Can traditional ethical theory meet the challenges of feminism, multiculturalism, and environmentalism?

This paper aims to evaluate the challenges posed to traditional ethical theory by the ethics of feminism, multiculturalism, and environmentalism. I argue that James Sterba, in his Three Challenges to Ethics, provides a distorted assessment by trying to assimilate feminism, multiculturalism, and environmentalism into traditional utilitarian, virtue, and Kantian/Rawlsian ethics - which he thus seeks to rescue from their alleged "biases." In the cases of feminism and multiculturalism, I provide an alternative account on which these new critical discourses challenge the whole paradigm or conception of ethical inquiry embodied in the tradition. They embrace different questions, goals, tools of analysis, and wider audiences, typically ignored or marginalized by traditional ethicists. I illustrate my argument through brief interpretations of writers such as Susan Okin, Catharine Mackinnon, Sandra Bartky, John Stoltenberg, Richard Wasserstrom, Anthony Appiah, Charles Mills, Will Kymlicka, Charles Taylor, and Martha Nussbaum. In many of these cases, I suggest that they provide us with new ways of being ethicists. In the case of environmentalism, I defend a more conservative and negative assessment. Sterba embraces authors such as Peter Singer, Tom Regan, and Paul Taylor in order to advance an environmentalist ethic of "species equality/impartiality" and "biocentric pluralism." Here I argue that the traditional Kantian/Rawlsian ethics - which Sterba hopes to accommodate - actually provides compelling moral reasons for rejecting his principles of "species impartiality" and biocentric pluralism. Moreover, Rawlsian ethics can provide a more coherent, consistent, and plausible account of environmental issues than Sterba's brand of environmental ethics. I argue that in practice, his ethics concedes what it denies in theory - namely, the special value which inheres in human beings. As such, environmental ethics, unlike feminism and multiculturalism, poses very little in the way of a credible challenge or alternative to traditional ethics. © 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers.