Abstract

Throughout the history of Western ethics, the moral status of women has been a persistent though rarely central topic of debate. A few isolated voices have contended that women are men's moral equals but most of the dominant figures in the tradition have offered ingenious arguments to justify women's subordination to men. Despite the long history of this controversy, the expression “feminist ethics” was coined only in the 1980s, after feminism's “second wave” had swept into the academies of North America and, to a lesser extent, western Europe – a critical mass of philosophers for whom the status of women was an important ethical concern. The appearance of this expression not only signaled a perception that attention to women and gender was indispensable to adequately understanding many issues in practical ethics; it also reflected a new belief that women's subordination had far‐reaching, though hitherto unnoticed, consequences for ethical theory.