In this article I attempt to untangle the purported connection between moral virtue and flourishing in the context of examining what looks like an unexpected effect of oppression: If moral virtue is necessary for flourishing—as Aristotle assumes that it is when he describes eudaimonia as an “activity of the soul in accordance with virtue” — then members of structurally privileged groups can only flourish if they are morally good. However, it is hard to conceive of the privileged as morally good, since their privileges result from unjust social positionings. Thus it appears that they are prevented from leading good lives. This is an odd claim to add to a theory of oppression, which one would expect to explain how the victims of oppression — rather than its beneficiaries — are denied a shot at the good life.

While the privileged may enjoy especially ample opportunities to develop certain virtues, I will be thinking here about vices associated with practices of domination, including active or passive acceptance of the benefits that come from occupying positionings that depend upon systems of male dominance, white supremacy, class divisions under capitalism, norms of heterosexuality, and so on.

Men do not want solely the obedience of women; they want their sentiments. All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favourite. They have therefore put everything in practice to enslave their minds. The masters of all other slaves rely, for maintaining obedience, on fear; either fear of themselves, or religious fears. The masters of women wanted more than simple obedience, and they turned the whole force of education to effect their purpose. All women are brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men; not self-will, and government by self-control, but submission, and yielding to the control of others. All the moralities tell them that it is the duty of women, and all the current sentimentalities that it is their nature, to live for others; to make complete abnegation of themselves, and to have no life but in their affections.—John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women.

In recent years, more and more philosophical work has come to be done under the rubric of ‘feminist philosophy.’ In particular, more and more work in philosophical ethics has come to be identified by both those who produce it and those who read it as within the domain of ‘feminist ethics.’ As a philosophical ethicist and a feminist, the question naturally arises as to whether I do feminist ethics. The question seems particularly natural in my case, because a great deal of my research has focussed on the nature of intimate relationships, the types of reasons to which such relationships give rise, and how moral theory ought to accommodate such relationships and their attendant reasons. Intimacy, after all, has been one of the areas to which feminist ethicists have paid a great deal of attention in their attempts to carve out a peculiarly’ feminist’ ethics, arguing that traditional or canonical theories need, at the very least, a great deal of revision if they are to respond appropriately to the ‘data’ acquired as the result of the inclusion and responsiveness to the experience of women.

In recent times the conception of the human being, particularly in Western moral philosophy, has been of an intellectual center, installed in a biological vessel like a “ghost in the machine”—according to Gilbert Ryle's haunting image. To be sure the machine in this image is fashioned of biological matter and governed by biological laws, but it is also subject to the “higher” law of the will, no less than to fundamental laws of physics. It is also the manifest image of the self in Western society outside the academy—the image a person procures by dint of growing up in a distinctive human climate—the image that each of us, in an increasingly wider circle centered on Europe, must master if we are to maneuver successfully in the contemporary legal and social milieu. It makes some sense to invoke such an image for the purposes of certain traditional moral theories. For the image, or something very like it, easily renders talk of individual responsibility sensible.

Given conditions of oppression presupposed by a feminist understanding of social structures, feminist agency is paradoxical. I am going to understand feminist agency as women's ability to be effective agents against their own oppression. The paradox of feminist agency arises because feminist assumptions about women's socialization seem to entail that women's agency is compromised by sexist oppression. In particular, women's agency appears to be diminished in ways that interfere with their capacity for feminist action, that is, action against sexist oppression.

Feminist philosophers have taken issue with traditional conceptions of agency, claiming that these conceptions are overly individualistic and valorize an illusory and unattractive ideal of agents and agency. If the paradox arises because women do not attain traditional ideals of independence, control, choice, and free action, then, if we reject the tradition, we may be able to articulate a preferable ideal of agency. This alternative may be one that women satisfy. Hence, a feminist reconstrual of the self could dispel the paradox.

If feminist ethics is to be “identified by its explicit commitment to challenging perceived male bias in ethics,” as Alison Jaggar states, then Kant's moral theory must be considered non-feminist. Indeed, many feminist philosophers have considered Kant's ethics to be anti-feminist. Some of these philosophers have noted such things as Kant's ascription, in his political theory, of all women to the class of passive citizens, and such reflections, in his writings about human nature, as “I hardly believe that the fair sex is capable of principles.” Other feminist critics have argued that Kant's ethics is scarred by male-bias at a fundamental level. For example, Sally Sedgwick has argued that Kant's conception of autonomous, rational agency, embodied in the categorical imperative's universal law tests, is inherently masculinist. Kant's ethics, however, has its feminist proponents as well. Jean Hampton endorses“ a Kantian conception of worth,” according to which “one must respect the value not only of others but also of oneself, and must therefore reject any roles, projects, or occupations which would be self-exploitative”; she develops her own “feminist form of Kantian contractarian theory” as an expression and elaboration of this Kantian notion of respect.

