Examples Of Traditional Ethics

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,”[2] 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.”[2] Traditional

This optimism was reflected in John Stuart Mill’s essay The Subjection of Women (1869).[3] Feminist approaches to ethics, were further developed around this period by other notable people like Catherine Beecher, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Lucrita Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton with an emphasis on the gendered nature of morality, specifically related to 'women's

Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings are exponents of a feminist care ethics which criticise traditional ethics as deficient to the degree they lack, disregard, trivialise or attack women's cultural values and virtues.[7] 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.[8] 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