Moral Understandings: Alternative “Epistemology” for a Feminist Ethics [1989]

This chapter discusses alternative epistemology of moral understandings by describing its three elements and their affinities. It shows how its features challenge the still hardy mainstream universalist tradition on moral knowledge. The chapter considers some ways this particular result of the reconstructive approach to feminist ethics answers to some concerns of the first, politically normative approach. Refusing the canonical "theory" option does not mean going without guidance in judgments and practices of countering domination. Neither does the alternative moral epistemology by itself require commitments to the specific moral values and paradigms lately in dispute among feminists. A substantial number of contemporary women writers on morality have sounded the theme of attention to "particular others in actual contexts". The three elements of attention, contextual and narrative appreciation, and communication in the event of moral deliberation might be seen, in their natural interdependence, as an alternative epistemology of moral understanding, or the basis of one.