The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy

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Robin S. Dillon

Feminist virtue ethics is an approach to issues in moral philosophy that draws from both one of the oldest approaches, virtue ethics, and one of the more recent developments in ethical theorizing, feminist ethics. It brings to the concerns that animate feminist ethics a particular orientation to the moral life, a set of questions, and an array of concepts that have long been of importance in virtue ethics, and to the concerns that animate virtue ethics, a certain perspective, a set of questions, and tools and methods that are distinctively feminist. Thus, an understanding of feminist virtue ethics requires understanding something of both traditional virtue ethics and feminist ethics.

Virtue Ethics, Feminist Ethics, and Feminist Virtue Ethics

Virtue Ethics

Traditional normative ethics can be understood to address four interrelated moral questions: How should we act and how can we determine what actions are right? What should we value and how should we value it? What kind of person(s) is it good to be and how should such a person live? How would it be best for all of us to live together? An ethical theory may address all four questions and issues related to them, but different kinds of theories can be distinguished by which question they prioritize or focus on. Traditional virtue ethics focuses on the third question. Rather than centering actions and the principles that should guide them, as is the case with deontological and consequentialist theories, virtue ethical theories address the whole trajectory of human lives and ways that it would be best to live; and rather than taking the kind of persons we should be to be wholly determined by, e.g., our duties to act rightly, virtue ethics works with rich conceptions of admirable qualities of character, or virtues, which compose the kinds of lives that it is good for human beings to live but that are not reducible to following moral rules. On this approach, the moral task facing a person is that of striving to develop and exercise the moral virtues that will enable her to live well. Virtue ethics is the oldest form of moral philosophy, tracing its origins to ancient Greek philosophy. It was eclipsed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the development of Kantian deontology and utilitarianism, but was revived in the late 1950s and 1960s and is now regarded as one of the chief contemporary approaches to ethics. (The approach has also been taken up in epistemology by theorists who examine intellectual virtues, traits that contribute to doing well as a cognizer. While there are interesting connections between intellectual virtues and moral virtues, this essay will focus just on the latter.)

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There are a variety of theories that can be classified as virtue ethics, but they all share an emphasis on virtues of character as an organizing concept for philosophical inquiry. A person’s character is the kind of person she is, morally speaking—a kind or inconsiderate one, a brave or cowardly one, a trustworthy or unreliable one, overall a good person or a despicable one. Typically, “character” refers not to what makes someone a unique individual, but, rather, to a person’s overall ethical structure and so to the combination of qualities that make someone, on the whole, a morally admirable person or an unworthy one. A moral virtue is a specific trait of character that makes a person to that extent morally admirable, while a vice is a character trait that makes a person to that extent unworthy of admiration, despicable or shameful, or even wicked. Virtues and vices are what Rosalind Hursthouse (1999) calls “complex mindsets” that involve relatively settled patterns of sensibility, perception, attention, reasoning, value, interest, desire, attitude, emotion, commitment, expectation, motive, choice, and action.

Two approaches to virtue ethics have been of particular interest to feminist theorists. The first, and traditionally dominant, approach is eudaimonism. The Greek term “eudaimonia” refers to the good life for a human, which is a life of long-term well-being, happiness, or flourishing. According to Aristotle, whose ethics is the paradigm eudaimonistic theory, the flourishing life is the greatest good and the ultimate aim of all human activity. To flourish as a human is to live a rich and fulfilling life in which one engages well or excellently in the activities that are distinctively human. Chief among these is rational activity, which includes not only thinking and reasoning but also acting, desiring, and experiencing emotions in ways that are guided by practical wisdom. The virtues, as dispositions to engage in excellent rational activity in this broad sense, are necessary for or partially constitutive of human flourishing. Thus, on this view, nothing counts as a virtue that is not beneficial in this way to its possessor, and the possession of (enough or particular) vices precludes living a good life. While the virtues are necessary for flourishing, they are not sufficient; as Aristotle recognizes, external goods, especially an appropriate social context and proper education, are also necessary. Attention to social context gives eudaimonism a potentially critical orientation that has made it attractive to many feminist theorists.

The other approach includes a variety of non-eudaimonistic virtue theories that take virtue and morality to depend on feelings and feeling-based motivations rather than on reason or rationality and that regard the virtuousness of a character trait as not dependent on its contribution to the possessor’s long-term welfare. Because this kind of approach emphasizes emotional aspects of our nature, which have been marginalized by the male-dominant rationalistic theories of Enlightenment philosophy, it has been appealing to other feminist theorists.

