[ETA clarification: This is “liberal” in the sense of “Enlightenment classical”, not in the sense of “the left.” MacKinnon is not a liberal but she is more to the left than I am.]
My favorite summary of my political views was written by Catherine MacKinnon in Toward a Feminist Theory of the State to describe the political views she opposed. Say what you will about Ms. MacKinnon’s… everything… but the woman could certainly pass an Intellectual Turing Test.
If you would like to read MacKinnon’s explanation of my political viewpoint, it is on pages 44-47 of the linked PDF. However, I am with Susie Bright that:
Aside from the fantastic pornographic passages (“penises ramming vaginas,” etc.), MacKinnon disdains the use of subject-verb in a common sentence. Andrea Dworkin, MacKinnon’s collaborator and mutual inspiration, can write up a storm–I ate up Intercourse like a box of chocolates. MacKinnon, on the other hand, is the typical academic who must publish but can’t write.
So I am going to write my own explanation and save you the tedium.
According to MacKinnon, liberalism consists of five interrelated dimensions: individualism; naturalism; voluntarism; idealism; and moralism.
Individualism is the idea that the fundamental unit of society is the individual who stands alone, apart from any groups of which she or he is a member. (This is sometimes called the “liberal subject.”) It is opposed to collectivism, in which the fundamental unit of the society is the group.
Voluntarism is the idea that those individuals are autonomous. We make our own choices for our own reasons, not being shaped by manipulative or distorting external forces. It is opposed to the idea that our desires are shaped by the society we’re part of: a woman may genuinely desire to wear lipstick, but the reason she genuinely desires to wear lipstick is that she was told since infancy that it was what she should want.
Naturalism is the idea that the world is ultimately knowable and understandable; there is an objective truth that you can communicate to other people, even outside of a social context. If everyone works really hard to overcome their biases, then we will manage to come to the truth. It is opposed to the idea that people are just biased; if there is an objective truth, we’ll certainly never be able to reach it. Rationalists and leftists actually have broadly similar claims here: both of us have noticed that human brains are fallible and the Descartian model of finding truth by sitting down and thinking about it very hard doesn’t work very well. However, rationalists tend to be most interested in fallibilities that all humans share, such as the sunk cost fallacy and the conjunction fallacy. Leftists tend to be more interested in the social context of thinking– either in specific, like “how does Ozy being white affect their opinions about linguistic diversity?” or in general, like “how does the concept of ‘productivity’ taught to Ozy as a small child affect their opinions about capitalism?”
Idealism is the idea that thought is a prime mover of social life. This one is perhaps easiest to understand by contrasting it with its opposite, materialism. Materialism is the idea that society is fundamentally shaped by vast formless things. Materialism claims that if you’re in a society with a lot of unhappy poor people next to a lot of showoff rich people, something a lot like Communism will naturally appear; if Marx died in infancy, someone else would have catalyzed the anger of the poor into an ideology about how the rich people’s money should be given to them. Idealism claims that Communism happened because Marx sat down and thought about it and came up with some pretty interesting ideas, and if he had died as a baby there might not have been any USSR at all. (In practice, I’m a lot leerier about idealism than I am about the other four– I’m inclined towards a moderate, “both ideas and vast formless things are important” position.)
Moralism is the idea that one must conform one’s behavior to abstract rules. It might be a single rule, like “do what causes the greatest good for the greatest number”, or a lot of different rules, like “don’t murder, don’t steal, don’t interfere with people’s freedom of speech…” Moralism is opposed to suspicion about the whole “abstract rule” project, often because the abstract rules are made up by people in power and have a strange tendency to conclude that powerful people should stay powerful.
I think MacKinnon’s list serves as a useful explanation of the difference between liberal feminism and other feminisms. Liberal feminism is feminism that agrees with individualism, naturalism, voluntarism, idealism, and moralism. Radical feminism, cultural feminism, and socialist feminism is feminism that doesn’t agree with one or more of those claims.
(This is not a very useful heuristic for identifying feminists in the wild. If you wish to classify feminists you encounter, I would use the following guidelines: socialist feminists are the only ones who give a shit about class; radical feminists are extremely angry about sex work, BDSM, and/or trans people; cultural feminists leave you with the feeling of “I have no idea what you’re talking about but I’m pretty sure you’re a misogynist”; and everyone else is a liberal feminist, except Christina Hoff Sommers, whose brand of feminism begins with “anti-“.)
