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.DEVELOPMENT IS GOOD FOR HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE ENVIRONMENT 1. DEVELOPMENT IMPROVES HUMAN RIGHTS RECORDS Ismail Serageldin, Vice-President, Environmental Sustainable Development, World Bank, NURTURING DEVELOPMENT: AID AND COOPERATION IN TODAY’S CHANGING WORLD, 1995, p. 5-6. Women and minorities continue to suffer in most societies. Furthermore, with over 1 billion people going hungry every day, and the highly selective application of various UN sanctions or interventions, many feel that there is a certain hollow ring to the universal declaration of human rights and the more recent instruments all the way to the declaration of Vienna of 1993. There is a certain hypocrisy in a world system that recognizes the rights of citizens if they are on one side of that imaginary line we call a political frontier but not if they are on the other, and then claims to adhere to the universality of these basic rights. Reliance on markets, however, is not an ideological construct as much as a pragmatic adoption of what works. It was the failure of the centrally planned economies that led to the almost universal adoption of a free market stance in most countries. True, some ideologues are trying to elevate free markets to the level of ideology and to urge the elimination of government and the privatization of everything in sight. But most reasonable people do not adopt such extreme positions. They recognize that the ruthless efficiency of the market must be tempered by the compassion of a caring and nurturing government, much as justice must be tempered by mercy to be more than legalism. Furthermore, the needs of the public in terms of health, security, and environmental protection will require a degree of regulation and control and standard setting, even if pragmatically one would rely on incentives and markets to obtain the desired results.
Ismail Serageldin, Vice-Pres. Environmental Sustainable Development for World Bank, NURTURING DEVELOPMENT: AID AND COOPERATION IN TODAY’S CHANGING WORLD, 1995, p.43. Intuition suggests that economic growth causes environmental deterioration. Growth requires more raw material and energy inputs‑causing depletion of natural resources. And growth brings more output, which causes more pollution. Fortunately, as in many other areas, facts give little support to intuition. Careful statistical analysis demonstrates three patterns of relationship between income growth and environmental damage. These are illustrated in box figure 3‑6, which is derived from an analysis of cross-country data in the 1980s. Some problems decline as income increases. This happens because increasing income makes available the resources for society to provide public goods such as sanitation services and rural electricity, and once individuals no longer worry about day‑to‑day survival, they can devote resources to profitable investments in conservation. Polluted drinking water, lack of sewage facilities, indoor air pollution, and some types of soil erosion are examples of this type of relationship. Some problems initially deteriorate but then improve as incomes rise. Most forms of air and water pollution fit into this category, as do some types of deforestation and encroachment into natural habitats.
WORLD BANK INSTITUTE, 2000, Accessed May 1, 2000, www.worldbank.org. Most subnational governments, not only in countries in transition but also in developing and developed countries, should be unable to finance their capital investment responsibilities out of current savings. The same is true for public utilities, when (and if) they are decentralized. These companies typically also lack the necessary funds for rehabilitation, maintenance and expansion of their capital stock. The only practical solution to this problem is for both subnational governments and public utilities to borrow the necessary funds for new investments in capital infrastructure and for rehabilitation. Borrowing, all kinds of borrowing, is seen in many parts of the world as an undesirable activity. However, borrowing for justified and needed long-lived infrastructure is both efficient and equitable. To avoid abuses of future generations by the current generation, most countries only allow borrowing for capital investment purposes. The particular details across international practices vary widely. Borrowing is efficient because it allows subnational governments to make large lump-sum payments in order to acquire the necessary infrastructure and capital equipment for the provision of public services. In short, borrowing solves the problem of liquidity or the fact that current savings are inadequate for financing discontinuous capital investment needs.
