Date: Fri, 30 Jan 1998 19:30:12 -0500
From: Yoshie Furuhashi <Furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Privacy and Marxism


I would like to respond to James and Justin at the same time.

James:
>> However, all that being said, I would say that moral autonomy, however
>> circumscribed, is a tremendous gain in human civilisation, that should
>> not be tossed away lightly. In particular I think it is a mistake to say
>> that because moral autonomy doed not transcend the relations of
>> capitalism, that it should be taken lightly: My point would be that
>> people who are not prepared to fight for their rights are not likely to
>> make a revolution.

Justin
>Although I would say that moral autonomy is not wholly circumstribed by
>capitalism, at least to the extent that we can act from alternative values.

James:
>> This, I think, is why the question of rights is so important to
>> Marxists. Rights are the legal-political form of the moral subject.

Justin:
>That's just legal rights. We can speak of moral rights as well.

I have a question for James and Justin. To what extent are rights the
legal-political form of the "moral subject"? I suppose rights can be in
some cases legal-political forms of "moral subjects," but aren't rights
primarily legal-political forms of legally recognized subjects? I say this
because rights can attach to many kinds of "legal persons," not all of
which have moral standings. (For instance, corporations have "rights.")

Further, as I wrote in my comments on Petchesky, I think that rights as
they were originally conceptualized did not take the female body as a
reference point. Rights belonged to citizens (and full citizenship was
originally only accorded to native-born propertied white males of age).
With much struggles, more peoples who were formerly excluded from
citizenship have gained rights "equal" to native-born propertied white
males in many areas of lives, but the rights that only women can exercize
(such as a right to safe legal abortion) do not seem to become as
"fundamental" or as deep-rooted and well respected as other rights. Could
it be that women are still not considered fully autonomous, legally,
politically, and culturally (you can add morally, if you like), despite the
seeming "equality" under the law? It seems that when push comes to shove,
women's "biology" still seems to trump women's moral, legal, political
autonomy.

Justin spoke of people's "moral rights." I recognize women have no legal
right to be protected from conservative moral pressures, but *within the
ranks of the pro-choice crowd*, does Justin believe that women have a
"moral right" not to be subjected to moral pressures on us to either
continue or terminate pregnancy? Do women's "moral rights" encompass such
an expanded conception of privacy?

James wrote:
>> Privacy is a more contemporary coinage (it features for example in the
>> ECHR). At the moment in Britain the Right to Privacy is claimed by the
>> rich and famous (Like Earl Spencer) to prevent public scrutiny of their
>> lives. I take it to be a vulgarisation of the more classical concpt of
>> autonomy.

Despite Justin's comments, it seems to me that James's remark here is
rather important. Under capitalism, the rich can buy a much larger and
better-protected zone of privacy than the working class, and the same can
be said about abortion.

Lastly, though I belive rights are very important when people are still
struggling to gain and defend those rights, it seems that once some rights
become fully accepted and entrenched in people's mores (or if some things
were never questioned to begin with, thus they did not become a matter of
struggles for rights), our attitudes to such rights (or the practices that
such rights are thought to protect) change, becoming more matter-of-fact.
So to the extent that American women (and women in some other nations) must
still vigorously (and sometimes physically, as in clinic defense) defend
the right to abortion (while losing parts of the right here and there), we
can say that struggles for women's emancipation are not moving forward at
all. Just think of stupendous amounts of activist and intellectual energy
expended upon merely an effort to defend the status quo. I would rather see
women workers become able to take this right for granted and move on to
other fronts to struggle for many other important things.

Yoshie




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