However, I think it goes beyond that: this is a succinct statement of my political commitments in general. I believe that people should be understood as individuals, not as part of groups; that these individuals are capable of free choices which should be respected; that as difficult as it is, we can know objective truth; that it matters what we believe, not just what social conditions are; and that you should follow abstract principles.
Thing of Things 
I am disappointed that you turned down an opportunity to use the word “Cartesian”
That said, are cultural feminists the one’s who are like “The linear nature of mathematics is an example of masculine bias, the pointed nature of skyscrapers is an example of phallocentrism, if women ran society there’d be no war.”? Because I think I’ve seen strawmen of them more than I’ve seen them in the wild.
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Dude, JULIA SERANO, in an inglorious passage near the end of Whipping Girl, pulls out the “no wars” chestnut. It’s depressiingly common.
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They aren’t very common outside of academia.
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The phallocentrism explanation of buildings has been around for a while, or at least since the 1920s; Chesterton mentions an encounter with an expounder of such in his 1925 book “The Everlasting Man”:
I had to Google who was Louis de Rougemont. A person with an interesting career 🙂
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I’m confused about the content of the first four claims to the extent that they’re not falsifiable empirical claims about the world; that is, I’m confused about the way in which they’re political views. They seem to describe four heuristics you might or might not subscribe to for understanding human behavior, as opposed to heuristics for making political policy.
I can sort of see how voluntarism leads to certain kinds of policy proposals surrounding e.g. punishment of crime, but I’m confused about the others. Can you elaborate?
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People who aren’t individualists can sometimes be more concerned about the welfare of groups rather than individuals; preserving or changing societal norms and conventions even when it hurts people, with the idea that it’s better to hurt a few people than to have a bad society. That’s a tenet of some forms of Communism and most forms of Conservatism.
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It seems unlikely that you’re really saying you oppose suspicion of abstract rules because “abstract rules are made up by people in power and have a strange tendency to conclude that powerful people should stay powerful.”
If anything, that phrasing makes it sound like you AGREE with that criticism of abstract rules.
Am I misreading that paragraph?
P.S. Good post.
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The ‘because’ clause motivates the suspicion, not the opposition.
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I’m kind of surprised that you didn’t mention egalitarianism, but I guess anti-egalitarianism is so far outside the Overton window now that nobody bothers discussing it.
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I expect it’s not mentioned because she was only listing where liberal feminism differs from radical feminism.
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There are obvious reasons why MacKinnon is not going to put egalitarianism in her definition of liberalism: most notably, because she believes that liberals are actively harmful to that cause.
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But isn’t the whole idea that egalitarianism is good itself an abstract rule? Is MacKinnon contradicting herself when she advocates for women’s equality but also the suspicion of abstract rules?
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Personally I think liberalism as it stands is a dead end. There really is no life in it which is why it’s been a failure throughout history People are individuals but act as a group. It’s important to the herd. I appreciate the individual and we can promote that yet greatly. But socialism in general as we understand where progressive liberalism in the west understands is so disrespectful of the very people it purports to be for. It sucks the very life blood of the people. No striving for self satisfaction What’s the point in education if there’s no place to use it. Look at the hypocrisy of the Soviet Union and do not delude yourself with the people’s Republic of China. It is a lie
Now we can do better here within capitalism and a restructuring of tax laws, job growth and in general a society of inclusion. But liberalism as it has shown it’s true face is as much about power to the few and just sounds better in its rhetoric but it is as nasty as the system it seeks to replace.
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I think it’s reasonably clear that “liberalism”, as commonly used and discussed in this article, is distinct from socialism.
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And also distinct from the straw-man that makes “liberal” equal to the red-tribe caricature of blue-tribe.
And also distinct, as an ideology, from the actions of those who are part of a coalition political group that serves many masters.
mdaniels4 isn’t just barking up the wrong tree, he is actually barking at a dead lead blowing down the street.
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Also, the link doesn’t work for me.
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Questions, one neutral, two not-so-neutral!
