Date: Thu, 26 Feb 1998 19:09:57 -0500
From: Yoshie Furuhashi <Furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Easy Virtue or Hard Choices (was ethics and intentions


Carrol wrote:
>Justin's emphasis on "hard choices" is a classical case in which the old
>cliche of "petty bourgeois moralism" holds concretely. It is only in the
>last few centuries that "choice for the sake of choice" has become such a
>fetish. Justin not only predicts that there will always be hard choices,
>whether he will admit it to himself or not, he really believes that a
>world without hard choices would be a sub-human world. To be human is to
>choose, and choice is meaningless unless it is "hard."

>I agree with Yoshie that there is no necessity for such "hard choices" to
>exist in a minimally decent society, or at most to be marginal. I do not
>think it even remotely utopian to believe such, since in fact humanity got
>along very well without bourgeois morality (i.e. a morality of "hard
>choices") for about 100,000 years.
>
>My prime example of what seems to me an absolute LUST FOR HARD CHOICES is
>the insistence of so many people that though they are fully for freedom of
>choice on the issue of abortion, they want that choice to be a HARD CHOICE
>for the woman. So I would further suggest that the LUST FOR HARD CHOICES
>is most often at least a remnant of patriarchy, more often positive
>misogyny. It was in opposition to this lust that I insisted in an earlier
>debate that we had no right to question a woman's reasons for abortion,
>and that if she wanted one on a whim, there was no reason to condemn or
>even frown on that choice.

Damn right, Carrol. Moralism is always pornographic. It is almost true that
the "LUST FOR HARD CHOICES is most often at least a remnant of patriarchy,
more often positive misogyny." But I want to make a qualification. It is
not a "remnant" of patriarchy. It is a defining feature of the marriage of
capitalism and patriarchy, which was not widespread before its emergence.
Cultural forms that emerged with capitalism (such as the bourgeois novel
and melodrama) thrive on the *sadistic gaze* cast upon *female agony* as
well as *masochistic identification* with it; visions of women racked by
HARD CHOICES are materials out of which both generic and gendered
discourses of bourgeois individualism have been staged.

>It has been 50 years since I read Ibsen's *The Wild Duck*, and I can't
>remember whether that play is "really" a celebration of this lust for hard
>choices or a vitriolic satire on it, but in any case the play revolves in
>one direction or another around the issue.

Depends on who reads it, I think. I'll go read it again later.

Yoshie




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