Ruth E Groenhout. Social Theory and Practice. Volume 28, Issue 1, January 2002.
Liberal political theory begins with rights, autonomy, and reason. Humans have rights, and their freedom to exercise those rights is properly limited by others’ rights. This view of the basic shape of the political terrain is based on certain assumptions about humans. The most basic is the assumption that humans, whatever their other differences, share some basic qualities that make them properly bearers of rights. In one strand of the liberal tradition this quality was rationality. Sometimes autonomy is the basic quality, and in the case of thinkers who trace their theoretical heritage back to Immanuel Kant, autonomy and rationality become mutually implicative so that together they are the essential qualities for membership in the moral community and ownership of rights.
Due to the important role rationality plays in liberal thought, the question of the nature of rationality is a central one for liberal thinkers. While there have been some who have argued for a minimalist notion of rationality limited to means/ends calculations, the liberal tradition in general has relied on a much richer notion of rationality, including the capacity to reflect on the meaning of one’s life, deliberate concerning different conceptions of the good, and engage in public political deliberations over these and other matters. This richer notion of rationality, and of humans as capable of engaging in self-directed behavior based on this conception of reason, provides the basic framework within which liberal moral and political discussions are carried out.
Because liberal political thought bases rights on what would seem to be a gender-neutral concept such as rationality, it has been a traditional resource for feminist thinkers, from early thinkers such as Mary Wolstonecraft and Harriet Taylor Mill, to contemporary thinkers such as Jean Hampton and Amy Gutman. The logic of this is obvious: if the possession of rights is based on a gender-neutral quality such as rationality, and if women can be shown to possess this quality, then women are possessors of rights, and any infringements of those rights is morally unacceptable. The argument is straightforward and intuitive, and has been fairly powerful in bringing about legal and social change in the status of women.
This easy and obvious association of liberal political thought with feminist theory has been challenged from two directions. On the one hand, some feminist theorists have challenged the tight connection between liberalism and feminism, because, they have argued, the notion of rationality on which liberal rights are based is not as gender-neutral as it seems. So in her critique of objective rationality, Catharine MacKinnon argues that traditional notions of objectivity that underlie claims about rationality are inherently tied to the objectification of women. If rationality/objectivity is inherently connected to the objectification of women, then the “rationality” of women becomes problematic. On this view, women must either deny their nature as women (become honorary men) and objectify other women in order to be rational, or they must accept their status as objectified (not objectifiers) and so be incapable of rationality. In either case, rationality cannot be exercised by women as women. If this account of rationality is accepted, the standard liberal assumption that men and women equally share in rationality must be given up.
Feminist critiques have not posed the only challenge to the liberal assumption that there is a single human nature that can serve to ground human rights. In more recent years the rise of evolutionary ethics, or socio-biological accounts of human nature, have also contributed to a general skepticism about an account of human nature as either rational, or autonomous, or gender-neutral. Human behavior, according to some proponents of this new field of study, is largely determined by past histories of genetic selection. Genetically determined patterns of behavior that maximize the statistical chance of producing viable offspring will dominate in society. These patterns of behavior are neither rational (in the classical liberal sense) nor gender-neutral, and they are certainly not autonomous. We humans are simply carriers for genes, selfish ones at that, and all of our vaunted rationality and freedom is nothing more than one more strategy for reproduction. A recent book on the topic of rape argues that the predisposition to rape is coded into male genes because of its success as a reproductive strategy, while other recent discussions argue that humor, art, and musical ability are all, likewise, reproductive strategies.
But the aspect of evolutionary ethics that has proved most effective in distancing liberal thought from feminist thought is the assumption, deeply imbedded in evolutionary ethics, that men and women are genetically coded for different behavior due to their differing roles in the reproductive process and the different reproductive strategies these roles require. What counts as “rational” from the perspective of genes that find themselves in a male body is, we are told, profoundly different from what counts as “rational” for genes that find themselves in a female body. Strategies that lead to success in propagation for men are different from strategies that lead to success in propagation for women. These differences, further, have been selected for over millennia of evolutionary processes, and are now ineradicably a part of what it is to be a man or a woman. It follows from this that even if one wanted to continue the liberal project of grounding rights in (say) rationality, one could no longer assume that male rationality is the same as female rationality, and the easy connection between liberalism and feminism is again severed.
For both sets of critics, the challenge to liberalism, particularly feminist liberalism, relies on a denial of a unified human nature that transcends gender and sexual differences. In both these cases, the difference gender makes in rationality negates the possibility of a unified human nature. Both accounts of gender make feminist liberalism incoherent. This paper is an attempt to think through the challenge offered by both of these accounts. Should feminism separate itself, theoretically, from liberal political thought? If not, how should feminism respond to the challenges and criticisms raised by these two types of critics?
This paper has two aims. One is to reaffirm the connections between feminism and liberalism, and to argue that there are good reasons for feminist theorists to continue to see themselves as situated in the liberal tradition. This is true in two senses, both that feminism is properly construed as a liberal theory, and that feminists have shaped and continue to shape liberal thought in ways that have improved and strengthened it. In order to make this argument, however, it is important to evaluate the claim that liberal thought rests on a fundamentally mistaken notion that there can be a suitably basic human nature. The challenges raised against liberalism by the two accounts of gender I am concerned with here thus require a response, and I argue that neither critique is sufficiently strong to warrant a rejection of liberal accounts of human nature.
Liberalism and Feminism: A Natural Alliance?
