Yeah, it's not really obvious if you're not familiar with the subject! And it's not exactly that abstract thought is intrinsically male. It's that the dominant style of thinking in Western philosophy elevates abstraction at the expense of concrete, situated experience to which women tend to be more attuned. (It's not necessarily a biolog…
Yeah, it's not really obvious if you're not familiar with the subject! And it's not exactly that abstract thought is intrinsically male. It's that the dominant style of thinking in Western philosophy elevates abstraction at the expense of concrete, situated experience to which women tend to be more attuned. (It's not necessarily a biological determinist argument; the gender difference could be a cultural effect.) And this carries with it a whole slew of emphases in moral theory. The wikipedia entry on feminist ethics is a decent enough overview: "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.'"
Consequentialism is an example of "male moral reasoning," in that it's abstract and universalist. Virtue ethics is more compatible with the feminist critique because it takes the capacity for right judgment and action under particular circumstances as the basis for morality.
Yeah, it's not really obvious if you're not familiar with the subject! And it's not exactly that abstract thought is intrinsically male. It's that the dominant style of thinking in Western philosophy elevates abstraction at the expense of concrete, situated experience to which women tend to be more attuned. (It's not necessarily a biological determinist argument; the gender difference could be a cultural effect.) And this carries with it a whole slew of emphases in moral theory. The wikipedia entry on feminist ethics is a decent enough overview: "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.'"
Consequentialism is an example of "male moral reasoning," in that it's abstract and universalist. Virtue ethics is more compatible with the feminist critique because it takes the capacity for right judgment and action under particular circumstances as the basis for morality.