"Feminist Transformations of Moral Theory," Virginia Held
In the following reading Virginia Held outlines how current feminist ethical philosophy
has reacted to and attempted to rethink the history of ethical thought. Held contrasts
the male-‐centric history of Western ethical philosophy with female-‐centric principles
on which a new radical ethic might emerge. Held is a professor of philosophy at Hunter
College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Guided Reading Questions
As you read the following text from Held, use these questions to guide your reading.
1. What does Held say about the history of ethical philosophy? How has that
history excluded women and minority voices?
2. Feminism not only focuses on the rights and ideas of women, but also
promotes other minority voices that have been subjugated. What are some
such voices and what social conditions led to their subjugation?
3. Women have historically been viewed as close to nature and volatile,
whereas men have historically been viewed as rational and measured. In
your opinion, why have these ideas tended to permeate so many societies?
How does Held propose that we break away from these forms of thinking? Do
you think humans will ever be able to think outside of gender? Why or why
not?
FEMINIST TRANSFORMATIONS OF MORAL THEORY
The history of philosophy, including the history of ethics, has been constructed from
male points of view, and has been built on assumptions and concepts that are by no
means gender-‐neutral. Feminists characteristically begin with different concerns
and give different emphases to the issues we consider than do non-‐feminist
approaches. And, as Lorraine Code expresses it, "starting points and focal points
shape the impact of theoretical discussion." Within philosophy, feminists often start
with, and focus on, quite different issues than those found in standard philosophy
and ethics, however "standard" is understood. Far from providing mere additional
insights which can be incorporated into traditional theory, feminist explorations
often require radical transformations of existing fields of inquiry and theory. From a
feminist point of view, moral theory along with almost all theory will have to be
transformed to take adequate account of the experience of women.
I shall in this paper begin with a brief examination of how various fundamental
aspects of the history of ethics have not been gender-‐neutral. And I shall discuss
three issues where feminist rethinking is transforming moral concepts and theories.
THE HISTORY OF ETHICS
Consider the ideals embodied in the phrase "the man of reason." As Genevieve Lloyd
has told the story, what has been taken to characterize the man of reason may have
changed from historical period to historical period, but in each, the character ideal
of the man of reason has been constructed in conjunction with a rejection of
whatever has been taken to be characteristic of the feminine. "Rationality" Lloyd
writes, "has been conceived as transcendence of the ‘feminine,' and the ‘feminine'
itself has been partly constituted by its occurrence within this structure."
This has of course fundamentally affected the history of philosophy and of ethics.
The split between reason and emotion is one of the most familiar of philosophical
conceptions. And the advocacy of reason "controlling" unruly emotion, of rationality,
guiding responsible human action against the blindness of passion, has a long and
highly influential, history, almost as familiar to non-‐philosophers as to philosophers.
We should certainly now be alert to the ways in which reason has been associated
with male endeavor, emotion with female weakness, and the ways in which this is of
course not an accidental association. As Lloyd writes, "From the beginnings of
philosophical thought, femaleness was symbolically associated with what Reason
supposedly left behind—the dark powers of the earth goddesses, immersion in
unknown forces associated with mysterious female powers. The early Greeks saw
women's capacity to conceive as connecting them with the fertility of Nature. As
Plato later expressed the thought, women ‘imitate the earth.'"…
The associations, between Reason, form, knowledge, and maleness, have persisted
in various guises, and have permeated what has been thought to be moral
knowledge as well as what has been thought to be scientific knowledge, and what
has been thought to be the practice of morality. The associations between the
philosophical concepts and gender cannot be merely dropped, and the concepts
retained regardless of gender, because gender has been built into them in such a
way that without it, they will have to be different concepts. As feminists repeatedly
show, if the concept of "human" were built on what we think about "woman" rather
than what we think about "man," it would be a very different concept. Ethics, thus,
has not been a search for universal, or truly human guidance, but a gender-‐biased
enterprise.