It seems worthwhile to begin with a brief account of the connections between liberal ethico-political theory and feminism. The connections are historically important ones, and it is important to be clear on just what they are (and aren’t) before turning to the challenges raised by the two accounts of gender I am concerned with here.
The first thing to note is that the term “liberal political thought” can be used to cover an extremely broad range of thinkers, from Mill to Rousseau, from Wollstonecraft to Hegel. In this paper I am concerned with one specific strand of the liberal tradition that has continued to be associated with politically liberal movements in the Western world. It is exemplified today in thinkers such as Jurgen Habermas, John Rawls, Virginia Held, Seyla Benhabib, Martha Nussbaum, and Susan Moiler Okin. Clearly there is disagreement among these thinkers, and just as clearly, their disagreements occur within the context of a general agreement that human life is best organized, politically, in ways that reflect the ability of humans to reflect on their lives rationally and direct their lives with some measure of autonomy. And, as mentioned earlier, I am assuming that the notion of rationality that undergirds liberal thought is an extensive notion, including the ability to reflect on and choose among conceptions of the good life. This account of rationality is needed to make sense of the moral and political claims of liberal thought.
Liberalism grounds its basic rights in human nature, a nature characterized by rationality and autonomy. There are really two separable aspects to this claim. We might call the first the individualism thesis and the second the rights thesis. Both rely on the notion that there is something morally significant to human capacities for rational deliberation. The first notes that humans are properly thought of first as individuals, not as units in a larger whole. The respect that liberalism accords humans is accorded prior to and independently of membership in any particular community or class. It is worth noting, of course, that one need not think recognition of the individual’s status precludes a concomitant recognition of the familial, social, and cultural contexts within which individuals live and form their identities. But liberal thought, in the form I am considering here, refuses to wholly subsume individual identity into group identity, and defends the liberty of the individual to reject familial or social constraints as well as the capacity of the individual to do so. This individualism arises naturally out of the conception of rationality functioning in liberal thought. Because each individual has the capacity to exercise rational deliberation, each should be accorded respect, as an individual, as he or she decides what sort of life to live and how to pursue his or her ends.
The rights thesis entails that the respect individuals should be accorded is best articulated in terms of rights, politically protected liberties or entitlements. Classical liberal theory takes its name from the notion that each individual should have a sphere of liberties that are protected from other individuals and from state encroachment. Like individualism, the notion of rights or protected liberties is naturally grounded in respect for the individual’s rational capacities. Which rights need to be protected is, of course, a contested issue in liberal thought. Libertarians defend a rather minimalist notion of protection, limited largely to protection of negative rights such as the right to own property. Rawlsian liberals and others defend a more expansive notion of rights, including rights to education and welfare, because these provide the basic necessities for exercising one’s rational capacities. But in either case, the rights being protected are justified on the basis of the individual’s capacity to exercise rational judgment and so act freely and be held responsible for his or her choices. This notion of rights naturally leads to a third thesis of liberal thought, that of a necessary, but limited state.
Individual rights cannot be protected without some form of governmental structures that protect them against both other individuals and governmental structures themselves. The liberal political theorist is committed to the notion that one cannot dispense with the state. Liberalism operates with a view of human nature that assumes that some political structures are needed to prevent humans from mistreating each other. This is not the only role the state can play, but it is a fundamental one. Liberalism thus must reject anarchic theories and utopian Marxist theories that advocate an overthrowing or withering away of the state. Liberals instead operate with a firm conviction that some political structure is a necessity in any well-ordered society.
So the state is necessary, but the state must also be limited. Just as humans, left unrestricted by the state, choose ‘on occasion to mistreat others, so the state, left unchecked, will mistreat its citizens. The power of the state must be limited to protect a sphere of liberty for its citizens and for the non-governmental social structures that they create. In taking this stance, liberals find themselves in opposition to certain varieties of communitarism and any sort of traditional aristocracy or theocracy.
Given the general account of social and political justice offered by this strand of liberal theory, are there reasons for feminists to be committed to liberalism? Four reasons come to mind. The first combines a historically grounded pragmatism with a basic philosophical concern. The notion of individual rights has been a politically powerful tool in the fight against sexual subordination. The history of the struggle against women’s oppression has shown that women need to be able to make decisions for and about their lives as individuals. The right to make decisions that determine the course of one’s life, in fact, has been a central right in the fight for women’s liberation. There is a deep disagreement between feminism and certain versions of communitarianism, both because women know too well the dangers of being treated as a member of the class or social role of Woman and because traditional values have frequently been the source of women’s oppression. The struggle to be recognized as an individual in one’s own right, and the respect accorded that individuality in law and in society has been too hard won to be given up lightly. Further, the individual is not valued, in liberal thought, because of a specific role that she or he is required to play in society, but instead is valued as an autonomous, that is, self-determining being. Because the self-determination of the individual is a central liberal value, and because the state is justified insofar as it protects and enables self-determination, liberalism also requires that the state be accountable to and potentially modifiable by the individual. This commits the liberal theorist to the re-definition and re-evaluation of political and societal structures, and to the protection of the individual’s liberty to analyze, criticize, and work to change those structures. These are core feminist values as well; feminism’s goal is a world in which women are free to determine the course of their own lives and to play a significant role in political and social decision-making. As long as these remain central feminist values, feminists have reason to place themselves in the liberal tradition.
