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In this paper I seek to distinguish a feminist virtue ethics of care from (1) justice ethics, (2) narrative ethics, (3) care ethics and (4) virtue ethics. I also connect this contemporary discussion of what makes a virtue ethics of care feminist to eighteenth and nineteenth century debates about male, female, and human virtue. In conclude that by focusing on issues related to gender--primarily those related to the systems, structures, and ideologies that create and sustain patterns of male domination and female subordination--we can begin to appreciate that true care and bona-fide virtue can flourish only in societies that treat all persons with equal respect and consideration.

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Critics greet feminist ethics with suspicion, alleging that it is biased towards the interests of women. Feminist ethicists reply that it is traditional ethics which is biased. As they see it, for centuries traditional ethicists claimed to speak for all of humanity, when they were speaking only or primarily for men, and the most privileged of men at that. In contrast, although feminist ethicists openly admit that they proceed from the perspective of women’s experience, their paramount goal is simply to reconstruct traditional ethics so that it becomes more universal and objective by including women’s as well as men’s moral voices. Far from being monolithic, feminist ethics encompasses a wide variety of woman-centred approaches to the moral life. Feminine approaches to ethics, with their stress on personal relationships and an ethics of care, put a premium on the value of human connection. Maternal approaches focus on one relationship in particular, that between mothers and children, as the paradigm for moral interaction. Lesbian approaches stress choice rather than duty, aiming to define the conditions in which lesbian women can flourish. Finally, specifically feminist approaches to ethics emphasize the political task of eliminating systems and structures of male domination and female subordination in both the public and the private domains.