ABSTRACT
In the past, ethicists and bioethicists thought that the way to proceed was to appeal to our common human natures, to characteristics that are common to all people. But shifts in ethical and bioethical reasoning toward relativism, antifoundationalism, and postmodernism changed this way of seeing things, leading to a major trans valuation of values in which what had been good became bad, and what had been bad became good. In particular, power-focused feminist ethicists and bioethicists heeded Spelman when she pleaded with them not to make the mistake historian Kenneth Stampp made by asserting that "innately Negroes are, after all, only white men with black skins, nothing more, nothing else." If power-focused feminist ethicists and bioethicists really value equality, implied Spelman, then they cannot claim all women are "just like us." The most striking difference between feminist and nonfeminist versions of practical discourse is, in Alison Jaggar's estimation, the nurturing nature of the former.