1. Volntarism: I have to wonder if perhaps you’ve misstated this, because as stated, this just seems to be false; it seems pretty clear that people’s desires do at least have something to do with the society they’re a part of. It seems to me the interesting question is not whether this is the case — or even to what extent this is the case, though that’s an important empirical question that bears on the question I’m about to ask — but to what extent this is morally relevant.
That is to say: It is perfectly coherent to say, “Yes, people’s desires are determined by society; but since they are honest individual desires, whatever their source, we are still required to respect them.” What you might call “moral voluntarism” with no component of “empirical voluntarism”.
Now to someone who does take the position that people are autonomous in the way you say, the only remaining moral question is “What do you do when people’s desires conflict”, which is a huge question, but one you’re going to face regardless. On the other hand, if you don’t accept that, then we’re left with the moral question you kind of implicitly assumed an answer to when you used the words “manipulative” and “distorting”. Because, as above, you could say, “So what, desires are shaped by outside forces, but these outside forces are not illegitimate”; or you could say “Some of these outside forces are illegitimate and must be countered”. (If that’s meaningful, anyway — “manipulative” and “distorting” seem to suggest there are underlying “real desires” that are being distorted. In the absence of those, it becomes less clear what it means to counter these illegitimate forces.) You could, I suppose, say “all outside forces are illegitimate”, but I doubt that’s workable.
So, like, I’m wondering what’s going on here.
2. You say “everyone else is a liberal feminist”, but I suspect a more accurate statement would be “everyone else who has some idea what they’re doing is a liberal feminist”, and that the fraction of feminists with a coherent thought-out view on these things in the first place is similar to the fraction of religious adherents with a consistent thought-out theology. Most feminists are probably what you might call “folk feminists”. But I guess they would say they’re liberal feminists, what with that being the dominant strain these days.
So, apologies if I’m tinmanning here, but basically I am about to point out that I don’t see how several important things that feminists — who I assume are generally notionally liberal — actually do or push for make sense under the framework you’ve outlined above.
Basically, my question (which is admittedly not neutral) is: Is there suposed to be some actual liberal justification for what I’m about to describe, or are we just witnessing folk feminism at work? Specifically:
2a. Violations of voluntarism — See everything of the form “We need to encourage girls to go into science!” or similar. If we assume voluntarism, why would we need to do that? If we assume “empirical voluntarism”, this should be futile. If we assume “moral voluntarism”, then I guess this isn’t wrong, but it also isn’t necessary or even clearly good. What’s going on here?
2b. Probable violations of… something — This one is less clear, hence the “probable”. But basically, see my comment here regarding potential justifications for gender-balancing. What’s going on here? Possibility A is a clear violation of individualism; possibility B doesn’t have any apparent problem; and possibility C is entirely individualist, but potentially runs into the voluntarism problem described above.
But, as I said in the comment there, people seem to endorse gender-balancing all the time without the slightest clarification of why, or implicitly endorsing some mix of these justifications without ever being explicit, and it’s not at all clear that these people are really being individualist and voluntarist. It may not be charitable, but I really think the best explanation here is that what we’re seeing in these cases is just folk feminism. Unless there’s some way of making sense of all of this within a liberal framework that I’m missing?
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Liberal feminists see this issue in terms of exclusion and differing opportunities — either that the masculine cultural norms of STEM professions alienate women, or that women have a harder time than men finding acceptance, jobs, mentors, etc. Encouraging more women to go into science is an effort to make science overall friendlier to women; it’s a form of entryism or pioneerism. I think that attitude is compatible with voluntarism, even though it involves a degree of (voluntary!) sacrifice on the pioneers’ part.
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That still raises the question of why nobody cares about gender gaps in fields other than STEM.
For example, I went to an art college which had, among other things, a School of Fashion. One time I read the program for my graduation ceremony and found that, among the 200 or so graduates with fashion design or marketing majors, 12 had typically male names, 10 had names I didn’t recognize (mostly foreign students, presumably) and all of the rest had typically female names. Obviously that’s an imperfect way of measuring things, but it still suggests a gender gap that makes the ones in any of the STEM majors pale in comparison. Yet how often do you hear about the need for initiatives to get men (and if the goal is to bring in people from underrepresented demographics, straight men) into the fashion industry?
