Knowing Thyself: Hegel, Feminism and an Ethics of Heteronomy

Abstract

Ongoing debates within feminist ethics have been preoccupied by meta-ethical questions concerning the ground and scope of feminist claims about justice and the good. This is evident in the most prominent of these debates, in which feminists have argued over whether an “ethic of justice” or an “ethic of care” is the most appropriate basis for feminist ethics. In characterizing the flaws of each others’ positions, feminist philosophers have persistently returned to arguments about foundationalism and universalism in ethics. Care feminism has been argued to run the risk of essentializing women and of collapsing into ethical particularism, whereas justice feminism has been held to account for assimilating women to a masculinist construction of the human and the universal. Meanwhile, a variety of postmodernist and post-colonial feminist theorists have sought to find a way beyond the choice between justice and care.¹