorphose') the feminine is presented as the source of humanized Ethics in all genders and enters all subjectivities. What Ettinger named 'seduction into life' occurs earlier than the primary seduction which passes through enigmatic signals from the maternal sexuality according to Jean Laplanche, since it is active in 'coemergence' in 'withnessing' for any born subject, earlier to its birth. Ettinger suggests to Emanuel Levinas in their conversations in 1991, that the feminine understood via the matrixial perspective is the heart and the source of Ethics.Emmanuel Levinas and Bracha L. Ettinger, Time is the Breath of the Spirit. Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1993.Emmanuel Levinas and Bracha L. Ettinger, Que dirait Eurydice?"/"What Would Eurydice Say? Paris: BLE Atelier, 1997. Reprinted in Athena: Philosophical Studies. Vol. 2, 2006. http://lkti.lt/athena/pdf/2/100-145.pdf At the beginning of life, an originary 'fascinance' felt by the infantBracha L. Ettinger, "Fascinance. The Woman-to-woman (Girl-to-m/Other) Matrixial Feminine Difference." In: Pollock, Griselda, ed. Psychoanalysis and the Image. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. is related to the passage from response-ability to responsibility, from com-passion to compassion, and from wit(h)nessing to witnessing operated and transmitted by the m/Other. The 'differentiation in jointness' that is at the heart of the matrixial borderspace has deep implications in the relational fieldBracha L. Ettinger, "Diotima and the Matrixial Transference: Psychoanalytical Encounter-Event as Pregnancy in Beauty." In: der Merwe, V., Chris N., Viljoen, H., eds. Across the Threshold. Peter Lang, 2007. and for the ethics of care.Birgit M. Kaiser, Kathrin Thiele, "If You Do Well, Carry! The Difference of the Humane: An Interview with Bracha L. Ettinger". philoSOPHIA, Volume 8, Number 1, Winter 2018, pp. 101-125 (Article). https://doi.org/10.1353/phi.2018.0005 The matrixial theory that proposes new ways to rethink sexual difference through the fluidity of boundaries informs aesthetics and ethics of compassion, carrying and non-abandonment in 'subjectivity as encounter-event'.Smith, Marielle, "Subjectivity as Encounter: Feminine Ethics in the Work of Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger and Anne Enright", Hypatia Vol. 28, No. 3 (SUMMER 2013)Angie Voela and Cigdem Esin, "Movement, Embrace: Adriana Cavarero with Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger (and the Death Drive)", Hypatia 36 (1):101-119 (2021) It has become significant in transgender studies.Cavanagh, Sheila, "Bracha L. Ettinger, Jacques Lacan and Tiresias: The Other Sexual Difference". The Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, n.18 2018. http://www.the-site.org.uk/sitegeist/spring-2018/bracha-l-ettinger-jacques-lacan-and-tiresias-the-other-sexual-difference/3/
Feminist justice ethics