The second reason feminists should be reluctant to give liberalism up is that rights have been and continue to be important conceptual tropes for understanding the wrongness of gender oppression. There may be other moral frameworks for conceptualizing the moral wrong done to women when they are denied their rights, but few that explain that wrong so clearly, so straightforwardly, or so incontrovertibly. As an example, consider the arguments by Islamic feminists, or similar arguments made by Christians for Biblical Equality. In both cases, there are good reasons given for new interpretations of both religious traditions, arguments that support women’s autonomy and independence. But in both cases one faces an uphill battle to convince conservative interpreters of the tradition to change their minds. In contrast, Wollstonecraft’s arguments are relatively straightforward. No new interpretation of the notion of a right is needed to recognize that if rational agents deserve the rights intrinsic to autonomy, women must deserve those rights. The problem in Wollstonecraft’s case is to convince others to act and reason in a manner consistent with their own stated principles. In the case of the Islamic or Biblical feminist, one must change others’ reading of sacred texts, that is, others must be convinced first to change their principles and then to act consistently with those changes.
A third reason why feminism has good reason to continue to locate itself in the liberal tradition is that the basic analysis of power that is central to feminism finds its historical roots in liberal thought. Power analyses are central to feminist theory, and a basic understanding of how power affects human interactions has been a staple of feminist analyses for as long as there have been feminists. In some contemporary circles, feminist attention to power is presented as deriving from the thought of Foucault, from whom feminists have certainly learned. But feminists were offering analyses of power differentials in society well before Foucault appeared on the scene, and some of the more perspicuous analyses were offered by Harriet Taylor Mill and John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth century. It is no accident that one finds a careful analysis of how power affects relationships between men and women in these thinkers; their liberal commitments provided a natural location from which to analyze the ways in which power affects individual relationships.
Finally, liberal political thought is based on a respect for the rational capacity of the individual. On this view, humans are more than stimulus response machines. They are capable of making decisions that are the result of critical reflection, and critical self-reflection, and are not purely determined in their actions by the biological and social forces that act on them. Both biological and social determinism truncate moral analysis in ways that make the wrongs done to women by sexism too limited. Both types of determinism rule out concern for wrongs that are not analyzable in terms of either biological harm or social value.
The liberal picture of human nature, as more than either biologically or socially determined, is a crucial aspect of the feminist analysis of the wrongness of sexist oppression. Sexual oppression, and social systems that perpetuate sexual oppression, are morally evil because they limit or deny women’s capacity to reflect on and determine their own lives. Sexism also causes immeasurable harm to people, and its consequences are a part of the evil it causes, but it would be wrong even if it were practiced in ways that did not result in either impoverishment or sexualized violence against women. It is wrong, ultimately, because it treats some humans as less than human, and limits their freedom to take responsibility for their own lives.
In making these arguments for a feminist liberalism I am not unaware of the many important criticisms feminists have leveled against liberalism. An unthinking account of individualism can become isolating and destructive, and an unreflective application of the notion of rights can be dehumanizing and disempowering. But these criticisms, I would argue, are better seen as reasons to be cautious and reflective in our advocacy and development of liberal theory, than as reasons to give up on liberal theory all together. They suggest that what we need is, in Virginia Held’s words, a limited liberalism, one that is always open to the need for modifications and changes to better meet its own aspirations. But such a self-limiting, self-correcting liberalism is nonetheless a liberalism, and perhaps a liberalism that is more true to liberal thought than a rigid, autocratic liberalism that resists change.
Further, most criticisms of this type are most forceful when they point to the inadequacy of a liberal conception of the self as an account of a full human life. But if what liberal theorists advocate is instead understood as the bare minimum necessary for a decent human life, and if liberal theory also offers the individual an opportunity to decide for herself the further components of a full human life, these criticisms lose some of their force.
As I mentioned earlier, however, the basic assumption on which a feminist liberalism is based is the notion of a common human nature. Critics who reject such a conception of human nature offer a critique that is, if correct, devastating to feminist liberalism. I would like to begin by presenting the critique, then argue that, carefully examined, it is not correct, and does not provide grounds for a rejection of feminist liberalism.
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. (Some postmodern critics have rejected any essentialism with respect to human nature. In this paper I am concerned to examine only the critics whose rejection of a unified human nature is based in sexual differences.) On some versions of this challenge, liberal thought accurately depicts men’s nature, but fails to be either descriptively or prescriptively accurate for women’s nature. On other versions of this challenge, liberal theory is inaccurate for both men and women, and serves instead as a smokescreen to mystify, justify, and protect men’s exploitation of women. In both cases a sharp dichotomy is assumed to exist between men and women, such that no single account of human nature can describe both.
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, 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. While MacKinnon does offer the very tenuous hope that perhaps sometime in the future there will be no men and women (she does not mean no males or females), this hope remains utopian and undescribed. Since there are currently no alternatives to being men and women, MacKinnon’s view does, effectively, offer us an essentialist picture of women’s and men’s realities.
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. Females, on this view, are primarily oriented toward life-giving, cooperative, nurturing activities, while males are primarily oriented toward death-dealing, aggressive, controlling activities. Sometimes these different orientations are simply assumed to be the case without explanation, sometimes they are explained as a result of a deep Jungian imaginary, or as a result of women’s ability to give birth and men’s envy of that ability. In any case, women and men are understood as fundamentally different in their perspectives on life, their value system, and their very conceptions of rationality. For the purposes of this paper, however, I would like to focus on MacKinnon’s account, because she is concerned directly with the issue of women’s participation in a liberal society, and so she addresses precisely the issues with which I am concerned.
