“It should be clear that the term “feminist ethics” has a different logic from that of
“It should be clear that the term “feminist ethics” has a different logic from that of, say, “legal ethics” or “medical ethics”. To study ethics without paying particular attention to the special issues which arise in law or medicine is not automatically to be handicapped (except in the sense that ignorance of something worth knowing is always a handicap). But to study ethics without paying attention to feminism is to be disadvantaged from the outset. For it is to assume that we are all equally well equipped to understand ourselves in terms of theories which draw most of their vitality from the experience, not of human beings at large, but of male human beings. In contesting this assumption, “feminist ethics” undertakes to be more than just another specialism in an increasingly fragmented world: where ‘medical’ or ‘legal’ modify ‘ethics’, feminism, we think, transforms ethics”.