Other distinctions and associations have supplemented and reinforced the
identification of reason with maleness, and of the irrational with the female; on this
and other grounds "man" has been associated with the human, "woman" with the
natural. Prominent among distinctions reinforcing the latter view has been that
between the public and the private, because of the way they have been interpreted.
Again, these provide as familiar and entrenched a framework as do reason and
emotion, and they have been as influential for non-‐philosophers as for philosophers.
It has been supposed that in the public realm, man transcends his animal nature and
creates human history. As citizen, he creates government and law; as warrior, he
protects society by his willingness to risk death; and as artist or philosopher, he
overcomes his human mortality. Here, in the public realm, morality should guide
human decision. In the household, in contrast, it has been supposed that women
merely "reproduce" life as natural, biological matter. Within the household, the
"natural" needs of man for food and shelter are served, and new instances of the
biological creature that man is are brought into being. But what is distinctively
human, and what transcends any given level of development to create human
progress, are thought to occur elsewhere…
The result of the public/private distinction, as usually formulated, has been to
privilege the points of view of men in the public domains of state and law, and later
in the marketplace, and to discount the experience of women. Mothering has been
conceptualized as a primarily biological activity, even when performed by humans,
and virtually no moral theory in the history of ethics has taken mothering, as
experienced by women, seriously as a source of moral insight, until feminists in
recent years have begun to. Women have been seen as emotional rather than as
rational beings, and thus as incapable of full moral personhood. Women's behavior
has been interpreted as either "natural" and driven by instinct, and thus as
irrelevant to morality and to the construction of moral principles, or it has been
interpreted as, at best, in need of instruction and supervision by males better able to
know what morality requires and better able to live up to its demands…
These images, of the feminine as what must be overcome if knowledge and morality
are to be achieved, of female experience as naturally irrelevant to morality, and of
women as inherently deficient moral creatures, are built into the history of ethics.
Feminists examine these images, and see that they are not the incidental or merely
idiosyncratic suppositions of a few philosophers whose views on many topics
depart far from the ordinary anyway. Such views are the nearly uniform reflection
in philosophical and ethical theory of patriarchal attitudes pervasive throughout
human history. Or they are exaggerations even of ordinary male experience, which
exaggerations then reinforce rather than temper other patriarchal conceptions and
institutions. They distort the actual experience and aspirations of many men as well
as of women. Annette Baier recently speculated about why it is that moral
philosophy has so seriously overlooked the trust between human beings that in her
view is an utterly central aspect of moral life. She noted that "the great moral
theorists in our tradition not only are all men, they are mostly men who had
minimal adult dealings with (and so were then minimally influenced by) women."
They were for the most part "clerics, misogynists, and puritan bachelors," and thus
it is not surprising that they focus their philosophical attention "so single-‐mindedly
on cool, distanced relations between more or less free and equal adult strangers. . . ."
As feminists, we deplore the patriarchal attitudes that so much of philosophy and
moral theory reflect. But we recognize that the problem is more serious even than
changing those attitudes. For moral theory as so far developed is incapable of
correcting itself without an almost total transformation. It cannot simply absorb the
gender that has been "left behind," even if both genders would want it to. To
continue to build morality on rational principles opposed to the emotions and to
include women among the rational will leave no one to reflect the promptings of the
heart, which promptings can be moral rather than merely instinctive. To simply
bring women into the public and male domain of the polis will leave no one to speak
for the household. Its values have been hitherto unrecognized, but they are often
moral values. Or to continue to seek contractual restraints on the pursuits of self-‐
interest by atomistic individuals, and to have women join men in devotion to these
pursuits, will leave no one involved in the nurturance of children and cultivation of
social relations, which nurturance and cultivation can be of greatest moral import.
There are very good reasons for women not to want simply to be accorded entry as
equals into the enterprise of morality as so far developed…Women should clearly
not agree, as the price of admission to the masculine realm of traditional morality, to
abandon our own moral concerns as women.
And so we are groping to shape new moral theory. Understandably, we do not yet
have fully worked out feminist moral theories to offer. But we can suggest some
directions our project of developing such theories is taking...
