Community, autonomy or both?

feminist ethics between contextualism and universalism

Ulla M. Holm

pp. 401-437

in: Lilli Alanen, Sara Heinämaa, Thomas Wallgren (eds), Commonality and particularity in ethics, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1997

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.