Feminism and Justice (Lloyd) • Private - governed by natural ties of sentiment and blood and

marriage relationships; there is no individualism, only natural

- Okin: Rawls’ Theory of Justice failed to take into account to address subordination (!!)

justice within the family and the selection of primary goods

- By the separation of the spheres, the need to examine the domestic
- Carol Gilligan: There is a “different voice” — there is a contrast between life disappears, and only reappears when inequalities of gender are
an ethics of justice and rights and an ethic of care and relationship
scrutinized by female thinkers.

• Lyons: explains this “different voice” as [A/N depends on how one

views him/herself]
Liberal feminism

- Those who view the self as separated from others are more likely to - This was the dominant school of thought for a long time. It was rooted in
voice a morality of justice
the belief that women are rights-bearing, autonomous human beings, and
- Those who see the self as connected to others to express a in this are no different from men. [A/N argument is centralized on
morality of care
similarities or sameness of the sexes] Accordingly, they should have equal
• Lloyd: This could be used to confining women within the private opportunities.

sphere, and to explain (however inadequately) why theories of justice • Critics were concerned that an assimilationist theory of equality was
have so little penetrated the family, as well as to argue for greater being adopted that would benefit women only if they acted like men.

participation of women in the public arena (and then to express • Because of this limitation, the feminist approach to justice, rather its
disappointment when nothing happens)
approach to questions of jurisprudence generally became more radical.

- Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract: Sexual subordination of women

in marriage is both required by, and an effect of, the social contract.
Radical Feminism
• Social contract to make civil society and state without a sexual - Iris Marion Young - claims that it is “a mistake to reduce social justice to
contract which subordinates women in marriage.
distribution.” Social justice is the “elimination of institutionalized
• Locke must be interpreted more than a critique of patriarchalism, but domination and oppression”

must be seen as an advocate of relocation.

• She proposes a theory of justice that addresses injustice.

- He separated political right from paternal right: the liberal foundation - Theories of justice rarely talk about the concept of social groups;
of free and equal men in a civil society required that patriarchalism Young believes that where there are social group differences, there is
be relocated from the political to private domain.
an inevitable concomitant: some groups are privileged, some are
• Lloyd: that may be so but it is not clear why liberalism today requires a oppressed.

social contract. It may be argued that not only liberalism, but also - Social justice requires explicit acknowledging and attending to those
women’s subordination, can be sustained without recourse to such group differences in order to undermine oppression.

device.
• Distributive issues remain important but it has been expanded to
- Levels of perception: (1) Locke’s separation was that of a the include “the political, as such, that is all aspects of institutional
paternal from the political; (2) separation of the public (all social life organization insofar as they are potentially subject to collective
except domestic) and private (domestic) spheres.
decision.”

- Principles of association governing the 2 spheres are different:

• But oppression and domination are the primary terms for
• Public - governed by liberal criteria (rights, property, equality)
conceptualizing injustice.

- Young focuses on differences. She argues for a “politics that recognizes

rather than represses differences.”

 • Oppression can result from tyranny but most is the result of everyday
practices of well-intentioned liberal society. It results from often
unconscious assumptions and reactions of well-meaning people in
ordinary interactions, media and cultural stereotypes, and structural
features of bureaucratic hierarchies and market mechanisms — or the
normal processes of everyday life.
Other.
respectability before they are even accorded with respect, as opposed
to white men.
• Cultural imperialism - to experience how the dominant meanings of a
society render the particular perspective of one’s own group invisible at
the same time as they stereotype one group and mark it out as the

• Her theory extrapolates from the experiences of oppressed groups and - Nancy Fraser, following Charles Taylor, talks of politics of
from the assumption that “basic equality in life situation for all persons recognition. She claims that the challenge is to combine just claims
is a moral value.”
for redistribution and recognition so that each supports rather than
- Young’s 5 faces of oppression:
undermines the other.

• Exploitation - she draws upon Marx: oppression occurs through a - The injustice of cultural imperialism is that the “oppressed group’s
steady process of the transfer of the results of labor of one social group own experience and interpretation of social life finds little expression
to benefit another. Exploitation enacts a structural relations between that touches the dominant culture; while the same culture imposes
social groups
on the oppressed group its experience and its interpretation of social
- Marx: the mediating principle is class
life.
- Young: gender and race; for gender, it has two aspects:
• Systematic violence - examples are sexual assault, domestic violence,
• Transfer of fruits of material labor to mean
racist attacks, institutional racism by the police.