And if you say that no one cares about the demographics of the fashion industry because it isn’t important, what about nursing (80% female) or teaching (98% of kindergarten teachers are female)?
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At risk of sounding cynical, NN, it’s because people only care about gender gaps when they “favour” men.
To be more specific, there’s no male equivalent of feminism – well, there’s MRAs, but they aren’t inside the Overton window – and it’s hard to get self-proclaimed feminists too worked up about something “favoring” women too much.
With that said! I’ve definitely heard people complain about the whole nurses=women thing, and housekeeping, probably a few other examples. And teaching is confounded by the whole men=paedophiles thing.
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For fairly obvious historical reasons, feminism exists while masculism, except as a joke, does not. Feminists are understandably not very concerned about gender imbalance in woman-dominated fields. That could be characterized as unprincipled, but only according to a diamond-hard definition of “principle” that we neither adhere to ourselves, nor usually expect from anyone else.
Besides, science occupies a unique position of authority in Enlightenment-descended liberal democracies — as it should, IMO. I’m just happy that liberal feminists want to join it rather than attack it.
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But here’s the thing: women aren’t choosing not to become scientists so they can become stay-at-home moms or go on welfare or otherwise leave the labor market entirely. If they wanted to do that, they wouldn’t even be considering a job that requires that much of a commitment in education and time.
What is happening is that women are, in greater numbers than men, choosing to work in fields other than STEM. So you can’t treat the gender gap favoring males in some fields and the gender gap favoring females in other fields as separate issues, if you honestly want to make the gender ratios more even anywhere. If you want to tilt the gender ratio of STEM fields more towards females, you’re going to have to “take” women from non-STEM fields, “take away” men from STEM into other fields, or both. It’s a zero sum game.
Assuming, of course, that making the gender ratio of a job field more even is a laudable goal in the first place.
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I think a big part of why the gender gap in STEM has so much attention focused on it is that (certain) STEM career paths can lead you to positions of wealth and power. Feminists often point out that women-dominated fields are mostly ones with lesser prestige and earning potential, whereas male-dominated fields include most of the higher-prestige/power/wealth ones. (Of course teachers are important in the sense that they are essential to society and influence people a lot, but they’re certainly not well-compensated in the U.S.)
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What tcheasdfjkl said. A central feminist point is that men tend to hold positions of power and that things coded male tend to be socially dominant while things coded female tend to be submissive. So doctors are men and nurses are women. And yes, perhaps fashion design attracts more women, but business management and STEM and so forth attract more men, and in the end which careers lead to power?
Furthermore, I’ve seen men dismiss fashion as frivolous while at the same time pontificating about the importance of sports. But to me sports seems as frivolous as fashion — but what I really mean is *neither* seems frivolous to me.
These days the broad culture takes STEM seriously in ways they do not take fashion design seriously. Thus the power balance of one matters more than the other.
Furthermore, among men who pursue fashion design, how many feel they are denied advancement *because* they are men, how many encounter manifest sexism? (Actually, in fashion I would not be surprised if *straight* men get discriminated against. But that’s another conversation.) Compare that to how many women in STEM feel their gender limits their advancement.
Also, while there are fewer men in fields like nursing, often the women find the men on the Glass Escalator, which limits their advancement, and suggests a fundamental asymmetry between the sexist characteristics of male-dominated fields versus female-dominated fields.
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Leaving aside the fact that almost everyone uses the products of the fashion industry for close to every waking second of their lives…
The median salary of a fashion designer is about $60,000, slightly more than the median salary of a computer programmer at about $57,000 (on the other hand, the fashion industry is concentrated in places like NYC where the cost of living is really high). In the top ranks of the industry, there are plenty of millionaires and even billionaires, though I’m sure not quite as many as in the top ranks of the tech industry. But money isn’t the only measure of power. The fashion industry offers far more opportunities to meet and befriend celebrities and rich people in other industries than the tech industry does.
So I don’t think this is as clear cut as you make it out to be. Yes, many fashion designers make products that don’t impact people’s lives much at all, but the same can be said of many programmers.
How many magazines and reality shows exist that revolve around STEM fields?
