Notes to pages 73–83 ( 227 )
- Onora O’Neill, “Abstraction, Idealization and Ideology in Ethics,” in J. D. G. Evans,
ed., Moral Philosophy and Contemporary Problems (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987); Onora O’Neill, “Justice, Gender, and International Boundaries,” in
Martha C. Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, eds., The Quality of Life (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1993).
- O’Neill, “Abstraction, Idealization,” p. 56.
- John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999;
orig. ed. 1971), p. 8.
- Jaggar, “Ethics Naturalized,” p. 453.
- Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology: Collected Works, vol. 5
(New York: International Publishers, 1976), pp. 35– 36.
- Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth July?” in William L. Andrews, ed.,
The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 116.
- In her Analyzing Oppression (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), Ann Cudd
points out how under- theorized oppression is in the Western philosophical tradition—
despite the obvious (one would think) fact that oppression should be the central concern
of a discourse on justice— and links this otherwise puzzling characteristic to the tradi-
tional demographic base of the profession. Though he does not draw from it the political
conclusions that Cudd and I would, Samuel Fleischacker has documented another strik-
ing fact: that contrary to conventional wisdom, distributive justice in our contemporary
sense is actually only a bit more than 200 years old. Pre- modern conceptions such as
Aristotle’s tied justice to social status rather than simple humanity and did not extend to
property rights: Samuel Fleischacker, A Short History of Distributive Justice (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Bluntly stated (by me, not Fleischacker), Western
normative theory has for most of its 2,500- year existence been a discourse of complicity
with injustice.
- It can, admittedly, serve the interests of particular individuals in these groups, who can
then be anointed by the establishment as the female or black dissident “courageous”
enough to speak out against the “victim mentality” of his or her peers (with appropriate
rewards and recognition for said courage to follow)— but not the interests of the group as
a whole. My thanks to Margaret Urban Walker for reminding me of this important point.
- Here the following obvious objection might be raised: isn’t A Theory of Justice a work
in ideal theory that, especially with the rightward shift in the United States in the four
decades since it first appeared, articulates a radical political vision now far outside of the
mainstream? My response would be this: (a) To the extent that the radical egalitarian tilt
of Rawls’s book is justified by advertence to the ways in which people are disadvantaged
by their class background, it is drawing precisely on (a subsection of ) the non- ideal facts
that non- ideal theory sees as crucial, and so in this respect is departing from pure ideal
theory. But even here, Rawls’s left- liberalism leaves him open to criticisms from those on
the Marxist left with a less sanguine, arguably more realistic, picture of the unjust effects
of the class inequalities his theory leaves intact— see, for example, the criticisms of R. G.
Peffer, Marxism, Morality, and Social Justice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1990). (b) As will be discussed in greater detail later, his idealization of the family and
marginalization of the history of US slavery and Jim Crow so shape the book that it does
not address gender and racial oppression and what measures would be necessary to dis-
mantle them and achieve gender and racial justice. So its radicalism, praiseworthy as it is,
is basically restricted to issues along a (white male) class axis.
- See, for example, Brad Hooker and Margaret Olivia Little, eds., Moral Particularism
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000).
- See, for example, the exchange between Susan Moller Okin and Jane Flax: Susan Moller
Okin, “Gender Inequality and Cultural Difference,” Political Theory 22, no. 1 (February
1994): 5– 24; Jane Flax, “Race/ Gender and the Ethics of Difference,” Political Theory 23,
no. 3 (August 1995): 500– 510; Susan Moller Okin, “A Response to Jane Flax,” Political
Theory 23, no. 3 (August 1995): 511– 16.
- Sandra Harding, ed., The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political
Controversies (New York: Routledge, 2003).
