Feminist Ethics:
Mill
& Taylor – done in class only.
Virginia Held,
“Feminist Transformations of Moral Theory”
Traditional theories of all (or most) kinds need to be transformed to take adequate account of the experience of women. WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?
Rationality:
Male=active, determinate, defining form – associated with human/public. Here, man can transcend animal nature and create “human” history. Creates government as a citizen, is a protector as a warrior.
Female=passive, indeterminate, inferior matter – associated with ‘natural’/private – the keeper of the household – satisfies natural, biological needs.
Traditional and even many contemporary moralists leave out or dismiss the experience of mothering as not falling into the category of the moral, but instead of the natural. Take, for instance, accounts of self-sacrifice by mothers that are excluded from the realm of the supererogatory.
Because women have been traditionally regarded as emotional and not rational, they have been considered incapable of full moral personhood.
“To continue to build morality on rational principles opposed to the emotions and to include women among the rational will leave no one to reflect the promptings of the heart, which promptings can be moral rather than merely instinctive.”
Three of the most questionable aspects of the history of ethics from a feminist point of view:
1.
2. Public/private distinction, relegation of the private to the ‘natural’
3. The self as constructed from a male point of view
Will Kymlicka, “Sexual Equality and Discrimination: Difference vs. Dominance”
Contemporary theorists have generally discarded the notion that women are incapable of or unsuited for political roles and economic activity outside the home. But even here, there are problems. In the newer view, women should be viewed as “free and equal beings” who are free to enter the public realm.
Anti-discrimination statutes have not brought about sexual equality. “A society would be non-discriminatory if race or gender never entered into the awarding of benefits.”
The success of anti-discriminatory practices is questionable because gender inequities are built into the definition of social/employment positions. There is gender neutrality in general, but there is no sexual equality in cases in which a position is already skewed in favor of the assumption that there would be, for example, no interference of child care roles in an employment setting. This “difference” view amounts to there being no sexual equality even in cases in which gender neutrality is accepted and practiced.
“The greater the domination, the less the likelihood that any women will be in a position to compete for employment, and hence the less room for arbitrary discrimination. The more sexual inequality there is in society, the more that social institutions reflect male interests, the less arbitrary discrimination there will be.”
Janet Radcliffe Richards, “Freedom, Conditioning, and the Real
Woman”
We are free to the extent that other people’s desires don’t come between you and your own desires.
Freedom is a means to happiness. Is freedom good as an end in itself? Is freedom more important than happiness? Consider examples: would you give up a valuable talent, even if after being “changed” you no longer valued the talent, and are made completely happy by a transformation (whether by drugs or some other force)? Would you consent to being made a very happy pig instead of being an unhappy human being? There are clearly things that are more important than happiness.
Are we concerned only with the happiness of human beings? If so, then it wouldn’t matter how happiness was produced if it were an end in itself – brainwashing, drugs, forcible medications, etc., would all be acceptable means to the end of happiness. But we do not, in fact, hold this position.
Do feminists think that freedom is a good thing and want it for women? “When the liberators of women or anyone else take the view that they know better than the beneficiaries of their efforts what should be done for them, they will argue that these people are conditioned, and therefore not in a state of mind to be able to choose freely no matter how many alternatives are open to them.”
Perhaps it is the case that freedom is an INTERNAL thing, some sort of state of mind. Two major views on this: 1) the stoic view that you shouldn’t want anything you can’t have and 2) the view that there is a TRUE SELF in each individual that should choose, but it can’t when there are obstructions in the way of the true self.
But everyone is influenced by society, upbringing, etc. and is in that sense conditioned. But for all that, it doesn’t imply that one is not free.
“Their failure to understand the situation they are in, and the persistence of deeply entrenched habits, may get in the way of what they want to do. And where this happens we can say that a woman’s state of mind is obstructing her desires, WITHOUT HAVING TO RESORT TO DUBIOUS THEORIES ABOUT HIDDEN DESIRES IN THE CORE OF HER IMAGINARY REAL SELF.”
It is clear enough that if people were brought up differently from the way they were, they would desire different things. But it is also possible that the interests a person has are really her interests. In a case like this, a “conditioned response” might be genuinely one’s own. “It is therefore impossible to tell whether or not a woman is conditioned just by knowing about her likes and dislikes, or about her formative influences.”
DIVERSITY is the solution to the problem of conditioning. It is not that there is no conditioning – it is instead that people should be exposed to new influences and information, not taken away from the old ones altogether, and to become aware of all the available possibilities.
“The way to prevent daughters from becoming conditioned is not to keep them out of the range of influence of the things which are believed to have conditioned their mothers, because it was not BEING IN THE RANGE OF THOSE INFLUENCES which did the harm, but BEING OUT OF THE RANGE OF OTHERS.” To bring up children with literature without sexist roles is not to free them – it simply conditions them in a different way.
Satris Articles by Ruth Sidel
and Elizabeth Powers
Some of the questions/issues here are differences between the authors regarding what it is that feminist ethics/theory does for society – whether it provides a positive or desirable direction for society.
Sidel claims that it does. She gives examples of the general attitude that a young girl who prepares for a sexual encounter is considered in some sense “bad” while the one who does not prepare, but inadvertently engages in sexual activity, or who acquiesces, has done something “permissible” – as though preparation and responsibility are bad things.
Sidel also mentions the unfair rates of pay for nurses and day care workers – “do we really want to tell our young women that they must play traditional male roles in order to earn a decent living and that caregiving no longer counts, is no longer worth doing?...”
Elizabeth Powers doubts that feminism provides a “positive” direction for society. She believes that in the realm of morals, men tend to follow the lead of women, and if women think of sex as something casual, men will consider it in the same way.
A VERY DUBIOUS CLAIM: (P. 67) “There is a cart-before-the-horse quality about feminism. An explosion of economic forces, starting after WWII, sent women into the workplace in huge numbers. It was only after this process was in high gear, and when women began directly competing with men in the upper echelons, that feminism came into being. An ideology then arose to justify the unprecedented autonomy on the part of women (and perhaps to assuage some of their felt guilt over the abandonment of hearth and home) and to allocate spoils.”
ANOTHER ONE: (69) “It strikes me that one of the peculiar results of the reign of feminism is that women have actually become unimportant, indeed nonessential.” -Deny that any of the endless tasks performed by women have any importance or contribute to the wholeness of a marriage. “This abandonment of the female realm has also led to the production of a class that appears to be in the vanguard of the nanny state: women who ‘have it all,’ whose marriages are not so much unions as partnerships of two career paths, and whose children, once assembled and produced, are willingly turned over by them to caretakers.”
ANOTHER
ONE: (70) “The greatest loss for my
friends who have not married is of course the children they never had. Exhortations to self-fulfillment aside, by
the time they reached forty many women of my generation were in a desperate
race with their bodies. Magazines in the
late 1980’s began featuring articles on ‘Mommie
Oldest,’ as women underwent Herculean efforts to get their aging uteruses into
shape. In vitro fertilization,
artificial insemination, hormone shots – if only they could go back and undo
all those abortions!”