Feminist Ethics

By contrast with the long tradition of virtue ethics, this is a relatively new approach in normative ethics, developing only since the 1980s as increasing numbers of women philosophers who self-identify as feminists have entered the profession. It is distinguished from other ethical approaches by its concern with the moral status of women and its critical examination of the cultural devaluation of women and everything feminine. It cuts across all of the central questions of normative ethics, asking each in a way that centers the subordination in society of women and women’s interests to men and men’s interests. A defining tenet of feminist ethics is that the systematic subordination of any group of humans is wrong, and so feminist ethics seeks to develop practical approaches to subverting the subordination of all peoples but especially women. Feminist ethics is also concerned with the depreciation or exclusion in moral philosophy of women’s perspectives. It takes the experiences of women to be as worthy of respect and concern as men’s, and so it seeks to revise or rethink aspects of ethical concepts, methods, and theories that ignore or denigrate women’s experiences.

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The concepts of gender and power are focal for feminist ethics. Margaret Walker, for example, holds that “feminist ethics is inevitably and fundamentally about morality and power and the moral meaning of relations of unequal power” (Walker 2001: 4); indeed, as Susan Sherwin says, “feminist ethics asks about power, about domination and subordination, even before it asks about good and evil” (Sherwin 1992: 54). Feminist ethics begins with the recognition that in human societies that are organized along lines of gendered hierarchies of power and so in which women are subordinated and men are privileged (which is to say, all known societies), gender makes a great deal of difference to how human lives go and to how social institutions and practices, including the practices of mainstream moral philosophy, are structured, function, and shape our lives individually and collectively. The questions feminist ethics asks about action, values, character, thought, emotion, motivation, responsibility, and individual and collective lives take seriously the contexts of unequal power, opportunities, and possibilities into which we are born, in which we develop, from which we absorb values that affirm some kinds of us and devalue others kinds of us, and in which we live together, some kinds of us privileged because other kinds of us are constrained, marginalized, exploited, or harmed.

Feminist Virtue Ethics

Feminist virtue ethics can be understood, then, as an approach to moral theorizing that examines issues of character critically in light of gender and power, and highlights character dimensions of gendered subordination and dominance. As feminist, it is critical of traditional virtue ethics insofar as the latter’s lack of explicit, prioritized attention to the effects of systemic forces of unjust power hierarchies on the constitutions of selves makes it liable to define virtue and vice in general, and specific virtues and vices, in ways that reinforce domination values, and liable also to distort what would count as flourishing of both those who are subordinated and those who are privileged in various power hierarchies. As virtue-theoretic, it holds that examinations of character are important for understanding the nature, mechanisms, and harms of oppression and for envisioning possibilities for genuinely free and fully human lives.

Susan Moller Okin once asked, “How does virtue ethics look from a feminist point of view—that is to say, from a perspective that expects women and men to be treated as equally human and due equal concern and respect?” (Okin 1996: 211). We can now identify a number of features characteristic of feminist virtue ethics (hereafter, FVE) that distinguish it from both traditional virtue ethics (TVE) and feminist ethics more generally (FE). I will highlight three.

First, as feminist, FVE has an explicitly political orientation and aim: it shares with FE the goal of theorizing women’s subordination in order to help end it, but does so by focusing on character and lives and on philosophical theories about character and lives. In particular, FVE theorists address distortions of character that are engendered under conditions of subordination and privilege and that contribute to the maintenance of oppression; they identify virtues that might enable their possessors to resist or struggle against oppression in morally justifiable and non-self-corrupting ways; they bring to the foreground virtues and vices that have been neglected by TVE or that take on a new significance, even a different valence, when viewed from a feminist perspective; and they envision possibilities for all human beings of developing genuinely good characters and living humane, free, and mutually respectful lives in just societies.

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Feminist theorists have also been concerned to identify ways in which traditional Western philosophical approaches to virtue, such as the accounts of Aristotle, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, reinforce the devaluation and subordination of women. Accounts like these, Nancy Snow says,

either expound different lists of virtues that apply separately to men and women and privilege men’s virtues over women’s; apply the same virtues, such as chastity, unequally to men and women; or elaborate social roles with accompanying virtues—such as wife and mother—that require women to subordinate themselves to men.

