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The Meta/Ethics of Radical Feminism, Not by Mary Daly
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hannahrorlove's post attacking slash goggles, peasant_ and I somehow found ourselves in a conversation about the metaethics of radical feminism. Specifically, she asked:
If you reject relativism as uncomfortable, and you reject an exploration of belief formation as uninteresting, what has led you to believe in the near-universal radical nature of the problem?It's true to say that I'm a radical feminist (insofar as I am one), as a result of certain important influences in my youth and childhood, in particular the influence of my mother, one of my high school English teachers, etc. (Mostly my mother.) This is true, but uninteresting. As a philosophically-interested human being, I don't just hold certain beliefs but also justify them to myself. These justifications are, of course, also causally determined and could be, if one were interested in doing so, explained in purely material terms. But I can't think of myself merely as a belief box (anybody have a cite for this concept?) into which random beliefs were merely shoved by nature, and I don't really think anybody could.
Mary Daly, in her book Gyn/Ecology, which is actually subtitled The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (and how disturbing is it that my copy--which is really my mother's old copy, has a huge picture of an axe on the cover?), which has been the deepest and most direct radical feminist influence on me in my adolescence and throughout my life, seems to avoid the question somewhat:
I would say that radical feminist metaethics is of a deeper intuitive type than "ethics." The latter, generally written from one of several (but basically the same) patriarchal perspectives, works out of hidden agendas concealed in the texture of language, buried in mythic reversals which control "logic" most powerfullly because unacknowledged.There is much to love in these passages (remind me to re-read the entire book over the summer). But this still leaves open the question: where do radical feminist ethics come from? (Daly's next paragraph implies the answer might be the goddess Metis.)
[. . .]
There are, of course, male-authored, male-identified works which purport to deal with "metaethics." In relation to these, gynography is meta-metaethical. For while male metaethics claims to be "the study of ethical theories, as distinguished from the study of moral and ethical conduct itself," [she cites Titus and Keaton's Ethics for Today here as the source of the quote] it remains essentially male-authored and male-identified theory about theory. Moreover, it is only theory about "ethical theories"--an enterprise which promises boundless boringness. In contrast to this, Gyn/Ecology is hardly "metaethical" in the sense of masturbatory meditations by ethicists upon their own emissions. Rather, we recognize that the essential omissions if these emissions is of our own life/freedom. In the name of our life/freedom, feminist metaethics O-mits seminal omissions. (12-13)
A certain amount of philosophical pragmatism, a la Richard Rorty, enters into the discussion for me at this point. I think I've indicated before that I'm not sure what it would mean to assert that "the nature of the problem is radical and near universal" as some type of meaningful, propositional claim. How would one go about falsifying such a claim?
What I would argue is that the claim does not and cannot have a truth value. Instead, it is useful to conceive of the problem as being radical and near universal, while making no ontological claim--because pragmatism in general eschews ontology.
The questions raised by this answer are obvious: useful to whom? and according to what standard of usefulness? I don't see anything obviously wrong in ethicizing epistemology and metaphysics (well, I could see someone arguing it was contradictory to the self-evident nature of truth, but that's rather begging the question) (and theology goes here as well; this was an important point as I working on feminist meta/theology in undergrad), but certainly we need to have some account of feminist ethics in place?
I can see three possible responses (and this part of the discussion is familiar to me, because I explained this part point-to-point to my London roommate in a hostel bar in Austria in 2004). The first is existential commitment, which is basically to refuse to answer the question. Now there are some things that existential commitment is good for, not least of all acting as a stopgap explanation as one works out a more detailed metaethic. "This is where I stand; I can do no other" is a principled position I can respect, but it ideally shouldn't take the place of critical dialectic and self-exploration.
Now obviously someone working from a position of existential commitment can make normative claims; there's nothing stopping them, after all. But they can't quite give an account of why other people should take them seriously, so they're only useful in modifying the behavior of other people who share those commitments. This strikes me as a rather weak and silly sort of radical feminism (but perhaps describes the traditional, "real" radfeminists of the 70s quite well!).
