ABSTRACT
Against the prevailing view that moral thinking is or ought to be politically neutral, many feminists claim that moral argument is not and can not be insulated from broader political and legal considerations. Feminists recognize the inevitable political inflection of moral thinking in at least two ways. First, drawing on a critical reading of the history of philosophy, feminist theorists have argued that fundamental moral categories—for example, moral agency—have been constructed to reflect and to maintain certain asymmetries of social power. Second, and more concretely, some argue that to approach particular moral problems as a feminist requires bearing in mind the socially and historically specific location of one’s theorizing, with an eye to how one’s deliberations are likely to affect the actual conditions of women now and in the foreseeable future. Every one of us has moral intuitions, and philosophers have always more or less explicitly relied on these intuitions in constructing moral theories and articulating moral principles.