• Transfer of nurturing and sexual energies to women

- Young: what makes violence a phenomenon of social injustice, not
• Marginalization - marginals are “people the system of labor cannot merely an individual moral wrong, is its systematic character, its
and will not use.” Distributive justice may address material deprivation existence as a social practice.

but there is injustice beyond distribution.

- If rights and economic resources were justly distributed, would these
- The provision of welfare produces injustice by depriving those forms of injustices arise?

dependent on it of rights and freedoms that others have.

• It is difficult to imagine these faces of oppression extirpated without
- Even when material deprivation is mitigated by the welfare state, redistributive justice. But it may be doubted that [redistributive justice]
marginalization is unjust because it blocks the opportunity to would remove any of the categories of oppression Young lists.

exercise capacities in socially defined and recognized ways.

• They call for structural and cultural changes: some of them

- Part of marginalization is the designation as appropriate subjects for

“patronizing, punitive, demeaning, and arbitrary treatment by the Feminist Moral Theory

policies and the people associated with welfare bureaucracies”

- Young notes that: “this ‘ethics of rights’ corresponds poorly to the social
• Being a dependent in our society implies being legitimately relations typical of family and personal life, whose moral orientation
subject to the often arbitrary and invasive authority of social requires not detachment from, but engagement in and sympathy with the
service providers and other public and private administrators who particular parties in a situation; it requires not principles that apply to all
enforce rules with which the marginal must comply. people in the same way, but a nuanced understanding of the
• Powerlessness - it is the lack of authority, status, and sense of self. particularities of the social context and the needs particular people have
They also lack autonomy and respect. It is seen starkly in the dynamics and express within it.

of racism and sexism — men of color and women have to prove their • Young’s argument: the ideal of impartiality in moral theory “expresses a
logic of identity that seeks to reduce differences to unity.”

 - The stances of detachment and dispassion that supposedly - Young: Alternative to justice is CARE.

produced impartiality are attained only by abstracting from
particularities of situation, feeling, affiliation, and point of view.
define a context in which each person can pursue their ends without
- Lloyd: though this critique is on one level extravagant (it would seem
to require the rejection of rules altogether), its core reveals an
important truth (that the logic of identity denies or represses
• Theory of justice that limits it to formal and universal principles that
hindering the ability of others to pursue theirs entails “not merely too
limited a conception of social life, but too limited a conception of
justice”

difference).
• Instead of a fictional contract, what is required is the real participatory
• It shoves difference into dichotomous hierarchal oppositions: structures which actual people, with their geographical, ethnic, gender
essence/accident, good/bad, normal/deviant
and occupational differences, assert their perspectives on social issues
• It privileges the first part of the dichotomy as the “unified” and the that encourage representation of their distinct voices.

second part as the “chaotic, unformed”

• Young: oppressed groups should have a guaranteed role in policy-
• Young’s argument, following postmodernists Adorno, Derida, and making. Group representation implies institutional mechanisms and
Irigaray: “…any identifiable something presupposes a something else public resources supporting 3 activities

against which stands as background, from which it is differentiated. No - Self-organization of group members to achieve understanding of
utterance can have meaning unless it stands out differentiated from collective experience and interests

another.”
- Group analysis and formation of policy proposals in institutionalized
- Lloyd: the irony of the logic of identity is that “by seeking to reduce contexts

the differently similar to the same, it turns the merely different into - Group veto power regarding specific policies that affect the group
the absolutely other.”
directly

- Young: we should move beyond the impartial point of view; a view from • Lloyd: Re this activities:

nowhere which carries the perspective, attributes, character, and interests - self-organization: may be a vocal but unrepresentative group
of no particular subject or set of subjects.
propagating their own self-interest (read: not all women, for example,
• It denies difference in 3 ways:
think alike! For example, views on abortion and reproductive health).
- Denies particularity of situations
it raises question as to group identity

- The requirement of dispassion seeks to “eliminate heterogeneity in - Policy-making: uncontentious. no question to this.

the form of feeling.”

- Veto power: “the precise mechanisms of accountability and exact
- Reduces plurality of moral subject to
degrees of representation matter”. Consequences of veto power
• She looks at Rawls’ original position (justice as fairness) as should also be considered! Example, in a Christian country, votes of
monological. The goal of impartiality may be impossible (an idealist christians would weigh more than the oppressed muslim group.

fiction) but it has practical effects:

• Lloyd: Does the politics of difference reject tolerance of
- Supports the idea of neutral state
difference?

