ABSTRACT
The chapter proposes to offer a radical rewriting of what constitutes the ethical moment, but it is necessary first to trace an overview of what is at stake in the deconstruction of conventional systems. From the perspective of feminist critique, it will quickly become apparent that the sexual difference which marks the modern body finds little overt expression in foundational paradigms of modern ethics, nor yet in its derivative, bioethics. The feminist ethical project starts from the point that, far from being the gender-neutral pursuit of objective utilities or expression of intrinsic goods, as is claimed, morality is highly mediated by gender. The dominant material, physical and psychological power of men over women is simply unacknowledged in the fiction that the transaction is between two equal moral agents. It is not that women are necessarily victims of men, but that in patriarchal society they are disenabled by those discursive and non-conscious strategies of power which construct them as morally inferior.
