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The Impossibility And Necessity Of Ethics
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The Impossibility And Necessity Of EthicsSartre once remarked that any ethics which fails to admit of its own essential impossibility contributes to ethical failure. By this he meant that ethics are rules which humans invent, fully aware that we can never live up to them, but feeling as if we need them anyway. Such an attitude is similar to Simone DeBeauvoir’s view that ethical choices are inevitable, even if ethical systems themselves are not always philosophically valid. Existentialism holds that humans make their own values, just as we make ourselves in every way through the sum total of choices we adopt and actions and attitudes we take or assume. Within that view of the world, it is generally acknowledged that there is no “higher source” which makes actions or ethical systems “right” or ‘wrong.” Actions and ethics can, then, only be validated or rejected with regard to the people concerned with them. This makes individuals (and groups) absolutely responsible for their lives. But many people, DeBeauvoir argues, respond to this “moral void” by celebrating the darkness of the valueless life. She points out that nihilism is dangerous because it is a glorification of the negative, rather than an attempt to fill the void with one’s own personal meaning. Nihilists, she says, are true cowards because they escape from the necessity of making our own values in accordance with what we consider to be a life worth living. The consequences of such nihilism are dangerous because nihilists often give themselves over to the sheer, raw, cynical power of hatred and to the love of power itself, and this leads to totalitarian movements such as Nazism. Only in embracing one’s own values, wherever they are chosen or made, can an individual feel secure enough in his or her own individuality that he or she would not think of supporting such oppressive or hateful movements like Nazism. This is also true because, as is so often ignored by students of existentialism, my freedom does not simply exist in myself, but is constantly contingent upon the gestures and recognition of other free people. We exist and make our values together, even if we ultimately commit to them as individuals. Nihilism also removes the connection we have, as free individuals, to other people, making acts of great cruelty possible. The Woman QuestionSimone DeBeauvoir, considered a “mother” of contemporary feminism, never referred to herself as a feminist. She never advanced a philosophical system called feminism. What she did do was frame the question of being a woman in terms accessible to most women in 20th Century Europe and the United States, whether those women considered themselves feminists or not. She did this by initially and honestly admitting that although she didn’t know what it really meant to “be a woman,” she knew it was the first thing she would ever say about herself when defining herself, and she figured this was probably the case with most women. For DeBeauvoir, the question of male oppression is historical and ethical as well as political. In The Second Sex she traces the historical roots of women’s subordination and concludes that there may be no systematic explanation for it, at least no explanation which can lend itself to systematic reform. What needs to happen, she argues, is for women to consciously empower themselves, individual woman by individual woman, through economic and spiritual emancipation from men. Although she acknowledges that men may resist such emancipation (and also points out that many women enjoy the pedestal which patriarchy occasionally places them on), she does not see a solution which can be implemented quickly and comprehensively, and she does not feel that feminine emancipation requires an abandonment of the present base and superstructure of society. In prescribing individual economic empowerment as a solution to women’s oppression, DeBeauvoir distances herself from two schools of thought which see the problem and solution differently. First, she rejects Marxian socialism as ill-equipped to deal with the problem of women, not only because Marxism is too collectivist and historicist to do justice to the validity of individual human experience, but also because Marxism sees the problem of women’s rights in the same eyes with which it views the antagonism between labor and capital; and, DeBeauvoir says, women’s bodies are not factories, and women have unique problems which male workers do not have. Second, DeBeauvoir rejects “essentialist” or radical feminist theories which call for the separation of women from men and the cultivation of special feminist values and a women’s culture distinct from “patriarchy.” Again, DeBeauvoir does not think that the “male” world of philosophy, business and enterprise is bad because it is “male.” It may be bad for other reasons; it may require some revolutionary change (even, she admits, a socialist change), but it is not bad simply because males inhabit it. And as long as that is the world before us, women would do well to become actualized and independent in that world. Feminisms which mystify the feminine (in the form of goddess worship or the glorification of childbearing and menstruation, etc.) simply continue oppression by separating women and glorifying the very attributes which weaken their participation in society. Not Enough Of A Feminist?Such dismissal of radical feminism leads many critics to accuse DeBeauvoir of complicity in the oppression of women. It can be pointed out that her tendency to privilege the social world (mostly dominated by males and masculine values) over some alternative feminine world is simply her way of ignoring the uniqueness of womanhood. In other words, by arguing that women must become more economically viable, competitive and socially adept, DeBeauvoir may simply be saying that in order for women to stop being oppressed as women, they “just need to become more like men.” This is a typical criticism leveled against many liberal feminists, such as Betty Friedan, and its charge against DeBeauvoir places her squarely in the liberal camp. Moreover, why does DeBeauvoir ignore the need for collective action? Even if many women were to follow her prescription and try to gain economic emancipation, this would only result in a few women being happier. The laws, social customs and economic makeup of society would still be largely in the hands of men. And the fact that these women would need to act like men in order to become emancipated would only further strengthen patriarchy. Many radical feminists and socialists argue that the entire structures of society must change before real change can benefit all women. While valid as arguments pertaining to the political philosophy espoused by DeBeauvoir, these objections may be based on a misunderstanding of her purpose for writing The Second Sex in the first place. The book was not a political manifesto, nor was it a philosophical principia devoted to unmasking patriarchy and offering a replacement for it. It was one woman’s attempt, at least as that woman tells it, to understand oppression and marginalization in today’s world, which means a world full of capitalism, competition and material considerations. Since DeBeauvoir knew most women were not as privileged as she herself had been, she also knew that those women would not feel at all aided in their personal lives by reading about prescribed changes in social structures or collective consciousness. What they wanted was to hear what a well-read woman had to say about being a woman, and how one can be a woman and still be a human being. In that, she largely succeeded. And given DeBeauvoir’s disenchantment with Stalinist Communism, it is likely she eschewed large-scale social experiments (conducted by men) to solve the inner, subjective dilemmas of womanhood. Directory: uploads uploads -> 587 Return function, r i(X) r i(0) r i(1) r i(2) r i(3) 1 0 2 4 6 Thermal Station, I 2 0 1 5 6 3 0 3 5 6 10 uploads -> Department of science and humanities department of mathematics part-a questions and answers uploads -> The Case Against the nypd’s Quota-Driven ‘Broken Windows’ Policing What Is It? uploads -> For want of a nail uploads -> Ownership Models There are two different types of ownership models uploads -> Police Militarization uploads -> City of rising star regular meting thursday, july 14, 2016 uploads -> Township of winfield uploads -> Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2014 uploads -> The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program What We Want Now! Download 5.81 Mb. Share with your friends:
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