Not all feminists, by any means, agree that there are distinctive feminist virtues or
values. Some are especially skeptical of the attempt to give positive value to such
traditional "feminine virtues" as a willingness to nurture, or an affinity with caring,
or reluctance to seek independence. They see this approach as playing into the
hands of those who would confine women to traditional roles. Other feminists are
skeptical of all claims about women as such, emphasizing that women are divided by
class and race and sexual orientation in ways that make any conclusions drawn from
"women's experience" dubious.
Still, it is possible, I think, to discern various important focal points evident in
current feminist attempts to transform ethics into a theoretical and practical activity
that could be acceptable from a feminist point of view. In the glimpse I have
presented of bias in the history of ethics, I focused on what, from a feminist point of
view, are three of its most questionable aspects: 1) the split between reason and
emotion and the devaluation of emotion; 2) the public/private distinction and the
relegation of the private to the natural; and 3) the concept of the self as constructed
from a male point of view. In the remainder of this article, I shall consider further
how some feminists are exploring these topics. We are showing how their previous
treatment has been distorted, and we are trying to re-‐envision the realities and
recommendations with which these aspects of moral theorizing do and should try to
deal.
I. REASON AND EMOTION
In the area of moral theory in the modern era, the priority accorded to reason has
taken two major forms. A) On the one hand has been the Kantian, or Kantian-‐
inspired search for very general, abstract, deontological, universal moral principles
by which rational beings should be guided. Kant's Categorical Imperative is a
foremost example: it suggests that all moral problems can be handled by applying
an impartial, pure, rational principle to particular cases. It requires that we try to
see what the general features of the problem before us are, and that we apply an
abstract principle, or rules derivable from it, to this problem. On this view, this
procedure should be adequate for all moral decisions. We should thus be able to act
as reason recommends, and resist yielding to emotional inclinations and desires in
conflict with our rational wills.
B) On the other hand, the priority accorded to reason in the modern era has taken a
Utilitarian form. The Utilitarian approach, reflected in rational choice theory,
recognizes that persons have desires and interests, and suggests rules of rational
choice for maximizing the satisfaction of these. While some philosophers in this
tradition espouse egoism, especially of an intelligent and long-‐term kind, many do
not. They begin, however, with assumptions that what are morally relevant are
gains and losses of utility to theoretically isolatable individuals, and that the
outcome at which morality should aim is the maximization of the utility of
individuals. Rational calculation about such an outcome will, in this view, provide
moral recommendations to guide all our choices. As with the Kantian approach, the
Utilitarian approach relies on abstract general principles or rules to be applied to
particular cases. And it holds that although emotion is, in fact, the source of our
desires for certain objectives, the task of morality should be to instruct us on how to
pursue those objectives most rationally. Emotional attitudes toward moral issues
themselves interfere with rationality and should be disregarded. Among the
questions Utilitarians can ask can be questions about which emotions to cultivate,
and which desires to try to change, but these questions are to be handled in the
terms of rational calculation, not of what our feelings suggest.
Although the conceptions of what the judgments of morality should be based on, and
of how reason should guide moral decision, are different in Kantian and in
Utilitarian approaches, both share a reliance on a highly abstract, universal principle
as the appropriate source of moral guidance, and both share the view that moral
problems are to be solved by the application of such an abstract principle to
particular cases. Both share an admiration for the rules of reason to be appealed to
in moral contexts, and both denigrate emotional responses to moral issues.
Many feminist philosophers have questioned whether the reliance on abstract rules,
rather than the adoption of more context-‐respectful approaches, can possibly be
adequate for dealing with moral problems, especially as women experience them.
Though Kantians may hold that complex rules can be elaborated for specific
contexts, there is nevertheless an assumption in this approach that the more
abstract the reasoning applied to a moral problem, the more satisfactory. And
Utilitarians suppose that one highly abstract principle, the Principle of Utility, can be
applied to every moral problem no matter what the context.
