The Meta/Ethics of Radical Feminism, Not by Mary Daly

[alixtii]

In the comments of 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 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)

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.)

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.

Comments

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Or categorical for yourself and people with a sufficiently similar background (which I think is a perfectly legitimate position - we live in a society and much value is to be made of working with that particular society)?

This is where I put most of the work that needs to be done, I think. This is where Putnam's Australia comes into the picture. (Since I'm home, I'm able to finally pursue the reference.) He imagines this Australia is peopled by "super-Benthamites" who have worked out "an elaborate science" of morality based on utilitarian principles, so that acts such as torturing children can in certain situations be easily justified without any cognitive dissonance. He argues that in applying this science, they will have rendered their language radically different to our own:

Every super-Benthamite is familiar with the fact that sometimes the greatest satisfaction of the greatest number (measured in 'utils') requires one to tell a lie. And it is not counted as 'dishonest' in the pejorative sense to tell lies out of the motive of maximizing the general pleasure level. So after a while the use of the term 'honest' among the super-Benthamites would be extremely different from the use of the same descriptive term among us. And the same will go for 'considerate', 'good citizen', etc. The vocabulary available to the super-Benthamites for the description of people-to-people situations will be quite different from the vocabulary available to us. Not only will they lack, or have altered beyond recognition, many of our descriptive resources, but they will very likely invent new jargon of their own (for example, exact terms for describing hedonic tones) that are unavailable to us. The texture of the human world will begin to change. In the course of time the super-Benthamites and we will end up living in different human worlds.

In short, it will not be the case that the super-Benthamites and we 'agree on the facts and disagree on the values'. In the case of almost all interpersonal situations, the description we give of the facts will be different than the description they give of the facts. Even if none of the statements they make about the situation are false, their description will not be one that we will count as adequate and perspicuous; and the description we give will not be one they could count as adequate and perspicuous. In short, even if we put aside our 'disagreement about the values', we could not regard their total representation of the human world as fully rationally acceptable. [. . . T]he inability of the super-Benthamites to get the way the human world is right is a direct result of their sick conception of human flourishing.

Insofar as people speak the same language, there is a sufficiently similar background on which to make a case. People who are really theocrats in liberal democrats' clothing may well be unpersuadable; neoliberals, on the
other hand, probably have a sufficiently similar paradigm for a conversation to be possible. Indeed, that's my central argument: that liberal democracy in particular contains within itself its own contradictions which give birth to radical feminism and the quest for systemic justice.

Or do you expect them to be categorical for every human being?

I don't reject this out of hand, but there is something un-postmodern and un-radical feminist about it, I think. Still, I'm not quite as radical as I once was when I was younger, and if the entire system doesn't need to be demolished, then it seems needlessly destructive to throw out the whole thing. (I don't think we could throw it out all at once, but we could concievably replace it piece by piece like the Ship of Theseus.) My claim is only something along the lines of that everything we think is categorical for every human being, forever and ever world without end, isn't necessarily so.

And now I need to get ready for church.