Rawls and feminism: What should feminists make of liberal neutrality?

Journal of Moral Philosophy

Volumn 1, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 293-309

  Brake, Elizabeth ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 34248063480     PISSN: 17404681     EISSN: 17455243     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/174046810400100305     Document Type: Article

References (34)

1. Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989), eh. 5, quotation from p. 89
2. See also Veronique Munoz-Dardé, 'John Rawls, Justice in the Family, and Justice of the Family', The Philosophical Quarterly 48.192 (1998), pp. 335-52; she writes of Rawls that 'the family is both treated as a distinct and fundamental institution, and never discussed in any detail', p. 337. As these writers have pointed out, in Theory, Rawls assumed that the family as it stands is just
3. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 467-68, and sections 70 and 71
4. Susan Moller Okin, 'Political Liberalism, Justice, and Gender', Ethics 105.1. (1994), pp. 23-43 (43)
5. Rawls replies to Okin in 'The Idea of Public Reason Revisited', in J. Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 129-80
6. section 5, and in Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), IV.50
7. Andrew Smith has argued that these replies fail to address the problems raised by liberal tolerance of religious groups which oppress women; see 'Closer But Still No Cigar: On the Inadequacy of Rawls's Reply to Okin's "Political Liberalism, Justice, and Gender"', Social Theory and Practice 30.1 (2004), pp. 59-71
8. See Okin, 'Political Liberalism, Justice, and Gender', pp. 42-43. More recently, Okin has addressed the tensions between liberalism and democracy which arise in the context of conferring group rights on groups which oppress women
9. See Susan Moller Okin, with respondents, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (ed. Joshua Cohen, Matthew Howard and Martha C. Nussbaum; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999)
10. See Catharine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987)
11. See also Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988)
12. MacKinnon, Toward, pp. 195-214
13. Okin, 'Political Liberalism', p. 42
14. Martha Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 77-80. Indeed, though MacKinnon critiques liberalism, Nussbaum writes that we may see her as 'a kind of Kantian liberal, inspired by a deep version of personhood and autonomy', p. 79
15. See John D. Walker, 'Liberalism, Consent, and the Problem of Adaptive Preferences', Social Theory and Practice 21.3 (1995), pp. 457-71
16. and Elizabeth Brake, 'A Liberal Response to Catharine MacKinnon', Southwest Philosophical Studies 22 (2000), pp. 17-23
17. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993)
18. Rawls, Theory, pp. 92-93
19. Kymlicka, 'Liberal Individualism', p. 883
20. John Skorupski, 'Liberal Elitism', in John Skorupski, Ethical Explorations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 193-212
21. See also Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 142
22. Rawls dismissed this conception of a well-ordered society as 'unrealistic' in Political Liberalism, p. xvi
23. See for example, Okin's 'Political Liberalism, Justice, and Gender'
24. To review some of the difficulties associated with establishing an account of moral equality, see Bernard Williams, 'The Idea of Equality', in B. Williams, Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 230-49
25. A related criticism, made by Adina Schwartz in 'Moral Neutrality and Primary Goods', Ethics 83.4 (1973), pp. 294-307
26. See Jean Hampton, 'Feminist Contractarianism', in Louise Antony and Charlotte Witt (eds.), A Mind of One's Own (Oxford: Westview Press, 1993), pp. 227-56
27. I use 'civil society' in Hegel's sense. On this point, see Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family
28. and John Tomasi, 'Individual Rights and Community Virtues', Ethics 101.3 (1991), pp. 521-36
29. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (London: Penguin Books, 1985 [1859])
30. John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (ed. Susan Moller Okin; Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988 [1869])
31. Green, 'Rawls', p. 35
32. Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family, p. 16
33. and John McMurtry, 'Monogamy: A Critique', The Monist 56 (1972), pp. 587-99
34. Dworkin, 'Liberalism', p. 141