feminist ethics

A narrative approach to ethics focuses on how stories that are told, written, or otherwise expressed by individuals and groups help to define and structure our moral universe. Specifically, narrative ethicists take the practices of storytelling, listening, and bearing empathetic, careful witness to these stories to be central to understanding and evaluating not just the unique circumstances of particular lives, but the wider moral contexts within which we all exist. In telling stories, they suggest, we both create and reveal who we think we are as moral agents and as persons; in granting these stories uptake—that is, in giving them epistemic credibility—we help to mold and sustain the moral identities of others, as well as our own. Thus, theorists engaged in narratively-based moral scholarship take stories to be foundational for how we view the world and our place in it, arguing that they are the means through which we can make ourselves morally intelligible to ourselves and to others. At their best, narrative methodologies offer non-ideal, epistemically rich approaches—that are not grounded in strict, juridical principles—to a number of philosophical discourses, including those central to questions of morality, identity, and social justice. At their most worrisome, they appear to be merely loosely-related notions about the constitutive roles of stories in moral theory and practice that do not easily lend themselves to rigorous moral justifications, epistemic explanations, or the guiding of action, raising concerns about the theoretical and practical soundness of the whole endeavor. Even as a relatively new set of moral discourses and practices, narrative ethics has made its presence known. Among the areas within philosophy in which the influence of narrative has been particularly influential are biomedical ethics and feminist ethics. While this entry will only minimally touch on the former, the focus on the latter requires some qualification: While the themes, concerns, and ideas that connect feminist ethics and narrative theory are philosophically significant, this is not to suggest that all (or even most) of feminist ethics employs narrative methodologies, or that all (or most) feminist ethicists are narrativists. In fact, in addressing the oppression of women and other disadvantaged individuals and groups, a number are focused on alternative, non-narrative methodologies (for example, multicultural feminists tend to focus on interconnected systems of oppression, which may or may not be grounded in oppressive narratives) while others (for example, certain liberal feminists who tend to focus on justice-related remedies) reject the personal turn altogether. Thus, the connection between narrative ethics and feminist ethics as explored here ought not be viewed as global or as necessary, but as one that exists whenever the focus on the particular, on stories, and on phenomenologies within feminist ethics intersects with the conception of narratives as normatively constituting our moral universe. Viewed in this light, their relationship is philosophically important in the sense of sharing an anti-totalizing, anti-hierarchical views of the practices of morality, as well as in the sense of emphasizing the necessity of greater inclusivity in moral discourses. Indeed, to view feminist ethics through the lens of narrative, or to conceive of narrative ethics as an approach to feminist value theory is not to exhaust the claims, significance, or methodologies of either one—it is simply to examine overlapping aspects of both, and how they have, and continue, to shape each other. This entry, then, will focus will be on the complicated relationship between feminist ethics and narrative ethics. And while narrative ethics does not always neatly intersect with some of the concerns of feminist theorists, the relationship between feminist ethics and narrative ethics is nevertheless a rather dynamic one, combining the social, political, epistemic