If men and women are fundamentally, essentially, different in the ways MacKinnon argues, then the liberal project of identifying basic human rights is misguided. If gender essentialism is correct, then there is no basic human nature, shared rationality, or fundamental similarity among people. There are two different sorts of beings that are lumped together under the rubric “human,” but these two sorts of beings think differently, see the world differently, and have completely opposed value systems.
Liberal rights, from this perspective, are rights that are valued by men, generated by masculine reason, and appropriate (if at all) only for relationships among men. MacKinnon writes:
The rule of law and the rule of men are one thing, indivisible, at once official and unofficial …. State power, embodied in law, exists throughout society as male power at the same time as the power of men over women throughout society is organized as the power of the state.
This might seem an extreme claim. But when one looks at the history of women’s struggle for legal rights it gains some plausibility. As a matter of historical fact, basic rights have been considered the prerogative of men, not women. Legal understandings of rights have, for centuries, been different for men and women.
But MacKinnon’s critique does not end with the historical record. In addition to noting that rights have, as a matter of historical fact, been the prerogative of men, she also charges that the very notion of rights is an intrinsically masculine construction. Freedom of speech, for example, has functioned, MacKinnon argues, to protect male “speech” in the form of the violent pornographic portrayal of women. Such speech, as she sees it, makes true freedom of speech for women inaccessible, since anything a woman says in the public sphere is undercut by the definition of women as sexual objects in pornographic portrayals. So the legal notion of freedom of speech functions, she claims, to protect male speech and prohibit female speech. In similar manner, abortion rights, framed as privacy rights, function to protect male sexual access to women. Laws against sexual harassment, likewise, have not served to protect working women adequately because of their reliance on the “reasonable man” standard for judging harassment. And the most egregious case, as she sees it, is the construction of rape law, where the state of mind of the rapist becomes determinative of whether or not a given case of forced sex was rape. In all of these domains, the male perspective is the perspective from which reality is defined, so that, for example, rape does not even count as rape unless a penis is involved, regardless of how little difference that makes to a woman raped with a coat hanger.
This perspectival bias indicates, according to MacKinnon, that these rights really are “basic” only from a male perspective. From the perspective of lived female experience, she argues, rights are the legal structures that both maintain and hide from view male dominance. This offers a serious challenge to any attempt to maintain a feminist liberalism. If liberalism, viewed accurately, is simply male dominance writ large, feminist liberalism is an oxymoron, which makes those who defend it perhaps just morons.
Gender and Genes: The Challenge from Sociobiology
A similarly serious challenge to feminist liberalism comes from a very different group of theorists. Like MacKinnon, sociobiologists assert that men and women are essentially different. The differences they find have certain parallels to those feminists have mentioned. The conclusions they draw from their essentialist claims are varied, but the basic challenge to liberal feminism is an important one.
First, the picture of gender differences. Sociobiologists argue that the two sexes are shaped by a long history of evolutionary change. That evolutionary change is driven by success in breeding—those traits that lead to reproductive success are genetically passed on to future generations. Men and women play different roles in the reproductive process. Men’s reproductive role is one that can be accomplished relatively quickly and does not involve a great deal of investment. Women’s reproductive role, on the other hand, involves an extensive investment in terms of time and energy, first in the nine months of pregnancy, and subsequently in the two to five years of breast-feeding and care-giving.
Given these differing reproductive roles, different reproductive strategies are likely to be more effective for the two sexes. For women, it is argued, it makes more (genetic) sense to be highly selective in terms of mates, to limit sexual access to men who are likely to stick around and help with the labor intensive aspects of child-raising. For men, on the other hand, it makes more sense (in reproductive terms) to get as many women pregnant as possible while investing as little time in each pregnancy as possible. The assumption in sociobiology is that the differential success of these two different strategies has led to genetically based differences in men and women’s behavior. Cultural and social differences, then, between men and women are not so much reflections of differing social roles and expectations as they are reflections of basic genetic differences between men and women.
Men, on this view, are genetically programmed for promiscuity and minimal investment in their children. Some have even argued that men are predisposed to rape as a part of their impulse to procreate. Women are programmed for monogamy and heavy investment in their children. These traits are a part, according to this view, of our genetic heritage, and behavioral standards that do not reflect these differences between the sexes will face an uphill battle. But the differences do not stop with mere procreative differences. Sociobiologists have argued that male and female tendencies to exhibit traits such as aggression and empathy are likewise tied to reproductive success, and so men are, by nature, more prone to aggression in all areas of life while women are more prone to docility and empathetic nurturing.
As I mentioned above, the picture sociobiologists have drawn is not wildly different from the view of masculine and feminine nature offered by feminists such as MacKinnon. On both views, men are inherently more aggressive, sexually promiscuous, prone to violence, and oriented toward dominating women sexually. Women are inherently more nurturing, more submissive, (particularly to men), sexually less promiscuous, and less driven by sexual urges, while more concerned about care for children and infants. While there is disagreement as to the causes of these differences, there is a remarkable level of agreement on the differences themselves.
Where differences become more significant is in the interpretation of these differences for social policy. In contrast to MacKinnon, whose writing is motivated by political concerns, sociobiologists see their work as having bearing on, but not directly dictating, social policy. They do, generally, imply that the differences between men and women will have social effects. Men’s natural aggression and sexual dominance will naturally make men the dominant sex in social settings. Women’s natural deference and nurturance will generally prevent them from acquiring social power, but will serve the continuance of the human race quite efficiently. Further, women will, as a matter of genetic course, be more inclined to seek successful mates than to seek success for themselves. Rather than offering social criticism, then, there is a tendency in this literature to offer explanations for why the status quo is what it is. Underlying this explanatory technique, however, there is sometimes the assumption that since the way things are is dictated by the differing natures of men and women, social policy that attempts to change or modify the existing situation is fighting an uphill battle. This is problematic be cause of the implicit approval it offers to sexist hierarchies. And even in cases where thinkers are careful to reject this simplistic slide from is to ought, reports of their research in the popular press rarely reflect that cautiousness.