But ignoring that, why should you care what kyriarchal society thinks? Isn’t arbitrarily taking “masculine” things more seriously than “feminine” things itself a form a sexism? This matches a pattern I see again and again in feminist discourse: when something dominated by men is considered more important by society than something dominated by women, they try to get more women into the male dominated thing without ever questioning the assumption that society’s measure of which is more important is actually correct.
Sometimes you have to wonder if a more effective route to equality might be to try to encourage society to give more importance to things that are already dominated by women. For example, shouldn’t nursing be considered one of the most important jobs in modern society, seeing how nurses save lives on a daily basis?
Considering that basically nobody in the media has bothered to report on sexism against men in the fashion industry whereas a bunch of people have spent years looking under every rock for any instances of sexism against women in STEM fields, I don’t think there’s a fair way to answer this question.
Regardless, based on my experience in elementary school, I expect that a little boy who displayed interest in fashion would be far more likely to get bullied over it than a little girl who displayed interest in computers or science.
Interesting. Are there any studies of the Glass Escalator effect that control for things like hours worked and likelihood of taking time off for family reasons? I’m genuinely curious.
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I don’t think voluntarism is central to liberalism and one can be a liberal while rejecting it. A liberal can say that we make our choices for our own reasons, but many of our reasons are influenced by our culture, environment, etc – what matters is that regardless of the source of those reasons, they should be allowed to act in accordance them (within reason). For example, there’s no contradiction in a statement like “You like BDSM because you were abused, but BDSM itself isn’t harmful, so since you like it, you should be free to practice it”.
Idealism doesn’t seem that important either. It would be difficult to be a liberal and an extreme materialist because that would conflict with naturalism, but anything from moderate materialism to extreme idealism is compatible with liberalism.
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A similar point is made by BHL Kevin Vallier here:
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The main problem with anti-voluntarism is that it proves too much; our preferences not to be enslaved or tortured become as arbitrary as our preferences to wear lipstick or play with toy guns. Anti-voluntarist arguments can justify anything.
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Just as arbitrary, yes, but preferences not to be enslaved and tortured are generally much stronger than preferences to wear lipstick or play with toy guns.
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Of course, but from the blank-slate perspective that does not matter. It only implies that the social conditioning against torture and enslavement is stronger, or more often repeated.
Blank-slaters are often willing to bite the bullet on some very strong preferences, particularly in the sexual domain, but never when it comes to, e.g., conditioning people to enjoy being exploited.
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There’s no inherent contradiction – I’d probably endorse that myself – but empirically, it does seem to be an idea that liberalism is uncomfortable with.
The whole “blank slate” idea was, IIUC, motivated by liberalism; which would be rather odd if there was no connection between the two.
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Wouldn’t liberals, as the first in the modern west to contemplate a world not made (so completely) in God’s image, have been natural place for blank slate to arise simply as a reaction to a certain Calvinist strain inherent in all religions that contemplate a multi-omni God?
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I am very grateful that you laid out your thinking clearly and succinctly, and actually staked out a position. If anyone else had written this, I would have expected the conclusion to be advocating for a middle ground in every category instead of taking a stand for one or the other.
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I’d imagine this list captures the beliefs and dispositions of most liberals, but I’m not sure adherence to these five points is a necessary condition of liberalism. I consider myself a liberal, and I am called a liberal by my conservative and communist friends. However, I’m not sure I could endorse three of these five points. A quick antihumanist critique:
Individualism: Those of us in advanced societies offload almost all of our labor, including our cognitive labor, onto other people. We trust doctors and pharmacists to prescribe and administer the correct drugs, trust accountants to know and follow the tax code, and trust lawyers and judges to understand and interpret the law. Just about every epistemic check we write is backed up by knowledge we ourselves don’t have, but which is held by the relevant expert(s). Even most scientists don’t run the many of the experiments they cite, but have to rely on the broader scientific community. (All this might be less true the closer we get to hunter-gatherer societies, in which almost all knowledge is common knowledge.)
Voluntarism: I doubt it is usually the case we can accurately identify all the reasons for our actions and beliefs. Many important decisions are made by “going with [my] gut,” and the goings-on of “the gut” are unconscious. Even when people do reason about their beliefs, they’re at least partially motivated to conform with people they admire or associate with. (What is the logical connection between being pro-choice and believing in global warming? What is the logical connection between broad interpretations of the Second Amendment and opposition to affirmative action?)
