Equality, personal responsibility, and gender socialisation

Proceedings of the Aristotelean Society

Volumn 100, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 227-246

  Mason, Andrew ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0007259553     PISSN: 00667374     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.0066-7372.2003.00014.x     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (36)

1. See E. Anderson, 'What Is the Point of Equality?', Ethics, Vol. 109, 1999, 287-337.
2. See J. Wolff, 'Fairness, Respect, and the Egalitarian Ethos', Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 27, 1998, especially pp. 113-5.
3. For example, Matthew Clayton and Andrew Williams suggest that the equal access view might be supplemented by a principle of sufficiency which holds that justice requires each individual to be guaranteed some decent social minimum. See M. Clayton and A. Williams, 'Egalitarian Justice and Interpersonal Comparison', European Journal of Political Research, Vol. 35, 1999, p. 447. Hillel Steiner points out that a political commitment to meeting people's needs regardless of how they come about creates a pervasive moral hazard by removing each person's incentive to refrain from engaging in activities which are likely to make him or her needy.
4. See H. Steiner, 'The Ethics of Redistribution' in J. Lovenduski and J. Stanyer (eds. ) Contemporary Political Studies 1995, Vol. 1 (Political Studies Association of the UK, 1995), esp. 413-4.
5. For important defences of the equal access view, see: G. A. Cohen, 'On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice', Ethics, Vol. 99, 1989
6. R. Arneson, 'Equality and Equal Opportunity for Welfare', Philosophical Studies, Vol. 56, 1989, 77-93
7. J. Roemer, Egalitarian Perspectives: Essays in Philosophical Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Ch. 8
8. J. Roemer, Theories of Distributive Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), Ch. 8
9. J. Roemer, Equality of Opportunity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998)
10. H. Steiner, 'Choice and Circumstance' in A. Mason (ed. ) Ideals of Equality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 95-111.
11. Steiner, 'Choice and Circumstance', p. 97.
12. For a sophisticated version of the argument that parents should be required to pay the costs of their decision to have children, see P. Casal and A. Williams, 'Rights, Equality and Procreation', Analyse und Kritik, Vol. 17, 1995, 103-114.
13. See also E. Rakowski, Equal Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 150-5
14. H. Steiner, An Essay on Rights (Oxford; Blackwell, 1994), pp. 277-9.
15. Following Eric Rakowski, she refers to this view as 'equality of fortune'.
16. See Anderson, 'What Is the Point of Equality?', pp. 297, 300, 311, 313, 324-5.
17. Of course the career-sacrificing mother is an instance of the more general phenomenon of the career-sacrificing carer, who sacrifices her career to look after dependants.
18. See Roemer, Egalitarian Perspectives, Ch. 8
19. Roemer, Theories of Distributive Justice, Ch. 8.
20. That seems to me to be an implication of Roemer's discussion in Egalitarian Perspectives, p. 193 (including the footnote).
21. See Roemer, Equality of Opportunity, pp. 16-8.
22. See also T. Scanlon, 'The Significance of Choice' in S. Darwall (ed. ) Equal Freedom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), esp. pp. 61-4
23. T. Scanlon, 'A Good Start' in 'Replies to Roemer', Boston Review, Vol. 20, April/May 1995, p. 8.
24. J. Roemer, 'Equality and Responsibility', Boston Review, Vol. 20, April/May 1995, p. 6.
25. See S. Scheffler, 'Another Unfunded Mandate' in 'Replies to Roemer', Boston Review, Vol. 20, April/May 1995, p. 10.
26. Roemer, 'Equality and Responsibility', p. 4.
27. Susan Hurley suggests that Roemer may be committed to what she calls the regression principle, 'that in order to be responsible for something, a person must be responsible for its causes (and so in turn responsible for the causes of those causes, and so on)' (S. Hurley, 'Troubles with Responsibility', Boston Review, Vol. 20, April/ May 1995, p. 13).
28. As Hurley maintains, this principle would seem to make responsibility impossible, for no one could satisfy it (see also S. Hurley, 'Justice Without Constitutive Luck'
29. A. Phillips Griffiths (ed. ) Ethics, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 35 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). But I don't see why Roemer can't reject the regression principle. He can allow that people may be responsible in virtue of exercising their capacity for effort making, even though that capacity is a product of causes external to them, whilst denying that people can be held responsible for possessing or lacking capacities, talents or skills where the possession or lack of them is due to external causes.
30. This account is extracted from R. Dworkin, 'What is Equality? Part 3: The Place of Liberty', Iowa Law Review, Vol. 73, 1987, pp. 34-6.
31. See especially G. Dworkin, The Theory and Practice of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), Ch. 1.
32. For a critique of those accounts of autonomy, such as Dworkin's, which adopt a basically Humean model of motivation but suppose that full autonomy requires identifying with the desires which motivate one's actions (or that one forms and acts upon one's second order desires), see O. O'Neill, 'Autonomy, Coherence and Independence' in D. Milligan and W. W. Miller (eds. ) Liberalism, Citizenship and Autonomy (Aldershot: Avebury, 1992).
33. See N. Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978).
34. The explanations for why career sacrificing women make the trade-offs they do may of course be highly complex, going beyond the impact of social norms and cultural images. For example, there are sophisticated psychoanalytic models of why women come to want to mother such as that developed by Nancy Chodorow which could play a role in these explanations. See Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering.
35. Jonathan Wolff offers some suggestions for how we might analyse the notion of an ethos: see Wolff, 'Fairness, Respect, and the Egalitarian Ethos', p. 105.
36. My claim has clear parallels with Cohen's proposal that a genuinely egalitarian society needs an egalitarian ethos: it cannot get by with egalitarian institutions which merely structure individual choices (see G. A. Cohen, 'Where the Action Is: On the Site of Distributive Justice', Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 26, 1997). That is not to say that Cohen would be sympathetic to my particular claim, however.