But there is a more disturbing implication of certain versions of the sociobiological view, one that follows from a reductionist account of rationality that some sociobiologists offer. Sociobiologists fall into two camps on this question, determined by whether they think evolutionary theory is an important part of the truth about human nature, or whether they think it is the whole truth about human nature. Several influential sociobiologists have distanced themselves from a reductionist account of human nature, arguing that evolutionary studies give us important insights into human nature and experience, but they are not the only field of study that can offer such insights. But the more problematic version of sociobiology denies that there are any truths about humans not captured by evolutionary science. Humans, on this view, are nothing more than the sum of their evolutionary heritage, and so all accounts of human nature, human rationality, and human morality must be based in evolutionary studies.
This latter version of sociobiology presumes that human evolutionary development determines every feature of human life. An adequate account of rationality, then, must be grounded in (and completely determined by) an evolutionary account of human nature. What this means in the case of most theorists who hold this view is that rationality comes to be defined in terms of evolutionary fitness. What is (or should) count as rational is a matter of biological fitness, in terms of both individual survival (to a lesser degree) and in terms of propagation of one’s genes (to a greater degree). Rationality, then, is fundamentally a matter of successful survival techniques. This reduces rationality to the ability to choose actions that have the long-term effect of maximizing genetic survival. Such a reductionist account of rationality seems problematic when stated so baldly, but it plays a key role in the arguments of a number of sociobiologists. For example, when we are told that individuals who choose a celibate life for religious reasons are “acting irrationally,” the only account of rationality that would support the charge of irrationality seems to be something like what I have just sketched. Otherwise the charge would be that such individuals are acting against their own genetic interests (though perhaps still rationally, given other commitments they may have). The stronger charge of irrationality requires the definition of rationality in terms of genetic success.
If one accepts this view of rationality, then one is forced to reject the notion that men and women share a common rational nature. The strategies that lead to successful biological propagation for men and women are essentially different, hence what it is to be rational for each must be different. There may be a fundamental rational principle (“Propagate effectively!”) but at the level of evaluation of actions or of social policy there is no shared conception of rationality. What is rational for men is irrational for women, and vice versa.
On this view, liberal rights are merely a thin veneer of illusion over the biological reality of genetics. We may like to think that all humans have certain basic rights, but the reality is that those with the good fortune to be born with good genes into a hospitable environment will do well, those born into an environment that is a poor genetic fit will do badly, and the language of rights is unlikely to change that. This being said, it is not necessarily a bad thing to have social structures that rely on such things as rights language or laws that protect human rights. Such structures may have reproductive efficacy in the long run. (Consider the chances of passing on one’s genetic material in the conditions that hold in Eritrea or the Sudan, for example, as opposed to Japan or Canada.) But we should not confuse reproductive efficacy with truth. From the (hypothetical) fact that the social structures that go along with a liberal account of rights are, under current conditions, conducive to reproductive efficacy we cannot conclude that rights “really exist” in any sense, nor can we argue that rights are an essential part of morality.
The best that such a sociobiological account of human nature can offer is an acknowledgment that perhaps rights are serviceable under current conditions. But if future conditions made it reproductively efficacious to deny women basic human rights, then that would become the rational course of action to take at that time. And, further, there is a deep and abiding conviction that hierarchies, particularly hierarchies of gender, are ineluctably written into the human genetic code. So E.O. Wilson famously comments that “… a schedule of sex- and age-dependent ethics can impart higher genetic fitness than a single moral code which is applied uniformly to all sex-age groups.” And, more recently, Matt Ridley describes the sexual division of labor as “an economic institution that is a vital part of all human societies.” Rights and a concern for justice for individuals are all very nice in philosophical treatises, the implication is, but in the real world it is reproductive success that counts.
Problems with Gender Essentialisms
If either feminist gender essentialism or sociobiological gender essentialism is correct, then feminist liberalism is incoherent. Feminist liberalism assumes that one can speak of a common human nature, but both sorts of gender essentialists hold that men and women have different natures. Further, both argue, these differences are not minor cosmetic differences. Women’s and men’s natures differ with respect to basic characteristics such as rationality. The effectiveness of these critiques, then, depends on the accuracy with which their account of gender essentialism describes human life and experience.
There are problems with both forms of gender essentialism, however, that defuse part of their challenge to liberal thought. The first problem is a matter of over-emphasis on difference. The second problem is an overstatement of determinism, in the one case cultural, in the second case genetic. I would like to deal with each of these in turn.
First, the over-emphasis on difference. Both gender-essentialist feminists and sociobiologists focus so heavily on gender difference that they lose sight of the huge areas of similarity between men and women. Two areas where this is particularly obvious are those of aggression and sexual promiscuity. According to both sorts of gender essentialists, men are more aggressive than women. In both cases theorists move from the statement that men are more aggressive than women to the assumption that aggression is a masculine trait. But the second claim is not entailed by the first. Both men and women are aggressive, though their aggression may show itself in different ways and be elicited by different occasions. The more careful theorists acknowledge this. Frans de Waal, for example, emphasizes the fact that aggression is a necessary component of human life, for both males and females. But such careful distinctions are often overlooked, and it is common to find men described, simply, as aggressive.