- Legitimate bureaucratic authority and hierarchal decision-making - Young: Affirmative action. It challenged the “primacy of a principle of
processes, thus diffusing demands for democratic decision-making.
nondiscrimination and the conviction that persons should be treated only
- It reinforces oppression by representing the point of view of as individuals and not as members of groups”.

privileged groups into a universal position.

• Young is critical of 2 liberal ideas: hierarchal division of labor is
• this may be a shortfall of impartiality but what if the POV of the unproblematic and just; distribution of positions should be according to
oppressed is not heard, can there be real impartiality?
merit

 - Merit - a class of powerful people establishes normative criteria.

I.M. YOUNG
• Young: decisions that establish and apply criteria of qualification should Defining Injustice as Domination and Oppression
be made democratically.

- Young: Discrimination is NOT the problem, it is the oppression that comes (tl;dr she criticizes distributive justice for 2 reasons: limiting justice to material goods, and not
considering rights, power, opportunity and self-respect; and, treating non-material goods and
with it. Equality can be better served by differential treatment.
burdens as something distributable just like the material goods and burdens would in the end
Discrimination, like injustice more generally is embedded within structure.
distort their very nature)

• For Young, the focus is on how decisions get made, as much, if not
more than the context of decisions.
- Justice should not be conceived primarily on the model of distribution of
wealth, income, and other material goods (distributive justice)

- Her position shifts the focus from distributive patterns to procedural

issues of participation in deliberation and decision-making.

• For a social condition to be just, it must enable all to meet their needs
and exercise freedom; thus justice requires that all be able to express
their needs.

- The scope of justice is more that distribution; social injustice is claimed by

a person who believes that a particular rule, practice, or cultural meaning
is wrong. And while some of these claims may involve distribution, a lot
may also refer to other ways in which a social institution may inhibit or
liberate a person.

- Persons are possessors and consumers, but they are also doers and
actors: we do not only seek distributive justice, but also different values
other than material values.

- Social justice concerns the degree to which a society contains and

supports the institutional conditions necessary for the realization of these
[general] values (in the good life):

• Developing and exercising one’s capacities and expressing one’s

experience.

• Participating and determining one’s actions and the conditions of one’s

actions

- These universalist values assume the equal moral worth of all persons,
and thus justice requires the promotion for everyone. And to there values
correspond 2 social conditions that define injustice:

• Oppression - institutional constraint on self-development

• Domination - the institutional constraint on self-determination

- Oppression and domination overlap; but there is reason to distinguish

them. Oppression usually entails domination, but not all subject to
domination is oppressed.

Five Faces of Oppression (see above for summary nalang)

2. Marginalization

1. Exploitation
- Marginals are the people the system of labor cannot and will not
- Oppression occurs though a steady process of transfer of results of use.

labor of one social group to benefit another

- Marginalization is perhaps the most dangerous form of oppression
- Exploitation enacts a structural relation between social groups. because a whole category of people is expelled from useful
Social rules about what work is, who does what for whom, how participation in social life and thus potentially subjected to sever
work is compensated, and social process by which the results of material deprivation and even extermination

work are appropriated operate to enact relations of power and - Material deprivation may be addressed by distributive justice but it
inequality.
is not the only harm caused by marginalization. 2 categories of
- Marxist concept of exploitation is too narrow to encompass all injustice are associated with marginalization:

forms of domination and oppression: it leaves important phenomena • The provision of welfare itself produces new injustice by
of sexual and racial oppression unexplained.
depriving those dependent on it of rights and freedoms others
- Feminists, however, have had little difficulty to show women’s have

oppression consists partly in a systematic and unreciprocated • Even when material deprivation is somewhat mitigated by
transfer of powers from women to men.
welfare state, marginalization is unjust because it blocks the
• It consists not merely in an inequality of status, power, and opportunity to exercise capacities in socially defined and
wealth resulting from men’s excluding them from privileged recognized ways.

activities.
- An important contribution of feminist moral theory has been to
• The freedom, power, status, and self-realization of men is question the deeply held assumption that moral agency and full
possible precisely because women work for them.
citizenship require that a person be autonomous and independent.

