Review Questions on Feminist Moral Theory (Annette Baier and Virginia Held)

1.  Explain, generally, how traditional moral theories tend to focus attention on rationality, the creation of univeral moral rules, obligation, individual rights, avoiding harm, penalizing offenders of moral rules, and the creation and celebration of "male" virtues.  Feminist moral theories might be said to involve more than this in the sense that they also recognize emotion, individual interests, a focus on individual persons, and the place of the "female" virtues such as love, kindness, nurturing, and care.  In what sense might it be argued that these "female" virtues are also an important and essential part of moral theory?

2.  Virginia Held claims that the traditional view of a woman's role in society is that, of course, she doesn't have one.  Instead, her role is largely that of the family, in which activities, especially those of "mothering" and caring for children, are seen as being solely in the private realm and not involving any aspect of what is particularly and peculiarly human.  What does this mean?  In what way does she attempt to show that human "mothering" or nurturing behavior is not simply "natural," but that it is social as well?  What does she mean by saying that nurturing relationships create human culture and constructs social reality?

3.  How does V. Held's argument for the inclusion of feelings in morality proceed?

4.  What is the Prisoners' Dilemma?  Why does Annette Baier claim that "games" such as the PD are boys' games?  What do family/caring relationships have to do with her analysis of this view of morality?

5.  How, according to Baier, are an ethics of love and an ethics of obligation to be brought together?

6.  Though we haven't yet gone through Hobbes' moral and political theory (but we will), there is a claim made by Baier such that:  morality does depend at least in part on threats and bribes, but life will be "nasty, emotionally poor, and worse than brutish...., if that is all morality is...."  This claim is a play on one of Hobbes' most famous quotations such that in a condition of mere nature, in a condition with no law, no morality, no justice, no property, no distinction between what is mine and what is yours, the life of man will be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."  Baier doesn't mean the same thing that Hobbes meant.  But what does she mean?