Moreover, sweeping generalizations about the aggressiveness of men frequently ignore the complexity of the notion of aggression itself. It often is used as a synonym for violence, and there are innumerable statistics that show that men engage in more violence against both men and women than do women. But aggression involves more than just “committing murders and making weapons”—the research definition used in one study. Aggression is a complex set of behavioral patterns, ranging from engaging in rough play, to taking food away from another, to rape, to killing another. In humans, the range of aggression becomes even larger due to our ability to engage in symbolic behavior. Human aggression can be evinced by giving a quiet verbal order as easily as by physically attacking another. Given this complexity, research on aggression becomes necessarily reliant on interpretation—one needs to interpret behavior as aggressive or as non-aggressive. Primate studies, in fact, have been shown to be extremely dependent on observer interpretation, and in ways that are problematic from the standpoint of research on gender differences. If those studying aggression begin with the assumption that aggression is a masculine trait, they will interpret behavior by males as aggressive. Research bias is a well documented problem, and a glance at contemporary discussions of primate research indicates that it is not easily overcome.
But, setting aside for the moment the question of research bias and the difficulty of defining aggression, let us imagine that males can be demonstrated, as a class, to have a tendency to exhibit aggression at a higher level than women. What follows from that with respect to men’s and women’s natures? It certainly does not follow that women are not aggressive. The fact that men are taller than women does not entail the claim that women don’t have height, and the same absurdity occurs when a higher level of aggression in males is equated with a female lack of aggression. Women are aggressive; aggression is a necessary attribute for survival in human life. So from the fact that, as a class, men are more aggressive than women, one surely cannot conclude that women are not aggressive. Nor can one conclude that all men are more aggressive than all women—the statistics would clearly not bear that claim out either. Given standard bell-curve distributions that overlap to some extent but are shifted to reflect the different average tendencies, one finds that many women are more aggressive than some men, and some women are more aggressive than nearly all men.
It seems to be a natural feature of our thinking that when we divide people into two distinct groups and then measure differences between those groups, we naturally slide into dichotomous thinking. But our reasoning is flawed when we do so. The difference between the claim that men are more aggressive than women and the claim that men are aggressive and women passive is an important one, and one that makes an enormous difference for theorizing about human social and political life. If both men and women share aggressive (and passive) tendencies, even if to somewhat different degrees, then it is at least not logically impossible to speak of shared human qualities. Unfortunately it is common to find writers in this field giving lip service to the overlap and individual variations among men and women on one page, only to completely ignore them when drawing substantive conclusions. So we find one writer who begins his discussion with the claim that “the only reality is the tremendous variety of individual behavior.” On the next page, however, he goes on to state that “[p]sychologically, the male spends his life in an arena…. Man thus appears as the adept of a sort of aggressive exhibitionism that is manifestly inherited from the parade behaviors of his mammalian ancestors.” Lip service is paid to individual differences, but the conclusions drawn ignore those differences and slip into simplistic dichotomies.
The second criticism of gender-essentialist thought involves a rejection of the deterministic assumptions such essentialism rests on. One can recognize that sex differences matter in life without moving to the further assumption that they entirely determine every aspect of one’s life. It is clearly true that our choices and decisions occur in contexts that are not completely under our control. We are constrained by the social setting within which we are born and socialized, and we are constrained by our physical nature. (It could not really be otherwise, of course. Both a physical body and a social context are necessary for the possibility of freely chosen action.) But nothing warrants the move from constraint to determinism.
On MacKinnon’s account, one cannot be a man without being an objectifier, and one cannot be a woman without being objectified. Further, one cannot choose to opt out of being a man or a woman. Similarly, some sociobiological accounts of human nature assume that being male or female is absolutely determinative of personality. Primate studies gain a large portion of their interest from the implicit claim that as male chimpanzees are, so must male humans be. And claims to this effect abound in such studies. As Natalie Angler has pointed out, however, what traits are taken as determinative vary wildly depending on which primates researchers choose to study (chimpanzees, for example, are much more aggressive and less sexually active as a species than bonobos) and on what behavior is assumed to be natural. Further, researchers themselves have demonstrated the fact that primate behavior can be changed by learning and socialization. If this is true of primates, it is most certainly true of humans. Whatever our tendencies may be, genetically, we can certainly modify and direct those tendencies through education, socialization, and individual choice. In some cases, in fact, biologically based behavior is more amenable to change than is culturally constructed behavior. Medication can diminish the symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder, but no medication is likely to change a Westerner’s deeply ingrained food taboos against, say, eating grubs. Asserting the “naturalness” of certain sorts of behavior, however implies the opposite. It implies that biological features of our characters and personalities are fixed and determined in ways that are clearly false when we consider the issue carefully.
MacKinnon’s own commitment to making legal changes in the way U.S. law deals with pornography suggests, in fact, that she herself has no trouble seeing herself as an agent rather than a sexualized object. Her legal successes suggest that the judicial system is capable of seeing women as more than sexualized objects. Likewise, the dedication to their research that scientists may display suggests that any account of human rationality as determined by the drive to procreate is seriously defective. The human drive to understand and engage in rational activity is very poorly explained as a reproductive mechanism. In both feminist and sociobiological essentialism an over-emphasis on dichotomy and an unwarranted determinism drive the gender essentialism, and in both cases the theorists’ own choices and lives suggest that both the assumption of determinism and the excessively dichotomous picture are false.
