ABSTRACT
Several male philosophers who have held widely divergent views about the nature of ethical principles, have been in agreement that the roles of men and women as ethical subjects are different. Some of these figures have been quite explicit about the matter; others have made claims which have this implication. Thus, Aristotle, Rousseau and Hegel quite clearly claim that women are incapable of male standards of morality. Rousseau advocated excluding women from citizenship on the grounds that their ‘virtues’ are more properly located in the home. Hegel equates ‘female consciousness’ with the life of the family, a primitive stage in relation to the life of civil society.1 In his pre-critical writing, Kant offers a view very much like that of Rousseau. In his Observations on the Feeling ofthe Beautiful and the Sublime, Kant assigns the sublime to men and the beautiful to women and continues as follows:
Nothing (for women) of duty, nothing of compulsion, nothing of obligation! Woman is intolerant of all commands and all morose constraint. They do something only because it pleases them, and the art consists in making only that pleases them which is good. I hardly believe that the fair sex is capable of principles, and hope by that not to offend, for these are also extremely rare in the male.