(1992: 34–35)

More troubling is the way such accounts

set identity conditions for women by making descriptive claims about women’s nature that have normative implications for the kinds of virtues women can hope to achieve . . . [and so] limit who they can and should be. At their worst, these claims deny women’s full and equal humanity.

(Snow 1992: 34–35)

Thus an important task for FVE is to develop accounts of virtue and vice that express right valuing of women. This involves rethinking traditional virtues and vices, as well as identifying heretofore unacknowledged virtues and vices. More interestingly, it has proved to involve the transvaluation of traditional virtues and vice. Traits that have traditionally been regarded as virtues, particular those thought to be distinctive of “good women,” such as patience, obedience, and humility, have been reconceptualized as vices that contribute to women’s continued subordination, while other traits traditionally regarded as vices, or vices of women, such as defiance, distrustfulness, unreliability, and arrogance, have been reclaimed as liberatory virtues.

A second feature of FVE is its emphasis on the great significance for character and life possibilities of social contexts and social institutions as shaped by hierarchies of power. This focus makes FVE, unlike most TVE, both non-universalizing and more likely to hold that the characters of individuals cannot be understood or evaluated in isolation from social context. TVE is a universalizing approach: it typically assumes that character psychology is universally human, that virtues and vices are linked to human goodness and human flourishing, and that all humans are liable to the same deficiencies of character for which the same virtues are universally corrective. But FVE holds social contexts shape psychologies differently, depending on the social location of individuals, that social context matters to the development of various character traits and to possibilities for flourishing, and that differently situated people may be subject to different kinds of character problems calling for different forms of character transformation, or may have opportunities or the need to develop different, context-specific virtues. FVE also recognizes that social and theoretical conceptions of virtues, vices, and flourishing are linked in important ways to conceptions of gender: traits have long been differentially identified as virtues or vices depending on whether it is women or men who possess and exercise them.

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TVE also has an individualist focus: it evaluates character based on facts about individuals’ psychologies, such as individuals’ motivations, values, and cognitive, affective, and desiderative dispositions, and it regards individuals as having primary responsibility for the development of their characters and sole responsibility for maintaining or changing them. FVE, by contrast, takes the more realistic view that character dispositions are inculcated, nurtured, directed, shaped, and given significance and value by social interactions, institutions, cultural understandings, and traditions. Thus, certain character traits may not be well understood or even visible apart from particular social contexts; some FVE theories, such as Nancy Potter’s (2002) account of trustworthiness, maintain that some virtues and vices are not dispositions of individuals at all but are constituted by relations among individuals. Moreover, FVE recognizes that individuals are never the sole architects of their own characters, that it may take interpersonal interaction or social change to make character transformation possible, and that social circumstances can damage people’s characters in ways that are not reparable.

In emphasizing issues of character development and transformation, FVE has also, as TVE has not, called attention to which groups are assigned what kinds of responsibility, and with what kind of acknowledgement (or lack thereof), for what dimensions of character development and transformation; and it asks how relationships and institutions would have to be reconfigured so that no group of humans is excluded from the possibility of becoming and staying good and living flourishing lives. As Okin has argued, even when TVE accounts, such as Aristotle’s, attend to character development and point to the importance of proper moral education, they typically covertly rely on women, who are subordinated in the family and the larger society, to do the important work of guiding character development in early childhood, while simultaneously regarding women as inherently defective beings who are incapable of full human virtue, without facing the question of how children could develop good moral characters within a “defective,” not to mention unjust, environment.

A third feature of FVE is one essential to FE generally, according to Alison Jaggar (1991): FVE takes women’s experiences seriously, but not uncritically. Because some FE theories give special emphasis to women’s experiences in relationships, particularly mothering and caring for dependent elderly, disabled, and infirm persons, which have long been neglected in mainstream philosophy, some FVE theories attend especially to virtues that are important for good mothering and caring. Insofar as FVE views women’s experiences critically, it takes them as likely to reflect in manifold ways the interplay of subordinating and privileging contexts of diverse women’s lives. In particular, it is alive to the possibility that in contexts of oppression, the characters of both subordinated and privileged people can have been distorted in ways that makes it difficult if not impossible for them to live flourishing lives.