A genuinely universal; or gender-‐neutral moral theory would be one which would
take account of the experience and concerns of women as fully as it would take
account of the experience and concerns of men. When we focus on the experience of
women, however, we seem to be able to see a set of moral concerns becoming
salient that differs from those of traditional or standard moral theory. Women's
experience of moral problems seems to lead us to be especially concerned with
actual relationships between embodied persons, and with what these relationships
seem to require. Women are often inclined to attend to rather than to dismiss the
particularities of the context in which a moral problem arises. And we often pay
attention to feelings of empathy and caring to suggest what we ought to do rather
than relying as fully as possible on abstract rules of reason…
The work of psychologists such as Carol Gilligan and others has led to a clarification
of what may be thought of as tendencies among women to approach moral issues
differently. Rather than interpreting moral problems in terms of what could be
handled by applying abstract rules of justice to particular cases, many of the women
studied by Gilligan tended to be more concerned with preserving actual human
relationships, and with expressing care for those for whom they felt responsible.
Their moral reasoning was typically more embedded in a context of particular
others than was the reasoning of a comparable group of men. One should not equate
tendencies women in fact display with feminist views, since the former may well be
the result of the sexist, oppressive conditions in which women's lives have been
lived. But many feminists see our own consciously considered experience as lending
confirmation to the view that what has come to be called "an ethic of care" needs to
be developed. Some think it should supersede "the ethic of justice" of traditional or
standard moral theory. Others think it should be integrated with the ethic of justice
and rules…
The "care" of the alternative feminist approach to morality appreciates rather than
rejects emotion. The caring relationships important to feminist morality cannot be
understood in terms of abstract rules or moral reasoning. And the "weighing" so
often needed between the conflicting claims of some relationships and others
cannot be settled by deduction or rational calculation. A feminist ethic will not just
acknowledge emotion, as do Utilitarians, as giving us the objectives toward which
moral rationality can direct us. It will embrace emotion as providing at least a
partial basis for morality itself, and for moral understanding.
Annette Baier stresses the centrality of trust for an adequate morality. Achieving
and maintaining trusting, caring, relationships is quite different from acting in
accord with rational principles, or satisfying the individual desires of either self or
other. Caring, empathy, feeling with others, being sensitive to each other's feelings,
all may be better guides to what morality requires in actual contexts than may
abstract rules of reason, or rational calculation, or at least they may be necessary
components of an adequate morality…
II. THE PUBLIC AND THE PRIVATE
The second questionable aspect of the history of ethics on which I focused was its
conception of the distinction between the public and the private. As with the split
between reason and emotion, feminists are showing how gender-‐bias has distorted
previous conceptions of these spheres, and we are trying to offer more appropriate
understandings of "private" morality and "public" life…
Revised conceptions of public and private have significant implications for our
conceptions of human beings and relationships between them. Some feminists
suggest that instead of seeing human relationships in terms of the impersonal ones
of the "public" sphere, as standard political and moral theory has so often done, we
might consider seeing human relationships in terms of those experienced in the
sphere of the "private," or of what these relationships could be imagined to be like in
post-‐patriarchal society. The traditional approach is illustrated by those who
generalize, to other regions of human life than the economic, assumptions about
"economic man" in contractual relations with other men. It sees such impersonal,
contractual relations as paradigmatic, even, on some views, for moral theory. Many
feminists, in contrast, consider the realm of what has been misconstrued as the
"private" as offering guidance to what human beings and their relationships should
be like even in regions beyond those of family and friendship. Sara Ruddick looks at
the implications of the practice of mothering for the conduct of peace politics.
Marilyn Friedman and Lorraine Code consider friendship, especially as women
understand it, as a possible model for human relationships. Others see society as
non-‐contractual rather than as contractual. Clearly, a reconceptualization is needed
of the ways in which every human life is entwined with personal and with social
components. Feminist theorists are contributing imaginative work to this project.
