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Feminisms
Why Feminists Should Oppose Feminist Virtue Ethics
Some feminists say women should forget old-fashioned ethical rules and focus on developing positive aspects of their characters. Not so, says Sarah Conly.
Feminism is naturally ethical and political in nature, in that feminists want change, want improvement, and want, specifically, the liberation of the individual from ways of thinking which confine and pervert human development. It is not surprising then, that many feminists have felt that we need a new approach to ethics, one which celebrates the distinctive individuality of persons and the complexity of the world in which we live. Traditional western moralists, it is thought, have rooted our moral worth exclusively in our rationality; they have held that our development as moral beings depends solely on our ability rationally to perceive universal and impartial rules of rightness, and then act on those rules. It is argued that these traditional theories, which, following convention, I will call ethics of duty, split people in two – conceptually speaking – into a rational self which is morally significant, and which is the same from person to person, and an emotional self which is distinctive and individual but irrelevant to your moral worth. We are thus alienated from ourselves, since the way we want to act is in fact more often governed by personal feelings and commitments than by reference to rules of action, and these are seen by traditional duty ethics as being without moral significance.
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