Virtue ethics persists only in women’s private sphere under modernity

Evidence

Virtue-based concepts such as friendship, love, respect, care, concern, gratitude, community and compassion are in conflict with the rational instrumentalism of the public sphere, in which they have no place. As the main ethical concepts of society, they correspond to a different conception of (social) moral life which is now, as McIntyre argues, a residue. Excluded from the public, these concepts appear today mainly in the practices and relationships of the private sphere, and of women especially as the representatives of that sphere (Gilligan 1987: Poole 1991:59). Motherhood and friendship represent perhaps the clearest examples of relational selfhood, and an identity expressed in caring practices which treat the other non-instrumentally. — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 701

Categorization

• XREF: Central ecofeminist structural point — the gender dualism assigning care-concepts to the private/feminine — extends the book_so_far claims in ch4 about women’s labour as background and ch13 on difference-based critique.