Care Ethics and Virtue Ethics

One prominent branch of feminist ethics with virtue theoretic dimensions is care ethics. Drawing on the work of psychologist Carol Gilligan (1982), who identified a distinctive moral voice speaking a language of care that emphasizes relationships and responsibilities, in contrast to the dominant voice in moral philosophy whose language of justice stresses rights and principles, feminist theorists such as Nel Noddings (1984), Sara Ruddick (1989), Eva Kittay (1999), and Virginia Held (2006) have developed theories that commend virtues and values traditionally linked to women and activities for which women have traditionally born the primary responsibility. These theories emphasize the kinds of human relationships that hold between unequal and interdependent persons, including mothers and children, those Kittay refers to as “dependency workers” and dependents, and in general caregivers and those cared for. While the initial focus of care ethics was on personal relationships in the private realm, these theorists and others have argued that values central to care ethics can and should be extended to the public realm, relations among strangers, and even global contexts (e.g., Khader 2011).

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Although some care theorists maintain that care should be understood primarily as a practice rather than as a virtue, others have developed accounts in a non-eudaimonistic vein that focus on emotion-based care as a virtue or on virtues that develop or are needed in care-taking or relational contexts. For example, in Maternal Thinking Ruddick analyses what she calls “maternal practice,” identifying several virtues, such as the ability to see things in perspective, humility, cheerfulness, and conscientiousness, that equip mothers to engage in activities necessary both to realize the maternal goals of preserving the lives and fostering the growth of their children and also to negotiate tensions between training children to conform to society’s needs and expectations and encouraging them to challenge morally objectionable social norms.

Early versions of care ethics drew criticisms from many feminists who identified problems facing the project of what Barbara Houston (1987) called “rescuing womanly virtues.” While virtues such as care, compassion, sympathy, and altruism have long been assigned to women, not only have these traits been valued less than virtues traditionally assigned to men, such as justice, rationality, and self-sufficiency, but the gendering of caring virtues bolsters the subordinating view that women are well-suited to domestic duties but unsuited to public life. An uncritical valorization of care, critics fear, may promote gender essentialism by implying that the virtues of caring are ones that only women can have or that all women have—so that caring is something that all and only women should do—or it may reinforce the view that women’s other-directed care is virtuous no matter the cost to the carer; and in either case it would buttress rather than undermine women’s continued subordination. Nevertheless, many feminist theorists regard care as the sine qua non of genuinely good human relations, and so they have engaged in rethinking virtues of care to avoid reinforcing subordinating implications.

While the task of retrieving virtues of care from distortions wrought by women’s subordination is one with which many FVE theorists may agree, there is a debate about how to understand the general relation between care ethics and virtue ethics. Some theorists such as Michael Slote (2007) and Margaret McLaren (2001) situate care ethics within virtue ethics. Slote, for example, takes the morality of caring to be best understood as a form of non-eudaimonistic, “agent-based” virtue ethics, in which caring motivation is the most basic feature of morality. McLaren highlight similarities between virtue ethics and care ethics, such as that both emphasize relationality, partiality, and emotions, both hold that intentions and actions are important, and both take the concrete, particular aspects of moral situations to be morally salient. She argues that embedding care ethics in virtue ethics allows the dissociation of care from gender and so from subordinating feminine stereotypes. Other theorists, such as Maureen Sanders-Staudt (2006), resist the “marriage” of care ethics and virtue ethics. Sanders-Staudt highlights differences between care ethics and virtue ethics, opposes subsuming care ethics under virtue ethics, and argues for, at most, a collaborative relationship that preserves the distinctively feminist dimensions of care ethics. We could also see in the appropriation of care ethics by virtue ethicists a theoretical recapitulation of the social subordination of women’s work, both domestic and philosophical. In my view, any connection between care ethics and virtue ethics must not only preserve but also give priority in moral theorizing to the feminist goal of examining the subordination of women and seeking to end it. But given that some virtue theorists define “virtue ethics” as giving priority to virtue concepts in theorizing morality, it is not at all clear whether a care-virtue ethics that prioritizes a feminist orientation, rather than merely valorizing traditionally feminine virtue or treating care as a non-gendered virtue, is even possible.