Liberalism and Critics
While I think that the essentialist case is overstated, I also think that there are valuable lessons to be learned from the critics of liberalism. MacKinnon’s arguments, for example, suggest areas in which contemporary liberal thought needs to engage in some self-reflection. The first area concerns autonomy. MacKinnon rightly pushes us to recognize that autonomy is not something one either has or does not have. Autonomy occurs along a continuum, and one of the things that makes one more or less autonomous is one’s enculturation and socialization into a way of life that may enhance or diminish one’s capacity to make and act on choices. MacKinnon is right to point out that women’s life choices are diminished when the culture they grow up in defines them as appropriate objects for sexualized violence. She is less concerned with the fact that men’s lives, likewise, are diminished when they receive a cultural image of manliness as requiring mindless aggression and the sexual subordination of women. These definitions create a culture that is destructive of human lives and human autonomy. One doesn’t need to think that this culture is equally destructive of men’s and women’s lives, of course, to say that it is damaging to both.
So MacKinnon challenges liberal thinkers to broaden their perspective from a narrow focus on legal protection of autonomy to a cultural critique of the practices we engage in that perpetuate destructive patterns of thinking and perceiving the world. Legal redress may not always be the most appropriate response to this recognition—debate over MacKinnon’s legal challenges to pornography is ongoing both inside and outside feminist circles—but recognition of the problem allows for a variety of responses to be proposed and attempted.
Likewise, criticisms from sociobiology are healthy for liberal political thought as well. Humans are not disembodied rational intellects. We are embodied, physical beings, whose lives and choices occur always in the context of our physical needs, our evolutionary heritage, and our hormonal present. This does not, in and of itself, negate our freedom and responsibility, but it does situate it in important ways. Careful thinkers have always realized that human freedom and responsibility do not merely occur in an embodied context: they require an embodied context for their exercise. Without a physical existence, it is hard to know what respect for another’s needs or rights would even be.
Sociobiologists also help us to avoid the tendency to utopian thinking that can be tempting for moral and political theorists. Humans will always need some form of social safeguards, to prevent them from exploiting others and from being exploited in turn. While the grounds of the exploitation may change (we have seen racial, sexual, religious, class-based, and ethnic exploitation in recent history, but I see no reason to think that exhausts the fount of human ingenuity), the temptation to engage in it will doubtless be with us into the foreseeable future. Our moral and political thinking, then, cannot operate on the assumption that if we could just find the magic principle (proper socialization, genetic manipulation, or the right religion) we could produce a completely fair and exploitation-free world. As long as we are dealing with humans, our theories must take both good and evil into account.
And a more accurate understanding of human lives and human psychology can enhance our ability to work together constructively to protect the moral values and the individual rights that we value. Framing sociobiology as antithetical to moral reasoning falsifies the nature of both types of intellectual exploration. As Sarah Hrdy comments:
[I]t will be well to keep in mind a central paradox of the human condition—that our species possesses the capacity to carry sexual inequality to its greatest known extremes, but we also possess the potential to realize an unusual social equality between the sexes should we choose to exercise that potential. However, if social inequality based on sex is a serious problem, and if we really want to do something, constructive about it, we are going to need a comprehensive understanding of its cause.
Knowing that humans may have natural predispositions to act in certain ways is valuable information for moral reasoning. But it can never substitute for moral reasoning, since from the fact that humans naturally do something we cannot conclude that they ought to do that.
Further, both the feminist and the sociobiological critiques keep liberalism more honest about what it can and cannot do. Liberalism may provide a political framework within which individuals are freed to search for their own conception of the good, but it cannot itself be wholly determinative of that good. When liberalism is framed as the only arbiter of meaningful lives, it makes claims it cannot fulfill. But an emphasis on rights as the necessary prerequisite to lives that can achieve fullness and the achievement of one’s chosen goals is an emphasis worth maintaining. While both views encourage liberalism to remain humble about its limitations, however, a similar caution is needed in each of their respective cases as well. Sociobiology cannot tell us what the good human life must be, and MacKinnon is quite frank about her own inability to offer a determinate picture of a non-sexually objectified woman. Ultimately, each individual needs to be the one who decides what sort of life she will pursue, but in stating this I find myself back on familiar, liberal, terrain.
Conclusion
I have argued that there are two fundamental problems with gender essentialism. The first is a problem of over-emphasis on difference that destroys any ability to articulate important moral concerns about shared responsibility and shared moral concerns. That the differences so emphasized are insufficiently distinctive to support the excessive claims made by proponents of gender difference is also a telling reason against accepting these accounts in lieu of a liberal conception of human nature. The second problem is the assumption of cultural or genetic determinism. Both types of determinism are morally pernicious, and both are arguably false, as well. Given these problems, the essentialist critiques of feminist liberalism fail, though both point to important issues for liberal feminists to consider.
It is, I think, one of the important strengths of liberalism, and a reason for feminists to remain liberals, that the criticisms levied against it can and should be heard and responded to. Liberalism incorporates difference and respect for alternative viewpoints into its very account of an acceptable public space. In so doing it makes more work for itself, since it is now charged with the task of responding to views that other political theories can simply dismiss out of hand. But in responding to critics, and in taking their criticisms seriously, liberalism gains a measure of self-reflexivity and the ability to change and improve.
