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A Feminist Perspective on Virtue EthicsCare, Gender and the Public Life

A Feminist Perspective on Virtue Ethics: Care, Gender and the Public Life [At the beginning of Chapter 5 we saw that the historical roots of virtue ethics are part of what is considered problematic about attempts at identifying care with virtue. In particular, the problem is not that virtue ethics is particularly unfair to women, regarding them as less capable of wisdom and virtue than men, but rather the fact that its focus is on the public domain and that it regards political participation as central. To be virtuous is, first and foremost, to be active in public, in the agora, to make one’s voice heard amongst others who participate in the political life of the city. Virtues are what enables a citizen to do this well, and they are geared towards the kind of public interactions that men in the public arena typically encounter. Care, on the other hand, focuses almost exclusively on what happens in private, inside the home, so that the virtues it would necessitate would probably be different from Aristotelian virtues. To be a good carer, one must learn to focus on the needs of one particular individual, and this can sometimes mean losing track of what is happening in public life. The carer’s universe, the home or the hospital, becomes as morally significant as the Aristotelian city is to the public man, and the skills required to navigate this universe successfully have as much title to be called virtues as those that enable the political life.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

A Feminist Perspective on Virtue EthicsCare, Gender and the Public Life

Berges, Sandrine
Springer Journals — Oct 10, 2015
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20 pages

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Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan UK
Copyright
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2015
ISBN
978-1-349-43930-0
Pages
129 –149
DOI
10.1057/9781137026644_7
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[At the beginning of Chapter 5 we saw that the historical roots of virtue ethics are part of what is considered problematic about attempts at identifying care with virtue. In particular, the problem is not that virtue ethics is particularly unfair to women, regarding them as less capable of wisdom and virtue than men, but rather the fact that its focus is on the public domain and that it regards political participation as central. To be virtuous is, first and foremost, to be active in public, in the agora, to make one’s voice heard amongst others who participate in the political life of the city. Virtues are what enables a citizen to do this well, and they are geared towards the kind of public interactions that men in the public arena typically encounter. Care, on the other hand, focuses almost exclusively on what happens in private, inside the home, so that the virtues it would necessitate would probably be different from Aristotelian virtues. To be a good carer, one must learn to focus on the needs of one particular individual, and this can sometimes mean losing track of what is happening in public life. The carer’s universe, the home or the hospital, becomes as morally significant as the Aristotelian city is to the public man, and the skills required to navigate this universe successfully have as much title to be called virtues as those that enable the political life.]

Published: Oct 10, 2015

Keywords: Political Participation; Military Service; Virtue Ethic; Parental Leave; Public Life

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