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Critical Feminist Eudaimonism

Care ethics was for some time the dominant approach in feminist ethics and so feminist discussions of virtue. More recently, however, as feminist ethics has broadened, so feminist work on virtues has embraced other approaches, especially eudaimonism. Despite the sexism inherent in his writings, Aristotle’s virtue ethics has been of particular importance. For example, some of Martha Nussbaum’s work on the capability approach to justice and development ethics, especially as it affects women, draws on an Aristotelian view of human flourishing (Nussbaum 1992; 2000). According to this view, because humans have certain inherent capabilities the development and exercise of which is essential for living a life that is both recognizably human and flourishing, justice requires that societies be organized so as to enable every human to flourish by developing and exercising the distinctively human capabilities. Marcia Homiak has argued that Aristotle’s ideal of the flourishing for a rational being provides valuable resources for feminist theory and has defended his account against charges of elitism that, if applicable, would make it uncongenial for feminist theorizing (Homiak 1993; 2010). Among the most interesting work in feminist eudaimonism is that of Lisa Tessman. In a series of essays and her book, Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles (2005), Tessman draws on a reconstructed Aristotelian eudaimonism to focus on ways that oppression can damage character and so interfere with flourishing.

Aristotelian eudaimonism takes the flourishing life to be the ultimate aim of all human activity. Tessman holds further that flourishing is the implicit aim of liberatory struggles and an ideal that guides feminist activism, and that flourishing provides a framework for analyzing the badness of oppression. Instead of focusing, as does traditional Aristotelian eudaimonism, on the goodness of the virtuous and flourishing life, Tessman employs eudaimonism to focus on ways that oppression seriously harms people. She identifies three kinds of character-related harm. First, oppression can impede the development or exercise of certain virtues or encourage the development of certain vices, such as dishonesty, cunning, or manipulativeness. Since the possession of virtue and the absence of vice are required for flourishing, oppression thus interferes with individuals living good lives. And if the virtues that can’t be developed are precisely those that would enable people to resist their oppression, character damage can help sustain subordination. Second, surviving or resisting oppression can require the cultivation of traits, which Tessman calls “burdened virtues,” that are virtues only under non-ideal conditions, that do not contribute to the possessor’s well-being, and that one has good reason to regret having to cultivate. So, whereas Aristotle held that virtues necessarily contribute to or constitute the possessor’s flourishing, Tessman argues that oppression disrupts the connection between virtue and flourishing. Third, while Aristotelian eudaimonism emphasizes that virtues contribute to the possessor’s well-being, Tessman holds that a trait cannot count as a virtue if it does not also contribute to the general flourishing of the members of an inclusive community.

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Several criticisms have been raised against feminist eudaimonism. One is a version of a question as old as Plato: is it indeed the case that the wicked cannot flourish? Marilyn Friedman (2009) has argued that it is not obvious that, e.g., men who live lives of privilege and are socially supported in their view of themselves as good persons living good lives aren’t happy or living well. Yet such a claim has to be made for feminist eudaimonism to have any motivational power for ending domination. This leads to a second criticism. The justification that eudaimonistic theories provide for ending domination and subordination points primarily to the consequences for the possessors of virtue or vice (and, on Tessman’s view, for other members of the community). Since most of those putatively experiencing the character harms from oppression don’t perceive their lives as unhappy and defective, the virtue-consequentialist justification strikes some theorists as a less strong moral argument against oppression than, say, a Kantian one that centers the inherent injustice of not respecting all persons as equals. A third criticism addresses the conceptual relation between flourishing and virtues. Feminist eudaimonism needs liberatory accounts of both. But the history of accounts of virtues that rationalize the subordination of women makes the project of developing an account of flourishing from a list of virtues problematic. It would seem, then, that a specific account of flourishing is required in order to determine which traits of character are really virtues and which are vices. But, as Macalester Bell (2006) has noted, different theorists and groups engaged in liberatory struggle, such as liberal feminists and lesbian separatists, have quite different conceptions of flourishing; which one should be the basis for FVE? Fully resolving these problems requires further work on flourishing, virtues, and vices.

