An Invitation to Feminist Ethics

Feminist ethics addresses how power, through gender, affects moral practice and theory. This enterprise is more important than ever before in an age of sharpened attention and concern for feminist issues and injustices. Yet the number of terms which have entered mainstream discussion can quickly overwhelm the novice: intersectionality, gender neutrality, androcentrism. An Invitation to Feminist Ethics offers an easy-to-understand, hospitable approach to the study of feminist moral theory and practice from a renowned ethicist, underscoring its need and the clarifying light it casts on some of the most pressing topics in contemporary society.

The work surveys feminist ethical theory, beginning with an explanation of ethics, feminism, and gender before discussing the concepts of discrimination, oppression, gender neutrality, and androcentrism. The work further discusses in-depth intersectionality and microagressions before examining personal identities and how identities are vulnerable to oppression, and what can be done about it.

The book also includes a helpful overview of three standard moral theories--social contract theory, utilitarianism, and Kantian ethics--and a discussion of their failings from a feminist point of view, followed by introductions to feminist care theory and feminist responsibility ethics. A "close-ups" section explores three social practices--bioethics, violence, and the globalized economy--within which these concepts are applied, and the need for feminist ethics is most urgent.

Hilde Lindemann is Emerita Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University. A Fellow of the Hastings Center and a past president of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, her ongoing research interests are in feminist bioethics, feminist ethics, the ethics of families, and the social construction of persons and their identities. Her most recent book is Holding and Letting Go: The Social Practice of Personal Identities (Oxford University Press, 2016), which builds on her earlier Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair (Cornell University Press, 2001). With James Lindemann Nelson, she also wrote The Patient in the Family: An Ethics of Medicine and Families. She is the former editor of The Hastings Center Report as well as of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy. She was the coeditor of Rowman & Littlefield's Feminist Constructions series and the general coeditor (with James Lindemann Nelson) of the Reflective Bioethics series at Routledge.

Preface

PART ONE: OVERVIEWS

Chapter 1: What Is Feminist Ethics?
Chapter 2: Discrimination and Oppression
Chapter 3: Intersectionality
Chapter 4: The Importance of Who We Are
Chapter 5: Standard Moral Theories from a Feminist Perspective
Chapter 6: Feminist Ethics of Care and Responsibility

PART TWO: CLOSE-UPS

Chapter 7: Feminist Bioethics
Chapter 8: Violence
Chapter 9: Globalization and Cross-Cultural Judgments