Rethinking Ethics in the Midst of Violence

Book excerpt: Selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1995. Moving beyond the traditional feminist ethics of care, Linda A. Bell places an existentialist conception of liberation at the heart of ethics and argues that only an ethics of freedom sufficiently allows for feminist critique and opposition to a status quo imbued with violence. She offers a critique of Aristotelian, utilitarian, and Kantian ethics, analyzing each approach from feminist perspectives and showing how each fails women and others who resist oppression.