Feminist Accounts of Specific Virtues and Vices

An alternative TVE approach that avoids many of the problems associated with both care virtue ethics and feminist eudaimonism is Christine Swanton’s (2003) target account of virtue. On this account, a virtue is disposition to respond in an excellent way to objects, people, actions, situations, etc., that are in the field, or sphere of concern, of the virtue. For example, the traditional virtue of courage is the disposition to respond excellently to dangerous situations. Although it has not received much explicit attention from feminist theorists, Swanton’s approach has several features that recommend it for feminist theorizing: it is pluralistic, allowing that different kinds of virtues and vices might be analyzed in quite different ways, so it doesn’t require, e.g., privileging one among the many accounts of flourishing; it is non-idealizing, so it doesn’t require reconstruction to be able to address the non-ideal circumstances of oppression; and its call for analyses of contexts, targets, and responses gives room for distinctively feminist analyses that center issues of gender and power. In not being tied to a particular kind of virtue theory, such as eudaimonism, the target approach also fits with an interesting feature of feminist virtue theorizing: most of the work in this area has not been concerned to develop full-blown ethical theories but has focused on analyses of specific virtues or vices. Although there are, of course, problems with Swanton’s account, I think feminist work on virtues and vices might be helped by drawing explicitly on such an approach.

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Feminist theorists have addressed specific virtues and vices in three ways. First, some have identified new virtues or vices or brought forward neglected ones. For example, care virtue theorists have moved caring virtues to the center of ethics; Ruddick analyzed maternal humility; Tessman has identified the burdened virtues of sensitivity and attentiveness to others’ unjust suffering and of hard resolve against oppressors; Margaret Walker (1991) has drawn attention to grace and lucidity as “virtues of impure agency” in contexts of moral bad luck, such as oppression; Rebecca Whisnant (2004) analyzed self-centering as a virtue for resisting sexist exploitation and for maintaining oneself as a fully responsible person. Second, theorists have analyzed traditional virtues and vices in new ways. For example, Cheshire Calhoun (1995) and Victoria Davion (1991) developed accounts of integrity that take seriously the experiences of people facing multiple and conflicting oppressions; Anne Barnhill (2012) has developed an account of modesty as a female sexual virtue that promotes feminist change; Macalester Bell’s (2009) examination of the Aristotelian virtue of appropriate anger in the non-ideal conditions of life under oppression leads her to argue that its justification as a virtue should not appeal to considerations of flourishing; Marilyn Frye (1983) has argued that arrogance is at the heart of male domination; I have developed feminist accounts of self-respect (Dillon 2004). Other traditional virtues and vices explored by FVE theorists include justice, inattention, honesty, submissiveness, generosity, chastity, shame, self-trust, trustworthiness, responsibility, hospitality, and decency.

Finally, some theorists have engaged in transvaluation of character traits, arguing that some traits traditionally viewed as virtues are actually vices that keep women subordinated, or advocating other traits, traditionally viewed as vices, as feminist virtues. For example, Claudia Card (1996) argued that women’s gratitude to men who don’t abuse them or who protect them in quid pro quo arrangements is a vice, and that politeness is not a feminist virtue but feisty insubordination is (Card 1991); in contrast to the dominant view that trust is unqualifiedly a virtue, Annette Baier (1994) took a more cautious approach, advocating women’s cultivation of appropriate distrust in exploitative conditions; Lisa Heldke has praised unreliability (1997) and being a responsible traitor (1998); Bell (2006) and I (Dillon 2012) have suggested that arrogance might be a virtue that enables subordinated people to demand respect and develop self-respect. Among other traits that have been seen in different lights by FVE theorists are forgiveness, defiance, altruism, bitterness, obedience, resentfulness, self-coherence, envy, selflessness, selfishness, vulnerability, and deference.

One valuable aspect of feminist work in this area has been an increased emphasis on vice. VE has assumed that people are mostly good and so has emphasized virtues (hence, the name of the approach). But it is implausible that mostly good people could create and maintain oppressive structures, or participate in them in ignorance of the manifest injustice of their societies, or actively resist emancipatory efforts; and yet innumerably many of us do just these things. Tessman (2005) and Anita Superson (2004) identify a number of traits that Tessman calls “ordinary vices of domination,” which enable members of dominant groups to maintain their dominance without thinking themselves unjust. The widespread possession of these vices entails that dominants as well as subordinates, and hence most people, do not live flourishing lives. Continued work on vices of domination, as well as vices of the oppressed that reinforce continued subordination, would be of great value to feminist ethics for understanding the nature and mechanisms of oppression and what needs to be done towards emancipation. In highlighting the character issues connected with unjust hierarchies of power, uncovering heretofore ignored admirable dimensions of women’s lives, and identifying virtues needed for resisting oppression and living fully human lives, feminist virtue ethics has already made a tremendous contribution to moral philosophy.

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