Idealism: If I read Dewy correctly, I think he has persuasive arguments that the materialism-idealism[1] dichotomy is a false one (see e.g. “Experience and Nature”). Human agents and the environment are parts of the same causal web, and one might exert more power over the other (and therefore have explanatory priority) in different situations. We respond to the environment to better order our environment, so that our interactions with it are more pleasant. Thoughts are our tools, and the environment is both the source of our raw materials, and the source of our problems.
(I think Ozy and I might agree on the same general point, that “both ideas and vast formless things are important”.)
Naturalism I adhere to. There is no a priori limit on what we can figure out a posteriori. However, I dislike metaphors which talk about the universe as “understandable,” as if it’s a piece of language we’re trying to decipher. Instead, I think comprehension of nature is proportional to our power to predict experiences, explain experience coherently, and alter our environment in accordance with goals.
As for moralism: I don’t know how you could possibly get away from following abstract rules. Even if we follow rules less often than we think, I don’t know how we could talk about morality at all without appealing to general principles at some point in the conversation.
[1] Dewy didn’t use either the term “materialism” or “idealism” in the sense they are being used here, but his thoughts on the interaction of agents with the environment map onto the concerns at hand.
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This list seems to mix “is” and “ought” statements.
1. Individualism is a purely “ought” statement – you value whatever you value.
2.Voluntarism is half-is, half-ought. If we ask whether humans are motivated by ghosts or universal wave function as a matter of fact, the answer is universal wave function. However, one might ask: in the absence of the general theory of everything ans the ability to predict humans (almost) deterministically, should we pretend that we have such theory, or should we pretend the ghost did it? This is “ought” statement.
3. Naturalism is more or less “ought”, since it boils down to “what kinds of epistemology you choose”, and it’s hard to answer without picking some epistemology first.
4. Idealism is purely “is”, you can answer it by science. Even if not directly (a randomized controlled trial of the effects of Karl Marx on the Earth is a little bit hard to conduct, unless you’re the overlord of quantum multiverse), it is ultimately answerable.
5. Moralism is mostly “ought”, although the origins of ethics is “is”.
While I’m fine with defining ideologies around “ought” statements, including “is” seems like a bad idea. Shouldn’t all “is” statements, instead of being hardcoded, be replaced with “pick epistemology, and believe whatever it tells you”?
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MacKinnon, who is an Hegelian historicist, would see the is-ought dichotomy as a bogus framework; to her, epistemology is as subject to the basic imperative of power as politics. “Is” statements merely reflect enforced consensus, under this view.
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But … ideologies do endorse both moral assertions and empirical claims about the universe. Unless you want to claim that “all humans are created equal” wasn’t a liberal statement?
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This statement is either false, or what the author meant was “ought”, or it’s nonsense.
If by “created” we mean that all humans were brought into existence by some deity, then it’s obviously false – even if you believe in young Earth creationism, you probably also believe that currently living humans were born by their mothers. But let’s omit this, and assume that “created” means “born”.
Then everything depends on what we mean by “equal”. If we mean “equal” as in “indistinguishable particles, like electrons, which can be proven by simple statistical experiments” then it’s obviously false. If by “equal” we mean “having equal rights” then it’s nonsense, because the universe doesn’t have inbuilt concept of rights, no matter how far you stretch what is considered natural – you can never ever discover the rights in experiments (without a government to enforce the rights, that is), nor can you derive them from pure math. And if we mean “all humans born are given equal rights by the government”, it’s a tautology, since its basically says “humans have equal rights, because our law says they should, and they should because they do”.
Finally, we can say “all humans should have equal rights”, and then it’s “ought”.
This isn’t to say that real life ideologies _aren’t_ sometimes endorsing true “is” statements. I’m saying that they _shouldn’t_ do it because if they do they _are_ bound to be terrible. Marxism says “hunters-gatherers had communism, and communism will win no matter what you do because historicism”, every religion says “there’s god who will punish you if you don’t follow these rules”, libertarianism says “free market will give the highest utility compared to other ways to run the economy”, modern liberalism or social democracy say “if you manually control (e.g. price control, minimum wages, zoning, gender quotas, etc.) one variable in a huge deeply interconnected network, it’s unlikely to backfire badly”. Even endorsing “is” statements that are true to the best of our knowledge is a bad idea, because the knowledge changes, and if in 18th century one could put “F=ma” on a banner and march against ignorance, now it just leads to the bizarre communities of relativity denialists.
