ABSTRACT
Discussion of ‘personal ethics’ must begin with demarcation. All ethics are personal ethics: only persons can live morally well or ill. What manageable topic is to be considered here? What is to be left out? ‘Personal ethics’ as a distinct subject is about people's private lives: not necessarily hidden, nor even beyond the reach of the law; but excluding their public roles, their citizenship, their trades, their professional services to their fellow human beings, their large- or small-scale politics. Such exclusion, to allow concentration elsewhere, is practical; but even so, feminists disapprove. As Susan Dowell put it:
Feminism challenges the whole concept of ‘personal morality’ as a separate category of ethics. ‘The personal is political’, we say. Our sexuality is not a separate or neutral part of our existence; it embodies our whole being.
Dowell 1990:38