Gender and Moral Status

One significant issue in moral philosophy is the human moral status or posion and its origin that has undergone various developments throughout the history. Ancient Greek philosophers take the possession of the valuable human nature to be the ground of his moral status, and thus they take other beings to lack such a status because of their nonessenal value. The possession of raonal nature is another proposed ground for the human moral status, and the feminist ethics grounds moral status in a free emoonal agent. On the contrary, Islam characterizes free agents with moral value because of their capacity for free choice. On this view, though other beings possess an existenal value, they lack a real moral value. The effect of gender in the possession of a moral status has concerned some contemporary thinkers, with which we deal in this paper.