THE DEVELOPMENT OF WOMEN'S
RIGHTS AS A MICROCOSM OF THE HISTORY OF HUMAN RIGHTS
1. Internal Cultural Norms That
Discriminate Against Women Are A Near Cultural
Universal: Examples from Hinduism,
Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and other traditional cultures.
2. An Evolutionary Explanation of Such Norms.
3. A Predictable Result: Women are regarded as less valuable than men.
4. Does the inequality of perceived value affect
the quality of life? Amartya Sen's
Estimate of 100,000,000 Missing Girls and Women.
A Moral Problem: Is the unequal treatment of women morally
justified?
1. A culturally universal form of justification
for coercion: Paternalism.
Not just opponents of human
rights opposed equal rights for women on paternalist grounds: Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and almost all of the
early advocates of human rights opposed equal rights for women.
WOLLSTONECRAFT ON THE
LIBERATION OF WOMEN FROM MALE PATERNALISM
Wollstonecraft is responding to Rousseau's discussion of the
education of women in Emile.
Wollstonecraft's
"Utopian" dream:
The
opportunity for women to develop their humanity (their human capabilities, not
merely the characteristics that make them attractive to men). "If they
are really capable of acting like rational creatures, let them not be treated
like slaves."(105)
Two aspects:
Negative
right: not to be subject to legal limits
because of gender. Examples: Limitations on owning or inheriting property,
on entering into contracts, and on entering professions.
Positive
right: to education and the other things
that are necessary to develop their humanity.
In
1792, Wollstonecraft knew what the reaction of men would be to her
argument: The limitations of woman's
nature and the danger of "masculine women".
Wollstonecraft's
response: Being treated like a slave
produces beings with the virtues of slaves.
She herself describes her hopes as "Utopian". Now, more than two hundred years later, they
are no longer Utopian.
The analogy between public rulers
(e.g., kings) and private rulers (husbands).
DO WOMEN IN PATRIARCHAL
SOCIAL SYSTEMS VOLUNTARILY ENDORSE THEM?
1. The Problem Of Socially
Enforced, Self-Serving Justifications for Patriarchal Norms: How Consent Can Be Coerced.
(a) The analogy between lynchings and "honor" killings.
(b) The universality of
violence against women by intimate partners.
(c) How economic dependence
motivates acquiescence: the economic
costs of not being attractive to men.
2. How Self-Reinforcing
Paternalism Makes Paternalist Justifications of Patriarchal Norms Stable: A law or practice (e.g., denying women
education) is an instance of self-reinforcing paternalism when it is
justified paternalistically and one of its effects is to prevent its targets
from being able to make their own judgments about what is good for them. Thus, they have no basis to challenge the
paternalistic justifications.
3. Conventional Enforcement of a
Practice Makes it Seem Voluntary. The examples of footbinding and female genital cutting.
THE EXAMPLE OF FEMALE
GENITAL CUTTING
1. The most extreme
form: Infibulation
2. Tamir's Argument: FGC is bad, but in the same way that lots of
practices in our culture are bad.
Analogies to braces, dieting, depilation, face lifts, fat pumping, and
breast implants. (Is the title
"Hands Off Clitoridectomy"
an accurate reflection of her argument?)
3. The responses identify ways in which FGC is
especially bad: (1) informed consent;
(2) nature and extent of harm (e.g. physical intrusion);
(3) irreversibility; (4) sexual capability vs. sexual functioning;
(5) wives as objects for husbands' gratification.
4. Is there an important similarity between FGC
and other practices, including those in our own culture? What does Tamir
mean that "the major problem with clitoridectomy
is socio-political"?
5. Conventional Enforcement of Oppressive
Practices.
6. The Ineffectiveness of Top-Down Coercive Laws
in Altering Self-Enforcing Practices.
7. Tostan: A Bottom-Up Alternative.
Social Equilibria and
Conventional Enforcement of Social Practices
A social practice in a community is part of a social
equilibrium = It makes sense for each individual in the community to comply
with the practice, given the expectation that all (or almost all) other members
of the community will comply.
There may be more than one social
equilibrium. For example, the
practice of driving on the right side of the road and the practice of driving
on the left side of the road are both social equilibria. Explain why.
In some cases, there are two (or more) social equilibria that are not equally good. For example, in the
In game theory, this kind of situation is called an N-Person
Assurance Game. Even if it is true that
we would all be better off if we switched to the metric system, most
individuals would not be better off if they switched unilaterally (i.e., if
they switched to the metric system while everyone else continued to use the
British system). Why not?
You should be able to explain why the practice of footbinding in
THE
SURPRISING RESEARCH OF
AMARTYA
SEN AND OTHERS ON THE EFFECTS OF MORE EQUAL RIGHTS FOR WOMEN
1. Differential female mortality. What variables are most significant in eliminating
it?
2. Fertility and Overpopulation: Malthus (coercion) vs. Condorcet
(education).
An example:
What variables are most significant in the voluntary reduction
of fertility?
The history of the
development of human rights is a history of eliminating paternalistically
justified systems of coercion.
FROM MICROCOSM TO MACROCOSM
The Development of Women's
Rights Reveals A Problem with Normative Cultural Relativism About Internal Norms
(NCRAIN):
Internal norms can define
oppressive practices made stable by socially enforced self-serving
justifications, self-reinforcing paternalism, and conventional
enforcement. In such cases, an outsider
may be in a better position than an insider to morally criticize a culture's
internal norms.
How is it possible to
attain a standpoint from which to criticize a culture's internal norms? By using the same standpoint from which it is
possible to criticize a culture's external norms: The Original Position behind the Veil of
Ignorance. The Original Position
provides a standpoint from which it is possible to make epistemically modest
criticisms of external and internal norms.
The historical development
of human rights principles is the development of principles for morally
criticizing oppressive practices based on socially enforced self-serving paternalistic
justifications, usually augmented by conventional enforcement.
CAN THE ADVOCATE OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS AVOID MORAL
IMPERIALISM?
The surprising answer is Yes. It is true that
the advocate of strictly universal human rights is metaphysically
immodest. Why?
To avoid moral imperialism,
the advocate of strictly universal human rights must avoid epistemic immodesty
and moral paternalism. So if the
advocate of advocate of strictly universal human rights is epistemically modest
and a moral anti-paternalist, s/he will avoid moral imperialism.
(1) Epistemic
modesty. Recall the distinction between
epistemic and metaphysical modesty (or immodesty). I am epistemically modest when I say that
even if there are universal moral truths, no individual is infallible about
them—including me! Indeed, I am quite
sure that some of my moral views are mistaken.
We correct our mistakes through experience and especially through open
dialogue with others: The Dalai Lama
shows us that the importance of human rights can be appreciated from within an
Asian tradition. Universal moral truths
can be discovered from within any moral tradition.
(2) Moral Paternalism. Tostan illustrates how an advocate of universal human
rights can avoid moral paternalism. Tostan is an educational organization, not an anti-FGC
organization or an anti-domestic violence organization. Tostan grounds its
educational modules in education on human rights.