From the start, feminists have been critical of mainstream moral theories because of a number of observed flaws in their methods. In Susan Sherwin's judgments, both feminist ethics and medical ethics share a sense of frustration about the level of abstraction and generalization that one finds in mainstream work in bioethics. To correct this, womanists have been committed to including contextual details in their analyses, and for making space for personal aspects of relationships in their moral decision making (21-22). "A feminine consciousness regards the gender traits that have been traditionally associated with women--in particular, nurturance, compassion, caring--as positive human traits," Rosemarie Tong explains. Feminist philosophers have
From the start, they have broadened the scope of ethics; they have focused attention on "house-keeping" issues, on wildlife and pets, the environment--subjects on the margins of mainstream ethics. Ecofeminists have proposed new images of creation, and reformulations of the relationships between God, humans, and the non-human world. Feminsts have been influential in biomedical ethics. Feminists have looked at how women deal with death and dying, and found that mothers, spouses, daughters and companions deal with these events in ways that are quite different from men of both dominant and nondominant cultures. They have developed theories of disability; they have re-examined the moral significance of birth, sex selection, surrogacy, and ectogenesis. Feminists have challenged liberal societies to reshape their social structures in ways that deal more justly with the
First, in place of a Kantian conception of rationality (seen as a now-discredited device for claiming mastery and control, as well as for refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of differing perspectives and different relations to life and nature), womanists advocate holism in the process of moral discernment. Second, there is "a firm methodological commitment to maintaining a focus on the experience of women as the primary source for feminist ethics" (Farley, 230). As well, women have opted in the process for the familiar rather than the distanced, for building upon the insights of Virginia Woolf, Maria Montessori, and research into women's ways of death, speech, work, and management. Women writers have chosen to articulate ethics in distinctly feminist ways; they have developed their own voices, vocabulary, and distinctive styles of rhetoric in which irony and shock are prized. For feminists e.g. Gilligan, Manning, Welch, how one speaks matters as much as what one speaks--a stand that male writers in mainstream ethics (with a few exceptions e.g. Augustine, Milton, Newman) seem to have