Virginia Held | on Feminist Ethics

Virginia Held | On Feminist Ethics
Held lays out the consequences of centuries of creating ethical theory purely from a male point of view. The most important is that a feminist ethics cannot simply add to a structure built of concepts that are themselves based on a patriarchal view of the masculine and feminine but rather must transform ethics completely. She focuses on three main issues: (i) that of equating reason with males and emotion with females; (ii) associating the public arena with men and the private, household arena with women; and (iii) creating a caricature of the moral self that is exclusive to males.
-Di Stefano criticizes Hobbes's account of human nature on the grounds that it

A) conceives of the self in feminine terms.
B) presents humans completely abstracted from birth and nurture.
C) includes women's experience in his "state of nature."
D) describes the complexity of male and female existence.