현대 윤리학의 위기와 페미니즘

The Crisis of the Modern Ethics and Feminism

This paper aims at analysing the cause of the crisis that the modern ethics has currently faced from its epistemological foundations. In doing so, this paper intends to search a new possibility of overcoming the limits of the modern ethics from a feminist perspective while rejecting a reductionist point of view that regards the meaning of morality simply as an outcome of power relations, and thus denies any moral values attached to it. This paper also seeks to present the implications the feminist perspective would offer to the current crisis by critically reviewing the historical process of ethical investigations developed from the modern West to the contemporary. The main arguments of the paper are presented as follows. One of the main causes of the crisis can be found from the foundations that the moral epistemology of the modern ethics has been based on. This foundation comes from the reason of the modern era which has pursued the universal objectivity of ethical belief as an absolute goal. In other words, the goal of the modern ethics dissociates ethical investigations from the reality while turning them into the level of theories with universal abstraction. Alienated from the concrete realities, it has lost its capacity to deal with the issues coming out of reality. After briefly reviewing the nature of the modern philosophical tradition, I will explain the ways in which the meta-ethics in the 20 Century American-British tradition has further deepened the distance between the ethics and the reality. Nonetheless, this paper will also emphasize that their analysis of morality whose foundation is not based on the reality should not be denied but be viewed as a starting point for a new ethics. Lastly, I will rather delve into the possibilities feminism offers for building a new ethics, than simply defining the current crisis as dissolution of the ethics or deconstruction of morality.