Abstract:

Personal Experience, Methodology, and Feminist Ethics

by Tracy Isaacs

An important and central claim of feminist, as opposed to “traditional” or “mainstream”, approaches to ethics is that they take seriously the moral experiences of women. Alison Jaggar and, more recently, Samantha Brennan have noted that in addition to taking women’s experiences into account, a feminist ethics must recognize the existence and wrongness of women’s oppression and have the elimination of this oppression as its central goal. [1] In this paper, I focus on two methodological possibilities for feminist ethics that arise from the claim that they take the moral experiences of women seriously. The first is a methodology that adopts normative claims directly from reports of women’s experiences. The second is the methodology of “story-telling”. Though they have much potential as starting points for developing the normative features of feminist ethics, I shall argue that neither has sufficient normative force on its own to be a helpful tool in the elimination of women’s oppression. In order to take feminist ethics further, we need to recognize that it is both a normative and a descriptive enterprise. I end the paper by showing how feminist ethics can take women’s experiences into account with a methodological approach in which the normative and the descriptive act as constraints on one another.

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[1] Alison Jaggar, “Feminist Ethics: Projects, Problems, Prospects” in Claudia Card, ed., Feminist Ethics (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991), pp. 78-104; Samantha Brennan, “Recent Work in Feminist Ethics,” Ethics, Vol. 109, No. 4 (July 1999), pp.858-893.