The readings for this week argue that morality, including the major theories that we have studied in the course, has typically expressed a masculine point of view, and that there is a lot that we can learn by taking more consideration of the female perspective (Gilligan, 1982; Held, 1990; Noddings, 2010). In broader terms, the idea seems to be that certain influences such as gender, race, socio-economic class, ethnicity, religion, and so on can affect not only our judgments about particular moral issues, but the deeper assumptions that lie behind these judgments, and that we can learn a lot by considering perspectives quite different from our own.
Describe an example from your own life in which your ethical judgments or assumptions were challenged and enhanced by considering a perspective that was different and unfamiliar to you. The example may be from our course material, or from outside of the course. Describe the way in which it helped you to think about ethical questions in a different way. (Note that this is not simply asking for a difficult ethical challenge or an experience of ethical disagreement; you should focus on encountering a different point of view, and on how your own perspective was enhanced by that confrontation.)