The second option would be some sort of foundationalism. But as you note, foundationalism isn't really compatible with the core premise of radical feminism, that systemic injustice runs all the way down. (Although nowadays I would probably want to hedge on it a little and say something like it might run all the way down, and if it doesn't it still runs down pretty darn deep.) To locate supposedly "feminist" ethics in reason, language, or culture would be to merely reinscribe masculinist domination.
When I was in undergrad, it seemed to me the process was simple: you let feminist ethicists do their thing, and then we feminist metaphysicians and theologians would apply the results to metaphysics, epistemology, and theology. (Aesthetics always seemed to fit very uncomfortably into this system.) The idea of deriving ethics from religion still sort of gives me hives, but it's obvious that the system as I was thinking of it just isn't tenable: it throws way too much burden on the feminist ethicists. Standpoint theory has too many implicit metaphysical and epistemological assumptions to be able to do what it does and be logically prior to those disciplines. Appointing ethics as queen of the science isn't ultimately a meaningful change, any more than demoting metaphysics and putting epistemology in its place, or doing the same with philosophy of language, had been. As long as the sciences have a queen, we have a problem.
Ultimately, then, I think the only workable option is a dialectical one. Reason (and I'll use that as a lump term for metaphysics/epistemology/theology) and ethics always have to be in dialectic to each other, with neither (or, in another sense, both) being logically prior to the other. (So, gritting my teeth, I have to accept that it is sometimes acceptable to turn to Scripture in order to learn about ethics--but this turn to Scripture will always-already be informed by a certain ethicism.) The limits of liberal democratism are built into itself and reveal themselves in history, so that there is a sort of imperative built within reason, language, and culture themselves for it to progress into radical feminism.
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But Why that order? Why not some other order? You've only pushed the explanations back a step.
"Enjoyable" is of course begging the question--saying we want to do things because they are enjoyable doesn't seem to be saying anything other than we want to do them because we want to do them. The survival of one's genes is certainly an empirical phenomenon, but you haven't provided an explanation of why anyone should care whether their genes survive or not.
I will never forget my philosophy teacher's look of outrage when I suggested that maybe the reason nobody had found any universal ethical beliefs was because there weren't any. I suspect I have treasured that response ever since and have been biasing my own thinking accordingly.
This surprises me, since usually Anglo-American philosophers are anal about considering all the options (or at least all the options their logical minds can understand), and the possibility there aren't "universal ethical beliefs" (quoting because that seems different than some other similar claims) seems intuitively quite plausible. It reminds me of my high school theology teachers who were more interested in moral education than engaging in real theological discussion (likely, I had one good teacher) or high school English teachers who are more interested in indoctrinating students with made-up grammatical "rules" (don't end a sentence with a preposition) than being linguistically knowledgeable.
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I assume you know the theory of evolution and the selfish gene. So the order is because that is how evolution works. People and things which survive do so because they put their genetic survival first, things that don't put their genetic survival first do not survive, so any gene which represents an 'instinct' to ensure its own survival by direct breeding or kin altruism is going to outcompete a gene that switches off those instincts, in just a few generations. Hence there develop inbuilt imperatives to survive, which in human terms means that we have a very strong instinct to rank things according to their nearness to us. As a theory it is elegant, simple, and can explain a huge range of behaviour.
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As another rule of the language-game, so to speak, we expect people who exist in language to be able to provide explanations for their actions which treat themselves as egos. (We ask the child why she did something wrong, and she says, "I don't know." We don't ask the dog at all, at least not expecting a response. When we get this response from an adult, we either shake our heads in disgust at the attempt to deny responsibility or else find out whether she is mentally ill.)
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I don't think she was a very good teacher or very interested in teaching us. She was basically the economics teacher who (presumably due to the combination of PPE that they have at Oxford) got saddled with the job of providing compulsory philosophy classes to the Oxbridge candidates as part of the prep for winning a place. Needless to say, most of us treated it as a break from our real work and had as little time for the classes as she evidently had for us. It has probably biased me against the concept for life.