ABSTRACT
Feminist scholarship often calls for radical revisions in the way in which inquiry should proceed in philosophy, the social sciences, and even the natural sciences. Contemporary moral philosophy has paid little attention to the morally significant phenomena of sympathy, compassion, human concern, and friendship. Standard moral philosophy has construed personal relationships as aspects of the self-interested feelings of individuals, or it has let close others stand in for the universal other. A number of feminist philosophers are trying to construct the kind of moral theory that would be compatible with the experience of women. If one holds that experience should determine the fate of moral theory, certainly one is talking about a very different view of experience than the standard empirical view. The region of particular others is a distinct domain where what becomes artificial and problematic are the very "self" and "all others" of standard moral theory.
