Feminist Critiques of Kantian and Utilitarian Impartiality

Annette Baier's 1985 essay "What Do Women Want in a Moral Theory?" (Noûs, vol. 19) is among the most influential feminist critiques of impartialist ethics. Baier argued that Kantian ethics, built around autonomous, rational agents who legislate universal law for themselves through the categorical imperative, effectively models moral agents as isolated, contract-like negotiators, and thereby privileges formal obligation between strangers over the relationships of trust — between parent and child, or between friends — within which most people's actual moral lives are embedded. Drawing on David Hume's sentimentalist ethics rather than Kant's rationalism, Baier proposed trust, not universalizable duty, as the more fundamental moral relation from which an adequate ethical theory should begin.