There is, however, a more important issue for theorists to deal with, and that is the question of what vision of human interactions we begin theorizing from. And at this level, I think there are strong reasons for feminists to resist the pressure to accept either a sociobiological or a MacKinnon-esque view of human nature. On both views, humans are fundamentally acted upon by outside forces. On a sociobiological view, humans are, at their most basic, simply “vehicles for the transmission of genes.” All human interactions ultimately must be understood in terms of seeing others as either competitors for reproductive efficacy or potential cooperators in reproduction. Since reproduction is the only deity in the evolutionary pantheon of gods, no other value can serve as an ultimate explanandum or as an “evolutionary stable stratagem”—the catch-phrase used to pick out practices that can endure in human society.
On MacKinnon’s view, sex is constructed of power relationships, and our definitions of ourselves as sexed beings are a basic aspect of our experience of the world and our sense of self. But the picture of radical oppression and subordination on the part of women, and radical domination and objectification that makes men what they are does not ring true. Men like John Stuart Mill, living in a day and age when male entitlement was legally enforced to a degree unimaginable today, have been capable of “seeing otherwise” and arguing that the subjection of women is deeply evil. It is unclear how we could account for the existence of such a phenomenon; given MacKinnon’s account of human identity, Mill should not have been able to see women as human. And a similar point can be made about women’s own experiences of moral agency and selfhood. MacKinnon recognizes the theoretical difficulties her position produces for understanding women’s consciousness-raising in the context of a sexually objectifying culture, but her account seems weak in its ability to capture the “aha!” moment of consciousness-raising. Part of the power of women speaking together is that experience of suddenly seeing things differently and knowing that they can be other than what they are. But on MacKinnon’s account of women’s identity formation, there is no self, separate from the objectified one, to whom such objectification can suddenly become apparent. Women are defined in terms of their sexual objectification, and there is nothing apart from that identity. So her analysis is able to go no further than to argue that women whose consciousness has changed are still damaged, but now they can see the damage as damage.
But liberalism holds out another vision, one of humans as more than the sum of their parts, so to speak. Yes, our evolutionary heritage is relevant in understanding human nature, and yes, MacKinnon is correct to point out the damage sexual objectification can cause and to notice and fight against the entrenchment of male privilege in legal and social structures. But that does not change the fact that we can and do envision an alternative reality in which the law more closely approaches justice. Nor does it change the fact that many women and men have been capable of understanding themselves and others as more than the sum of their sexual natures.
An example here is helpful. In Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, MacKinnon analyzes the political battle for abortion rights. She argues that the legal use of the privacy doctrine to ground a right to abortion shows that abortion rights are more a matter of removing an impediment to men’s sexual access to women than a matter of the protection of women’s right to bodily integrity and autonomy. She then goes on to draw from this the conclusion that framing abortion as a privacy matter is in keeping with the general liberal approach to privacy. Her comments here are worth quoting:
The liberal ideal of the private holds that, so long as the public does not interfere, autonomous individuals interact freely and equally. Privacy is the ultimate value of the negative state … To complain in public of inequality within the private contradicts the liberal definition of the private. In the liberal view, no act of the state contributes to shaping its internal alignments or distributing its internal forces, so no act of the state should participate in changing it.
There is an important grain of truth to MacKinnon’s claim here, but it is a one-sided truth.
It is true that liberalism does have an ideal of the private, a realm where state intrusion into the lives of individuals is limited. But it is not true that liberals have assumed that such an ideal is already a reality, nor that liberals have thought that inequality in the private is not a matter for state intervention. John Stuart Mill’s rejection of the marriage exemption from charges of rape in The Subjection of Women stands as an obvious counterexample to the second claim. MacKinnon is correct in noting that the notion of the private has frequently functioned in ways that allowed women to suffer violations and attacks with no recourse. But she is wrong to attribute this to liberal theory itself. And while the abuses that happen in private do need to be addressed, addressing them by abolishing the private may not be in women’s best interests, nor does it seem to be what MacKinnon is advocating.
An additional point needs to be made about MacKinnon’s account of the fight for abortion rights. Her analysis is not one that does justice to the intentions or the bravery of the women who fought the legal battles to secure that right. She probably is correct in noting that for some men the fight was seen as important in order to remove one impediment to sexual access to women. But it is not correct to say that this was the motive that drove all the men involved in the fight. And it is certainly not true that this description captures the experiences of those women who fought to make abortion legal. While I don’t think MacKinnon would endorse this reading, her description suggests that these women were dupes of a male power establishment. Tricked into thinking they were fighting for women’s rights, they were instead simply pawns maneuvered by sexist men. We need, instead, an account of women’s political action that can see such women as morally responsible, politically powerful agents.
The belief that women, as women, can fight and win legal battles is one worth holding on to. It seems to be one that MacKinnon herself holds. But it is in rather serious tension with the notion that women are defined, as women, in terms of their sexual violability. The two ideas do not sit well together. A liberal notion that women, oppressed though they may be, are still more than the sum of that oppression is, I think, exactly what is needed to make sense of the many ways in which women have exercised their agency to bring about political change. And it is a belief that is situated squarely in liberal theory.
Liberalism does have its weaknesses. Among them are the tendencies to erase differences among people and to overlook how culture and physical circumstances affect the very meaning of terms such as rights and autonomy. But having recognized these tendencies, is liberalism to be rejected? Not until a better alternative comes along, and that is what often seems missing from the critics of liberalism. MacKinnon may charge that the legal system is a masculine protection racket, but her work in legal theory also suggests a deep and abiding respect for basic liberal assumptions, such as the need to treat all individuals, male or female, weak or powerful, with respect. If we are not willing to give up the protection of basic rights, and if we think that individual autonomy is worth defending, then what is called for is a new and improved liberalism, not the rejection of liberal theory.