Autonomy and Normativity by Winfield Richard Dien

Author:Winfield, Richard Dien
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Notes

1 These factors are “natural” in the sense of being given, rather than being determined by the will of the individuals to whom they apply. Although their privileging is a matter of convention, they themselves are not artificial products of conduct.

2 The rise of demarcated social and political domains has occurred by overthrowing the feudal relations exemplified in estates where individuals’ role in society is tied to political privileges, and where both are tied to birthright. Admittedly, such feudal relations could be eliminated without separating civil society and the state by means of a totalitarian solution where government directly administers the economy.

3 In this vein Aristotle claims that the family is an association rooted in nature from which all others follow (see Aristotle, Politics, Book I), Rousseau maintains that the family is the earliest and only natural society (see Rousseau, On Social Contract, Chapter II, 8) and Locke proclaims conjugal relations the first society, from which relations of parents and children and then master and servant follow (Locke, Second Treatise on Government, Chapter VII, 44).

4 Alan Bloom is one who argues that justice does not apply to the family since nature imposes a hierarchy and gendered division of labor upon household organization. See Okin, Susan Moller, Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 26, 36–37, for a critical discussion of Bloom’s position.

5 Mark Poster argues analogously that Freudian psychoanalytic theory provides an accurate portrayal of the dynamics of the bourgeois family, but not a conception applicable to other historical family formations where a nuclear patriarchal household is not encountered. See Poster, Mark, Critical Theory of the Family (New York: Continuum, 1988). Similarly, Okin points out that psychoanalytic and other psychological theories of personality development have taken gendered parenting as the locus for personality development and have therein examined how gender is reproduced. See Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family, 131. Freeing psychological theory from such assumptions about gendered parenting would still, however, retain the assumption of the disengaged nuclear family.

6 Hegel raises these issues in his introductory critique of past theories of the family. See Hegel, G.W.F., Vorlesungen Über Rechtsphilosophie, Edition Ilting (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1974), IV:425–429.

7 Walzer, Michael, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 238.

8 Conceiving the family in contractual terms might seem to meet an insurmountable obstacle in how children have no choice about into which family they are born or adopted. Yet, liberal theorists since Locke have set aside this apparent difficulty by arguing that children do not yet have an independent capacity of choice and that the purpose of upbringing is to provide them with the conditions for becoming an autonomous individual, capable of owning property and entering into contract.

9 Kant, Immanuel, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans, by Mary Gregor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), sections 22–23, AK 276–277.

10 Walzer follows in Kant’s footsteps by incoherently claiming that the family is just like the market, except that in domestic affairs the commodities own themselves,

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