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I am not sure what, in your view, separates a political ideology from an ethical system, if they’re both primarily concerned with oughts.
Also, what ought one to call one’s set of empirical beliefs that leads one to advocate for particular policy positions, then?
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Oh, “all men are created equal” is false (well, an overgeneralization.) It’s also an “is” statement.
“All races are created equal”, however, seems to be roughly true, and it’s descended from that idea.
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I’m confused about the meaning of “individualism”. Ozy writes: “Individualism is the idea that the fundamental unit of society is the individual who stands alone, apart from any groups of which she or he is a member.”
Is it possible to say “the fundamental unit of society is an atom”? Is it about how we model the society? Or about individual interests taking priority before group interests? What are the group interests? Does collectivism supports false consensus as a “group interest”, even if no individual inside or outside of the group benefits from it? Does collectivism supports the dictate of majority “let’s torture this guy, it’s kinda fun”?
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Great post.
However … on the other hand:
“Individualism is the idea that the fundamental unit of society is the individual who stands alone, apart from any groups of which she or he is a member.” Which is of course why liberals tend to be libertarians, opposed to social welfare etc.
“Voluntarism is the idea that those individuals are autonomous. We make our own choices for our own reasons, not being shaped by manipulative or distorting external forces.” Yup, liberalism sure does reject the idea that anything about us could be socially constructed.
“Naturalism is the idea that the world is ultimately knowable and understandable; there is an objective truth that you can communicate to other people, even outside of a social context. If everyone works really hard to overcome their biases, then we will manage to come to the truth. It is opposed to the idea that people are just biased; if there is an objective truth, we’ll certainly never be able to reach it.” Which is why conservatives embraced post-modernism as … no, wait, post-modernism is usually considered the pinnacle of liberal wishy-washyness and cultural relativism.
“Idealism is the idea that thought is a prime mover of social life. This one is perhaps easiest to understand by contrasting it with its opposite, materialism. Materialism is the idea that society is fundamentally shaped by vast formless things.” Like … Marx believed? The March of Progress, the inevitable sweep of history, has nothing to do with liberalism, I’m sure.
“Moralism is the idea that one must conform one’s behavior to abstract rules.” Don’t you tell me what to do, man.
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This is “liberal” as in “Enlightenment classical liberal”, not “liberal” as opposed to “conservative.” MacKinnon is a leftist and she hates liberals. Radical feminists are more to the left of liberal feminists. Postmodernists don’t like liberals much either.
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There is a reason that there are many libertarians who refer to themselves as “classical liberals”.
There is a reason that Chait keeps referring to liberalism and liberal values when he argues against “the new P.C.”
I don’t think that liberals and libertarians disagree (much) about individualism and voluntarism as moral values. Nor do they, I think, disagree (much) on naturalism, but they do seem to see the same facts and draw different conclusions about the underlying truth.
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I would have said that liberals and libertarians only disagree about individualism and voluntarism as moral values. Liberals are OK with the government telling people what to do, libertarians aren’t. It’s kind of their defining disagreement.
Although, to be fair, one might also construe Libertarianism as concerned with Formless Things (and thus Materialism) and rejecting moral requirements in favour of said Formless Things hopefully working this out on their own.
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(Mostly aimed at MugaSofer)
There are a lot of not-liberal social democrats (moderates on the capitalism-socialism scale if that makes sense) in the US who tend to get called liberals over there. This tends to confuse the situation, because you have economic-moderates (that is, moderate between Stalin and Ayn Rand) who are also liberals aligned with economic-moderates who aren’t, but both called “liberal” – so you tend to miss that the actual liberals have liberal – individualist, voluntarist – arguments for their economic positions.
Liberals tend to see it as government getting rid of other oppressors. Conrad Russell’s definition of liberalism was that it was about “minimum oppression as opposed to minimum government”. The British Liberal Party defined one of it’s founding principles as opposition to “enslavement by poverty, ignorance or conformity”.
