Abstract
The so called ‘Gilligan-Kohlberg-controversy’ on the existence of a gendered moral development has brought about a plurivocal and rapidly growing feminist ethical discourse. This discourse, among other things, amounts (i) to unveiling and calling into question the inherent gender-blindness of occidental, androcentric ethics, especially in its liberal, universalist version, sometimes called the ‘ethics of justice and obligation’; (ii) to constructing, in opposition to that model, explicit gynocentric perspectives claimed to draw on valuations and conceptual schemes generated within traditional caring practices such as mothering, nursing, care of the elderly etc., called the ‘ethics of care and responsibility’; (iii) to questioning such gynocentric projects as either politically retrograde, falsely essentialist or blind to unprivileged women unwilling to accept a white, middle-class, well-educated, able-bodied, heterosexual woman’s perspective; (iv) to querying whether differences among women do not demand contextualist, pluralist ethical theories; and (v) to criticizing this new form of pluralism for its occupation with identity politics, for its running the dangers of relativism and for the risk of once again losing sight of those culturally neglected values and concerns that generated the feminist debate in ethics in the first place.
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Nodding, op. cit., 30ff., refers to Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufman (1970)
Michèle LeDoeuff, ‘Women, Reason, etc.’, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 2:3 (1990), 153, reads a male and androcentric philosopher like Jean-Jacques Rousseau over the shoulder of Mary Wollstonecraft: she accepts the pluralist but rejects the sexist. Andrea Nye argues similarly that feminists could read male philosophers the way Rosa Luxemburg, Simone Weil or Hannah Arendt read them, in Andrea Nye, Philosophia: The Thought of Rosa Luxemburg, Simone Weil, and Hannah Arendt. Even philosophers like Agnes Heller, Seyla Benhabib, Amélie Rorty, Nancy Sherman and Martha Nussbaum seem to read our canonical father as co-workers in their own projects more than as eternal authorities. One could also in Grician terms conceive of ‘that unjustly neglected philosopher Kantotle’ as a ‘Kantotla’, cf. H. P. Grice, The Conception of Value, 115. A ‘Kantotla’, informed also by feminist insights, would always keep her inner dialogue partners alert to flaws of thought of the other. Through dropping the first syllables in the slaveholder’s name I hope to transform the aristocratic, patriarchal, androcentric and teleologic accidences in his ethical theory in favour of a non-gendered ethics. Cf. also Hannah Arendt’s Socratic conception of why it is morally important to think dialogically in ‘Thinking and Moral Consideration: a Lecture’, 7–37, and in The Life of the Mind.
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© 1997 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Holm, U.M. (1997). Community, Autonomy or Both? — Feminist Ethics Between Contextualism and Universalism. In: Alanen, L., Heinämaa, S., Wallgren, T. (eds) Commonality and Particularity in Ethics. Swansea Studies in Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25602-0_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25602-0_16
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