• Gender exploitation has 2 aspects:

• This is individualistic and derived from a specifically male
1. Transfer of fruits of material labor to men
experience of social relations. Female social experience would
2. Transfer of nurturing and sexual energies to women
recognize dependence as a basic human condition, so
- Labor (Christine Delphy): marriage, a class relation where women’s dependency should not be a reason to deprive a person of
labor benefit men without comparable renumeration.
choice and respect.

- Sex-affective production (Ann Ferguson): women provide men and - While marginalization entails serious issues of distributive justice, it
children emotional care, while providing men with sexual also involves the deprivation of cultural, practical, and
satisfaction. Gender socialization of women make them more institutionalized conditions for exercising capacities in a context of
nurturing.
recognition and interaction.

- Traditionally, gender exploitation focused on the institutional 3. Powerlessness

structure of a patriarchal family. Now, feminists have begun to - Powerlessness means the lack of authority, status, and sense of self
explore gender exploitation in contemporary workplace through the that professionals tend to have.

state.
- The status privilege of professionals have 3 aspects which produces
• Men have removed themselves from care of children, and oppression of non-professionals:

women have become dependent on the state for subsistence as • Acquiring and practicing a profession has an expansive,
they continue to bear total responsibility for child bearing.
progressive character but it usually requires college education.
Nonprofessionals are powerless in a sense that they lack an
 orientation towards the progressive development of capacities oppression. Most, if not all, violent oppression is the direct result of
and avenues for recognition
xenophobia (an intense and irrational fear of people, ideas, or
• Professionals have autonomy and some authority over others.
customs that seem strange or foreign).

• Privileges of professionals extend beyond their work-life. Young - Given the frequency, why are theories of justice usually silent about
calls this “respectability.”
it? Young thinks that it is because theorist usually do not think of
- Respectability appears starkly in the dynamics of racism and those as matters of social injustice.

sexism: men of color and women must prove their respectability as • Young argues that what makes violence a face of oppression is
opposed to white men!
because of the social context surrounding them. What makes it
- Injustices associated with powerlessness: inhibition in the a phenomenon of social injustice and not merely an individual
development of one’s capabilities, lack of decision-making power in moral wrong is its systemic character, its existence as a social
one’s working life, and exposure to disrespectful treatment because practice.

of the status one occupies.

- Violence is systemic because it is directed at member of a group
4. Cultural imperialism
simply because they are members of that group.

- It involves the universalization of a dominant group’s experience and • e.g. women have reason to fear rape, black men have
culture and its establishment as the norm. As a consequence, the reasonable fear of being subject to attack or harassment

dominant cultural products of the society, that is, those most widely - The oppression of violence consists not only in the direct
disseminated, express the experience, values, goals, and victimization, but in the daily knowledge shared by all members of
achievements of this group.
oppressed groups that they are liable to violation solely on the
- On the other hand, those culturally dominated undergo a account of their group identity.

paradoxical oppression where they are marked out by stereotypes - Violence is a social practice in a sense that everyone knows it
and at the same time rendered invisible. As remarkable, deviant happens and that it will happen again. It is always at the horizon of
beings, the culturally imperialized are stamped with an essence.
social imagination.

- Double consciousness — “a sense wherein one looks at oneself - An important aspect of systemic violence is irrationality.

through the ayes of another, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of - Cultural imperialism intersects with violence. Culturally imperialized
a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”
may reject dominant meanings and attempt to assert their own
• It arises when the oppressed subject refuses to coincide with subjectivity which may be a source of irrational violence.

these devalued, objectified, stereotyped visions of him/herself.

- Violence is a form of injustice that distributive injustice seems ill-
5. Violence
equipped to address, which may be the reason why it is rarely
- Many groups suffer oppression of systemic violence. Members of mentioned.

some groups live with the knowledge that they must fear random, - To the extent that social practices encourages, tolerate, or enable
unprovoked attacks on their persons or property, which have no the perpetration of violence must be reformed which may requrie
motive but to damage, humiliate, or destroy the person.
redistribution of resources and positions, but can come largely
- n American society, women, Blacks, Asians, Arabs, gay men, and through change in cultural images, stereotypes, and the mundane
lesbians live under such threats of violence. And in at least some reproduction of relations of dominance and aversions to gestures of
regions, Jews, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, and other Spanish- everyday life.
speaking Americans must fear violence as well. All forms of sexual
violence and hate crimes are prevalent examples of violent