Date: Mon, 2 Feb 1998 00:06:48 -0800 (PST)
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Privacy and Marxism


At 08:03 AM 2/1/98 -0500, hoov wrote:
>Yoshie:
>> I think that rights as
>> they were originally conceptualized did not take the female body as a
>> reference point. 
>> 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. 
>
>Susan Moller Okin makes similar point in *Justice, Gender, and the Family*.
>..she notes that the concept of rights has been understood to include
>both the right to life and the right to control one's own body...with
>respect to abortion, no "shared understandings" exist because both basic
>liberal rights cannot be universalized to women as well as to fetuses...
>Michael Hoover

Both the original statement and the reply are complete horseshit and remind
me of why I hate academic feminism so.  There are two questions of the
conception of rights, the intensional and the extensional.  Unless you can
show how the intensional meaning of rights is compromised by a failure of
extension, i.e. to include within it all the people to whom it could
possibly apply, then you are committing a fraud by making such a statement.
The proposition "all men are created equal" is a perfectly valid conception,
even though it was originally intended to extend only to property-holding
white men.  If there is something to be criticized about the conception, one
would have to delve more deeply into the question of bourgeois right, law,
and personhood underlying the meaning of the concept as we use it in modern
society.  Obviously many have done this: the question is being fought out on
this list also.  But to claim that there is a special feminist dispensation
that implicates the very concept of right in bourgeois society as being
"male" in essence, this is a fraud and the perpetrators deserve to be
humiliated.

I would suggest BtW, that no human society can dispense with the concept of
right, though the concept has gone through qualitative changes as the mode
of production has changed.  But until we achieve the level of an unalienated
society (which I don't believe has ever existed--including those tribes
allegedly at one with nature that Uncle Lou has adopted as his pet of the
month), the concept of right is absolutely necessary to protect the
individual--singly or en masse--against the state, against mob rule, against
harm and predation of every kind.

Which reminds me of some more feminist horseshit to the effect that males
live by rules and women by empathy and cooperation and similar
warm-and-fuzzies.  Not only is this a bald-faced lie, (Bhaskarites, line up
to kiss my ass), but if it were true, it would prove that women really are
inferior beings.  Because if you can't play by any rules, and you don't
think you have to be fair, then you are a completely subjective animal who
thinks she can do anything she feels like without having to account to
anybody.  (and don't think I don't know a few people like this.)  In which
case you deserve just what's coming to you.  So let's put this infantile
feminist philosophy to bed, please.  This is what I live to wipe off the
face of the earth.




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