III. THE CONCEPT OF SELF
Let me turn now to the third aspect of the history of ethics which I discussed and
which feminists are re-‐envisioning: the concept of self. One of the most important
emphases in a feminist approach to morality is the recognition that more attention
must be paid to the domain between, on the one hand, the self as ego, as self-‐
interested individual, and, on the other hand, the universal, everyone, others in
general. Traditionally, ethics has dealt with these poles of individual self and
universal all. Usually, it has called for impartiality against the partiality of the
egoistic self; sometimes it has defended egoism against claims for a universal
perspective. But most standard moral theory has hardly noticed as morally
significant the intermediate realm of family relations and relations of friendship, of
group ties and neighborhood concerns, especially from the point of view of women.
When it has noticed this intermediate realm it has often seen its attachments as
threatening to the aspirations of the Man of Reason, or as subversive of "true"
morality. In seeing the problems of ethics as problems of reconciling the interests of
the self with what would be right or best for "everyone," standard ethics has
neglected the moral aspects of the concern and sympathy which people actually feel
for particular others, and what moral experience in this intermediate realm suggests
for an adequate morality.
The region of "particular others" is a distinct domain, where what can be seen to be
artificial and problematic are the very egoistic "self" and the universal "all others" of
standard moral theory. In the domain of particular others, the self is already
constituted to an important degree by relations with others, and these relations may
be much more salient and significant than the interests of any individual self in
isolation. The "others" in the picture, however, are not the "all others," or
"everyone," of traditional moral theory; they are not what a universal point of view
or a view from nowhere could provide. They are, characteristically, actual flesh and
blood other human beings for whom we have actual feelings and with whom we
have real ties.
From the point of view of much feminist theory, the individualistic assumptions of
liberal theory and of most standard moral theory are suspect. Even if we would be
freed from the debilitating aspects of dominating male power to "be ourselves" and
to pursue our own interests, we would, as persons, still have ties to other persons,
and we would at least in part be constituted by such ties. Such ties would be part of
what we inherently are. We are, for instance, the daughter or son of given parents,
or the mother or father of given children, and we carry with us at least some ties to
the racial or ethnic or national group within which we developed into the persons
we are.
If we look, for instance, at the realities of the relation between mothering person
(who can be female or male) and child, we can see that what we value in the relation
cannot be broken down into individual gains and losses for the individual members
in the relation. Nor can it be understood in universalistic terms. Self-‐development
apart from the relation may be much less important than the satisfactory
development of the relation. What matters may often be the health and growth of
and the development of the relation-‐and-‐its-‐members in ways that cannot be
understood in the individualistic terms of standard moral theories designed to
maximize the satisfaction of self-‐interest. The universalistic terms of moral theories
grounded in what would be right for "all rational beings" or "everyone" cannot
handle, either, what has moral value in the relation between mothering person and
child…
To argue for a view of the self as relational does not mean that women need to
remain enmeshed in the ties by which they are constituted. In recent decades,
especially, women have been breaking free of relationships with parents, with the
communities in which they grew up, and with men, relationships in which they
defined themselves through the traditional and often stifling expectations of others.
These quests for self have often involved wrenching instability and painful
insecurity. But the quest has been for a new and more satisfactory relational self,
not for the self-‐sufficient individual of liberal theory. Many might share the concerns
expressed by Alison Jaggar that disconnecting ourselves from particular others, as
ideals of individual autonomy seem to presuppose we should, might make us
incapable of morality, rather than capable of it, if, as so many feminists think, "an
ineliminable part of morality consists in responding emotionally to particular
others."
I have examined three topics on which feminist philosophers and feminists in other
fields are thinking anew about where we should start and how we should focus our
attention in ethics. Feminist reconceptualizations and recommendations concerning
the relation between reason and emotion, the distinction between public and
private, and the concept of the self, are providing insights deeply challenging to
standard moral theory. The implications of this work are that we need an almost
total reconstruction of social and political and economic and legal theory in all their
traditional forms as well as a reconstruction of moral theory and practice at more
comprehensive, or fundamental, levels.
Virginia Held, "Feminist Transformations of Moral Theory," Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research, Fall 1990 (supplement) Vol. 50, pp. 321–344. Reprinted
by permission of Blackwell Publishing Ltd. .
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