Nearly everyone agrees that sexual exploitation occurs and that, when it does, it is morally wrong. However, there is substantial disagreement over what constitutes sexual exploitation and why it is wrong. Is sex between freely consenting adults ever exploitative? Is prostitution always exploitative? What features of sexually exploitative interactions lead us to regard them as morally wrong? And if sexual exploitation is morally wrong, what should be done about it?

These are not new questions for the social philosopher. However, recent criticisms of social contract theory may lead us to wonder whether contractarianism (of any variety) has the resources to criticize important cases of sexual exploitation—particularly prostitution. Some liberals have defended prostitution “in principle,” arguing that when prostitution is truly consensual, there is nothing wrong with it. This is called “sound prostitution.” Indeed, in cases where the parties to a sexual exchange are both competent adults, liberals and libertarians have a difficult time criticizing it, since to do so runs the risk of imposing a local and historically specific sexual ideal on members of society who explicitly reject it or else suggests that the prostitutes and their clients are not really competent agents.

Kant discussed the moral wrong of treating people as mere means or as a means only. To treat people as means is to treat them as objects for our use. It is to objectify them. To treat people as a mere means is to treat them wholly as objects, rather than partially so. It is to have an objectifying manner that is absolute or unmitigated. Whether Kant meant to suggest that we commit a moral wrong only when we treat people as means absolutely, rather than partially, is debatable. My concern is with how feminist theorists writing on the objectification of women have followed Kant in emphasizing the extreme case of the mere means. These feminists have implied that the moral wrong of objectification occurs only with absolute objectification, as though between it and respecting someone's autonomy there were no degrees of objectification that are morally suspect.

The relevant feminist work centres on such topics as women's reproductive freedom, their sexual freedom, and gender equity in employment.

Samantha Brennan notes in her survey article, “Recent Works in Feminist Ethics,” that “the reshaping of moral concepts in light of feminist critiques of individualism and feminist development of relational alternatives represents significant progress in feminist ethics, indeed in ethics at large.” Two suggestions in this claim serve as a starting point for my application of a relational approach to inequalities in a global context. First, equality is a moral concept that has been and continues to be central to Western liberal theory. The global context reveals liberalism's dominance on the world scene as well as increases in inequalities of wealth both within and across borders. I claim that this context calls for renewed vigilance in the “reshaping of moral concepts” that are central to liberal theory. To clarify, I do not argue that feminists must work with these concepts. Rather I hold that some concepts, one of them being equality, have enduring moral value and this makes continued feminist analyses of them important, particularly in the contemporary global context.

In the face of rapid technological developments and growing economic pressures, governments around the world are being called upon to regulate activities in the realm of biotechnology. My aim in this paper is to argue that core conceptual insights of feminist ethics are essential to ethically adequate policy-making in this area. Specifically, I shall argue that development of ethical biotechnology require that policy-makers undergo an ontological shift from the currently widespread assumptions of the dominant political framework of liberal individualism to an explicitly feminist understanding of subjects as relational beings. To ground my discussion, I shall explore the field of reproductive technologies, especially as they are (or may soon be) used for genetic “improvements.” I shall pay particular attention to the use of in vitro fertilization (IVF) in conjunction with pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) and related variations.

Briefly, IVF, the core technology of so-called new reproductive technologies, is a platform technology that facilitates many other practices through affording access to oocytes (eggs) and embryos.

This is an exploratory paper, the kind of thing to which philosophers often give a title beginning with the word “towards,” as in, “Towards a Theory of the Ethical Significance of Concepts of Life Span and Life Stage.” We give titles like this when we think we may be on to something interesting but can so far only gesture at what it means. This paper is part of a larger ongoing project, and it is programmatic at best. Throughout much of this work. I have felt, I believe with justification, that there is relatively little philosophical background for what I am trying to do.

In her classic paper, “A Defense of Abortion,” Judith Jarvis Thomson suggests that if human pregnancy lasted only one hour, or conversely, if it lasted nine years, then our views about the morality of abortion would justifiably change from what they are now.

Moral perception, as the term is used in moral theory, is the perception of normatively contoured objects and states of affairs, where that perception enables us to engage in practical reason and judgment concerning these particulars. The idea that our capacity for moral perception is a crucial component of our capacity for moral reasoning and agency finds its most explicit origin in Aristotle, for whom virtue begins with the quality of perception. The focus on moral perception within moral theory has made a comeback in the last few decades, especially in the hands of self-proclaimed neo-Aristotelians such as John McDowell, Martha Nussbaum, and Nancy Sherman. For these writers, our perceptual capacities are not static, and the laborious honing of our perceptual skills is a crucial moral task. On this picture, as Nancy Sherman puts it, “How to see becomes as much a matter of inquiry as what to do.”

Moral particularists—including but not restricted to the neo-Aristotelians—have emphasized the centrality of moral perception to moral agency and judgment, as a corrective to moral theories that treat deliberation in terms of universal principles as the privileged keystone of moral agency.