If you see people being told what to do by their boss as being just as dangerous as being told what to do by government, then government stepping in to tell the boss not to hand out orders (or, at any rate, not to hand out those orders) is the government protecting individualism, not overriding it.
If you see poverty as restricting the autonomy of the voluntarist individual, then the state stepping in to restore that autonomy is a perfectly voluntarist / liberal position.
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I think that some of the disagreement here lies in defining individual freedom…
* negatively, as “being allowed to” (libertarian, classical liberal(?)) – i.e. not prohibited by the government –
versus
* positively, as “being able to” (modern liberal, libertarian socialist/anarchist) – i.e. having the economic and social means to.
I don’t think there is much disagreement over whether we should value individual freedom or not.
(Am I misrepresenting? Especially the libertarian perspective?)
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Catherine Mackinnon is attacking liberalism from the left.
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The individual being the fundamental unit of society is (arguably) compatible with endorsement of a welfare state. For example, an individualist could say that we owe a lot to each other, or that a welfare state is good because it would be endorsed from behind a Veil of Ignorance, or it could be justified on utilitarian grounds. What makes the individualist approach distinctive is the rejection of unchosen obligations based on a certain kind of group membership: to the extent that you have unchosen obligations, they are to individuals and not to groups and they reason they are binding on you is not related to your gender, ethnicity, etc, and to the extent that you have more particular obligations, they are chosen.
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*the reason they are binding
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Does “feminism” refer to an empirical cluster, or does it refer to the belief that people of different genders should be treated equally? If the latter, what suggests to you that Hoff Sommers doesn’t believe people of different genders should be treated equally? If anything she seems substantially better than the other folks you cite at working towards this goal. In fact, if we are to use the “gender equality” definition rigorously, many self-proclaimed “feminists” would be better described as “misandrists” or “woman’s rights activists” or even “female supremacists”/”misandrists”.
(All I want you guys to do is either stop pretending feminism is about equality, or stop labeling people who seem to be working towards equality as anti-feminists. One or the other–I don’t care which you pick. Just cut the motte and bailey stuff.)
And I think it’s incorrect to call Sommers an anti-feminist if she is working towards what she thinks is equality but you don’t think is equality. Both pro- and anti- nuclear power people refer to themselves as “environmentalists” because they care about the environment–they just differ on how best to help it. If Sommers doesn’t get to be a feminist, you’ll want to redefine feminist as “someone who works to achieve gender equality *and* believes that the state of gender equality is such that women have it worse and their problems are more important to solve”. Or something.
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I’ve always supposed I was liberal-ish, at least in terms of “what sort of feminist are you.”
But those categories: they all seem to me false dichotomies. Which is to say, I think “individual versus collective” misses the point of what humans are like, as does voluntarism. I mean, to me it seems obvious that we are a sum of our experiences modulo the complexity of our brains. Likewise for some of us, a group identity is critical for us to thrive, for other maybe less so. In either case, we are individual brains that make choices, according to their internal logic as *physical things in the world*. (This gets to the “free will” question, to which I respond: that’s a silly way to think about things.)
(Technical aside. There seem to be three “realities,” three types of ontological status: first, the base material reality, which is mind-independent; second, our internal psychological reality, which is at its base a brain, but it doesn’t feel like a brain (“what it’s like to be…”) and thus our language treats our psychological experiences as primary; and third, our social reality, which is a shared structure and vocabulary, which ultimately manifests as psychological reality, but which provides strong constraints on how we experience the world.)
Naturalism? I’m pro-empiricism and pro-science, but I think folks get a lot wrong a lot of the time. I’m certainly distrustful of folks who think they have it all figured out. Idealism? Again, this seems like a false dichotomy, but then again, entropy always wins. Would Marxism have arisen without Marx? I don’t know. How could I possibly know that? We can name repeating patterns of organization and behavior, but there is more complexity than we can ever fully name.
Finally moralism? OMG no!
So I guess I’m not a liberal after all. But I feel like one. I dunno.
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What is wrong with the HS kind of feminism?
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And here I thought I was the only person under 50 who had ever heard of Phil Ochs.
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