“Mystical fervor, like love and even narcissism, can be integrated with a life of activity and independence. But in themselves these attempts at individual salvation are bound to meet with failure: either woman puts herself into relation with an unreality: her double, or God; or she creates an unreal relation with a real being. In both cases she lacks any grasp on the world; she does not escape her subjectivity; her liberty remains frustrated. There is only one way to employ her liberty authentically, and that is to project it through positive action into human society.” Simone DeBeauvoir, THE SECOND SEX (1989, p. 678.) It would be ridiculous to deny that for the first ninety nine percent of history, philosophy has been a male enterprise. Making that statement, however, also necessitates another admission, one which at first will sound like a capitulation to feminism. The admission is that men HAVE controlled the world for a very, very long time, not only philosophically, but also economically, spiritually and politically. Nor would anyone in their right mind deny that this has been unfair to and undesirable for women. Theories abound about how to correct this problem, but there is considerably less attention given to why the problem exists. Some have even gone so far as to defend patriarchy, refusing to even call it a problem; Hegel saw it as a necessary component of the structure of society, as natural as the biological process itself. But even he did not bother to explain why, when all is said and done, when we step away from the mire of interpersonal relations, there is this ‘difference’ between genders, why one is “weaker” than the other, why historically societies have generally (though not one hundred percent exclusively) chosen this difference as the basis for so much obvious social inequality. Engels, who in The Origin of the Family. Private Property, and the State sought to give a Marxist account of women’s oppression, and who in fact succeeded in at least pointing out the historical origin of the economic component of patriarchy, did not, however, explain “why” the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy took place. One is generally resigned to asserting that men have had the power just as the earth rotates around the sun. This, in fact, is more than a mere metaphor. Defenders of patriarchy, as well as certain types of radical feminists, often seek, and find in abundance, scientific evidence of differences between men and women which render certain types of tasks favorable to one or the other sex. But the question is not “why” they exist in the biological sense, but instead why we have been so capable of and willing to make those differences the basis of severe differences in social, economic, political and spiritual status. In a sense, patriarchy is the ultimate naturalistic fallacy. It argues that because those differences are there, they should be there. And, patriarchy is another fallacy, reasoning from the parts (biological differences) to the whole (society). Strange that I should begin an essay about how to “answer” feminism by admitting that patriarchy is bad, acknowledging by implication (and openly as well) that women should have the exact same legal, ethical and political status of men, in every situation except when necessary to remedy past injustices, in which case I will further admit that preferential treatment for women may well be justified for the same reason we might treat Blacks and other HISTORICALLY oppressed groups with appropriate corrective preference. Strange, yes, but patriarchy seems strange as well, and defending it is distasteful. This essay is not about whether or not sexism is good or bad, nor is it about my personal beliefs. This essay is about why the systematic and universalizing philosophy known as “feminism,” in most, if not all, of its versions, (1) seems very compelling and thus appeals to both women and the men who hate sexism; and (2) wins so many debate rounds. To this you may add a third purpose, trying to explain the most effective ways to ANSWER feminism when it is employed as a debate strategy. Knowing what one cannot justify is as important in deciding how to argue as is knowing what one can justify, and in this case, you are not going to win any debate rounds by arguing that women should be subordinate to men. You will win almost no rounds either by arguing that women have not been oppressed, and probably only the lucky one or two rounds denying the oppression that exists now. I will go even further, because these experiences can be verified across the debate spectrum: If you are a male, and your opponent runs feminism, and particularly if your opponent is a female, and even more particularly if your judge is also female, you will feel at a disadvantage. Sometimes that perception will be justified. Who we are is part of the arguments we make. And gender differences are among the most obvious of differences in our human experience; we can see them, hear them, and, theorists generally agree, we often think through them. No debate handbook is going to get us out of this condition, so my job is to tell you how to defeat the position argumentatively while not coming off as Rush Limbaugh or Andrew Dice Clay. This is a rhetorical as well as an argumentative job, and in many ways it demonstrates how rhetoric and argument are intimately linked, because the argument choices you make in arguing against feminism will enable, or disenable, your opponents to explain why someone “like you” would make such an argument. So the first thing you need to do is put aside any personal feelings you have against feminism and learn to respect it. You ought to always do this, of course, but it’s especially important here. You never need ridicule or dismiss something in order to beat it, but if you ridicule or ignore feminism, you will lose. I will begin by explaining, in careful, and seemingly tedious, detail, the general theory of feminism and its many divergent types. Then, I will delve into some “alternative” ways of seeing the problem of gender inequality. Admitting the existence of gender equality will be the most powerful rhetorical and argumentative tool at your disposal. It will immediately disarm a major assumed advantage for the position, and allow you to take the moral high ground by claiming your advocacy better addresses the problem. When answering comprehensive systems which attempt to explain oppression, positions such as Marxism, critical race theory, and feminism, it is also important to question the generalizations these theories make about the groups who are oppressed and the groups who are doing the oppressing. For while no one can deny that in a general sense “women” are exploited, it does not follow from this that a comprehensive theory can cover all that oppression. Women of color are oppressed differently than white women; while this sounds like a trivialization, the interesting thing about such theories is that the real people you meet in everyday life who belong to these oppressed groups seldom have much sympathy for the theories intended to liberate them. Herein lies another very important approach to the debate: When female authors are writing very powerful indictments of feminism, one can assume that something is probably wrong with femimsm. Marx is said to have had little patience with actual members of the working class who did not blindly follow his views (of course Marx was said to have had little patience with anyone at all except his family). Likewise, is the theory of feminism, which ought to be true to its subject, the real, “rank and file’ women of the world, guilty of the same charge that can be made against all theory? That it is removed from everyday experience and often makes universalizing assumptions which undermine its practical application? If so, then perhaps feminism should be more suspect than other theories for that flaw, precisely because feminism so proudly claims its exclusive privilege to understand and liberate women. Still another powerful option is to explain how the theory is, in fact, so far removed from reality that it is guilty of explaining patriarchy in a way which actually results in greater oppression of women. In this case, as we shall see, many feminists make arguments about differences between men and women that smack of the same arguments patriarchy has made about those differences. Such arguments prove the need to scrutinize all theories, especially theories of liberation. As some authors in this section will argue, feminism often avoids critical, logical scrutiny, on the grounds that “logic” is the handmaiden of patriarchy. This makes it difficult to deal with philosophically, but that evasiveness might be feminism’s Achilles’ Heel; as Ellen Klein will argue below, women need logic as much as men do. 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