[1] Feminist philosophers critique traditional ethics as pre-eminently focusing on men's perspective with little regard for women's viewpoints.
Caring and the moral issues of private life and family responsibilities were traditionally regarded as trivial matters.
[3] Traditional ethics has a "male" orientated convention in which moral reasoning is viewed through a framework of rules, rights, universality, and impartiality and becomes the standard of a society.
Women need to be men's economic equals before they can develop truly human moral virtue, this is a perfect blend of pride and humility that we call self-respect.
[9] Feminist care-focused ethicists note the tendencies of patriarchal societies not to appreciate the value and benefits of women's ways of loving, thinking, working and writing and tend to view females as subordinate.
[11] The 'metafeminist' theory of the matrixial gaze and the matrixial[12][13] time-space, coined and developed by artist, philosopher and psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger since 1985,[14][15][16][17] articulates a revolutionary philosophical approach that, in "daring to approach", to use Griselda Pollock's description of Ettinger's ethical turn,[18][19] "the prenatal with the pre-maternal encounter", violence toward women at war, and the Shoah, has philosophically established the rights of each female subject over her own reproductive body, and offered a language to relate to human experiences which escape the phallic domain.
Thus, Ettinger offers a language to talk on the female rights over her reproductive body while revolutionizing philosophy and psychoanalysis through matrixiality where feminine sexuality and symbolic responsibility coexist.
Feminine sexuality is not foreclosed when maternality emerges, matrixial desire is a mixture of both, thus the contradiction between them established by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan recedes.
Ettinger suggests to Emanuel Levinas in their conversations in 1991, that the feminine understood via the matrixial perspective is the heart and the source of Ethics.
[28] The matrixial theory that proposes new ways to rethink sexual difference through the fluidity of boundaries informs aesthetics and ethics of compassion, carrying and non-abandonment in 'subjectivity as encounter-event'.
Other ethical approaches that define themselves by differentiating groups from one another through culture or other phenomena are regarded as "thick" accounts of morality.
[3] "The goal of feminist ethics is the transformation of societies and situations where women are harmed through violence, subordination and exclusion.