ISE Analyzing Moral Issues by Judith Boss

Author:Judith Boss [Boss, Judith]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781260566178
Google: kYgkxAEACAAJ
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Published: 2019-03-29T20:41:07+00:00

2. AGAINST LIBERALISM: THE CHALLENGE FROM FEMINISM

Potentially the most devastating feminist critique of liberal thought arises from a denial of the most basic claim in liberalism: the claim that there is some essential human nature that is the source of moral rights. One feminist challenge to this claim arises from the belief that there is no neutral human nature, but rather there are men’s natures and women’s natures, and the two are radically different….

One theoretical vantage point from which such an attack on liberalism has been made is that of Catharine MacKinnon’s account of rationality, objectivity, and legal structures. I should state at the outset that MacKinnon does not consider herself a gender essentialist, since she believes that “man” and “woman” are socially constructed categories. That said, however, she offers no alternative account of what it would be like to be male or female in any other way than as they are currently constructed in terms of men and women. Since she also believes that an oppressive gender hierarchy is a universal feature of human societies,2 what she describes seems very close to an essentialist picture of men’s and women’s natures. Men and women are radically different in nature, they are shaped that way by their culture and cannot simply choose to be otherwise, and the very nature of our perceived reality is determined by these differences….

On MacKinnon’s view, women’s and men’s natures are determined by, respectively, their objectification as objects of sexualized violence or their objectification of others as objects of sexualized violence. What it is to be a woman is to be turned into an object that is an appropriate locus for sex and for sexualized violence; to be a woman is to be sexually vulnerable. What it is to be a man is to be one who can sexually objectify another, either through words or actions, and to be capable of sexual predation. Not all men are sexual predators, of course. Some see themselves as protectors of women rather than predators on women. But both of these roles, protector and predator, assume the same things about women—that women are weak and incapable of self-protection, that women are appropriate objects of sexual violence, and that it is men who control sexual access to women, not the women themselves.

On this view, then, women’s nature is essentially one of sexual prey. Women are defined in terms of their sexual accessibility and status. Likewise the essence of being a man is being a sexual predator/objectifier. While neither of these roles is, for MacKinnon, biologically or genetically essential, both are essential to the nature of being a man or a woman—the only way to be otherwise is to cease to be a man or a woman, and become we know not what.

MacKinnon offers one version of a sort of gender essentialism, but other feminists have offered other varieties. Others do not rest, as MacKinnon’s does, on a sexualized predator/prey relationship, but instead on a sharp dichotomy between male and female natures in terms of value hierarchies.

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