Feminist Moral Philosophy (review)

Samantha Brennan has assembled a strong collection of ten diverse essays. They all bring feminist perspectives to topics in moral philosophy, broadly conceived to include questions in epistemology (such as Rebecca Kukla's essay on the nature of moral perception) and politics (for instance, Susan Sherwin's recommendations for policy around reproductive technology). While some readers might expect feminist philosophers to be sharply critical of much of the history of philosophy, only one of the essays (by Nancy Snow) devotes substantial space to critique of the tradition. More of the essays argue for the ongoing importance of male canonical figures such as Kant and Aristotle to feminist projects while also signalling ways in which these philosophies need to be criticized or transformed.

Many of the essays concern issues about agency or autonomy (how we should think of it, what makes it possible, how oppression may limit it). Carolyn McLeod argues both that there are degrees of objectification (such that a woman may be viewed both as an interchangeable sexual object and as an accomplished tennis player, for example) and that philosophers, feminist and otherwise, need to attend to these different degrees if they are to understand the full impact of oppressive practices on our capacity to act as authors of our lives. Ruth Sample asks exactly what constitutes sexual exploitation and argues that exploitation, sexual or otherwise, involves taking advantage of another's vulnerability in a way that fails to value or respect their personhood. Her essay concludes that prostitution might not always be morally wrong, but that it is wrong under conditions of patriarchy which limit women's options and affect what they see as valuable about themselves. Many of the essays on this theme share a commitment to viewing selves as relational, or irreducibly social, such that personal relations and social group membership affect one's self-understanding, options, and capacity for action.

Some of the essays in this volume are valuable contributions to longstanding debates (for instance, about how to understand the virtues, or how to understand Kant's ethics). In one such essay Lara Denis argues that Kant's emphasis on duties to oneself can be a useful corrective to women's tendency to interpret morality solely in terms of service to others. In particular she focuses on the feminist implications of Kant's duty to avoid degrading one's self. In another, Rebecca Kukla carefully distinguishes between different ideals of objectivity and different types of moral blindness (for instance, failure to notice something morally relevant, self-interested avoidance of what is morally relevant, distorted perception, and incomplete perception). She argues that often the best way to appreciate what is morally important is not to strive to be disinterested but to engage in more critical ways with situations, and to educate our perception in ways that require us to interact with people from different social groups.

Other essays open up entirely new ground, such as Christine Overall's very original claim that both the length of human life stages and what we conceive of as the nature of these stages can change in ways that affect how we understand traditional philosophical problems or raise new problems. She argues that both men and women are affected by the life stage they are thought to occupy (middle-aged people are often considered to be more knowledgeable than teenagers or the elderly), but also that more life stages are marked by gender for women than for men (including pregnancy and menopause).

The essays are written from very different standpoints (virtue ethics, social contract theory, sociobiology, among others), and tackle different questions and issues. They are united in the fact that their authors bring feminist concerns to bear on their philosophizing, but they do so in very different ways. One of the contributors, Diane Jeske, offers a very useful taxonomy of different ways feminists combine their feminism and their philosophizing, a list that includes feminist methodological generalism, feminist moral psychology, and meta-ethical feminism. The richness, variety, and...