ABSTRACT
Feminism is first and foremost a political project: a project aimed at the liberation of women and the destruction of patriarchy. This project does not have a particular metaethics; there is no feminist consensus, for example, on the epistemology of moral belief or the metaphysics of moral truth. Extant moral philosophy is largely the product of men, and men operating under patriarchal assumptions: the inherent superiority of men to women; the inherent superiority of the symbolically masculine over the symbolically feminine; and the centering of male experience as normative or ideal, with female experience treated as marginal, aberrant, or non-ideal. The development of feminist ethics has been much influenced by Carol Gilligan's argument that ways of moral reasoning are gendered, with men typically concerned with issues of rules, justice, individualism, and autonomy, and aspiring to abstraction and universalism; and women typically concerned with issues of care, interpersonal relationships, and the emotions, and more focused on the particular and the contextual.
