Burdened Virtues

This deeply original and provocative work looks at the concerns of traditional feminist scholarship from the perspective of Aristotelian virtue ethics. Her subject is the moral life and the self under duress - how human beings exercise their moral agency within the constraints of oppressive social structures. Tessman examines moral harms of two types in particular: the first is to the oppressed self; the second is that the very conditions of oppression require the oppresses to develop a set of traits, "burdened virtues," that carry a moral cost to those who practice them. This book will be of interest to feminist theorists in philosophy and women's studies as well as ethicists and social theorists.