Caring Ethics Of Feminism In The Construction Of China's Harmonious Society

Caring ethics, centered by care and feeling, emphasizes inter-dependence, inter-connnection and inter-caring among people. It emerged in the 1970s and was a result of second stage feministic movement. It conctructed feminine moral philosophy from a psychological perspective so as to revolt masculine society and hence make up the inadequacy of impartial morals. The founder of caring ethics was professor Karol Gilhengen in America who discovered that relations, connections,care and responsibility were more emphasized in the evaluation of feminine values. Professor Nellile Nottingson developed it into a systematic theory which claimed that caring ethics should pay attention to intuition and was averse to logical inference or testification. Jone C. Tolonto attempted to construct caring ethics whch went beyond sex, and divided the caring process into four stages, namely, caring, looking after, offering care and accepting care.Caring ethics was a product of the historical struggle between feminine philosophy and masculine philosophy. In ancient Greek, Aristotle and Aquinas claimed that women were vulgar, nasty, and of low value. Rousseau, Kant and Hegel believed that justice should not exist in private families. On the contrary, Plato held that men and women should be equal, and Locke in recent times criticized the masculine system from a political-philosophical view. Mary Wastocolclough called for equal educational, working, and political rights for women, and James Stuart Mill said that women should have the right to vote and be elected. The traditional feminine philosophy took masculine power as its standard and aimed at equality with men in politics, economy and culture. However, feminism in the second stage no longer treated equlity with men as its goal but tried to establish its own voice in every aspect of society, especially in the aspect of ideology. The aim was to achieve its goal of fighting against masculine philosophy, and caring ethics was among the voices.From the research in caring ethics, its found that its value for our construction of a harmonious society are as follows: first and foremost, it provide a new pattern for women's liberation in our contury. On the one hand, the concept of social gender which is introduced in this ethics raises self-protecting ability of women. On the other hand, the voice of women which is established lead the research in women theory into a new field. Secondly, there are three advantageous aspects of caring ethics in the construction of a harmonious society, namely, it is favorable for understanding people's needs and developing closer rapport with them, for our attending to research questions from various perspectives so as to find underlying complexities and finally solving the problems, and for enhancing our abilities of administration. Moreover, caring ethics have special merits for re-constructing our traditional culture and promoting construction of a harmonious society. Under the current situation of a undeveloped production capability, justice is still the main body of our construction work. As a result,a combination of justice ethics and caring ethics is suggested to accelerate social harmony. The proposed reasons are, firstly, justice represents sense while care stand for sensibility, and a combination of the two not only compensates the deficiency of justice but also strengthens the power of caring ethics; secondly, justice ethics seeks for justice and impartiality while caring ethics pursues affection and relations both of which are indispensable for society; last but not least, both ethics seek for democracy, and the only difference is that caring ethichs is doing refiner.The justice ethics has been in the dominating position for a long time and resulted in the neglect of caring ethics. Therefore, it is of vital importance to reinforce the safegard of caring ethics to make sure its long-rangeness. And to do this according to the situation of our country needs to enlarge investment, establish regular helping mechanism, set up mental relief mechanism, and lastly set up domestic marriage coordination mechanism.