Available here. Below is an excerpt:
SV: And one final question about feminism, a more philosophical question. I have always felt that you have a critical attitude towards the more extreme feminist views. I think of people like Andrea Dworkin and to some extent Catharine MacKinnon. To what extent has your intervention influenced this sort of more radical feminist? Have things changed do you think, have things become more balanced today?
MN: My view about MacKinnon and Dworkin is extremely positive, as I’ve said both in Sex and Social Justice and in Hiding From Humanity. I think that both are great and I have great enthusiasm for their views. I don’t agree with absolutely everything.
SV: You tend to be more universal, more ecumenical…
MN: MacKinnon thinks that she is an opponent of liberalism. And she thinks that, because when she went to graduate school liberalism was very underdeveloped and wasn’t thinking about women’s issues at all. Especially in law, liberalism was just talking about how all principles should be neutral, and so she thought that it makes no room for affirmative action. For example, there were insurance companies that did not give pregnancy benefits and legal liberals argued that this was OK, there is no sex discrimination here, because all non-pregnant persons, both male and female, are going to get the benefits. And she thought that this was ridiculous and of course it was. But that sort of obtuseness is not entailed by liberalism. She had never studied Rawls, she had never studied Dworkin, she had never studied any of the really theoretical works that think that there’s a Kantian idea of human equality and human dignity at the bottom of liberalism. She’s stressed that she had studied Mill, and she thought Mill was great, you know she is my colleague so I talk to her all the time. So she really objected to a kind of neutralism that was very influential in the legal realm, that made affirmative action for women impossible and refused to take seriously these differences of power. But of course Rawls never had that failing.
My primary difference with MacKinnon is that she is reluctant to express any universal norms or ideals. I think the reason for this is her Marxist background, because she thinks we first have to have the revolution and then once the revolution has taken place, women themselves will say what they want to say. She thinks it’s too dictatorial to announce ahead of time what the norms are. However, in her writings there’s a very obvious normative structure. There are ideas of dignity and equality. Andrea Dworkin is actually explicit about this, and in fact MacKinnon will say “Oh yes, that’s the humanism in Andrea that I always find so unfortunate.” She herself will admit that Andrea is sort of on my side in this debate. But I think she herself is, when you philosophically reconstruct her views. I don’t think you can do it without employing normative notions; to the extent that she does avoid them it just means that her own ideas are underdeveloped and that there’s not enough of a principled structure. I think that her views about sexual harassment are very, very important. Her emphasis on differences of power in the workplace is extremely important, as is her idea that what we have to look at is not just sameness or difference of treatment but the underlying structures of power. I think it’s a liberal idea. I differ with some of her specific claims about pornography. But I don’t actually think that’s so central.
SV: What do you think of Andrea Dworkin’s book Intercourse?
MN: Oh, I think Intercourse is a great book, I teach it all the time, but it’s not about pornography. Andrea Dworkin is a fiction writer really. She’s not a philosopher, so she doesn’t always write with a great deal of definitional precision. I wrote a piece which is in “Sex and Social Justice” about philosophers and prophets in which I contrasted myself with her with some kind of unease, because I think philosophers don’t want to move to the next step until they patiently make the right distinctions. Whereas I think Dworkin is a prophet. Her mentor was Frederick Douglass, she wants to get out there and denounce an evil. And like Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist, she doesn’t always define her terms precisely. So what I think she really is doing in Intercourse is saying that it’s not just this or that evil offender that we need to be worried about, it is social norms themselves. When men use force against women, it’s not enough to say: oh well that was a bad guy, or: that was a pervert, but that the problem is intrinsic to some of our social norms. Men think they have a right to use force in certain circumstances, when they’ve paid for the woman and they’ve got drunk and so on. Actually sociological evidence shows this. Edward Laumann, who is the greatest sociologist of American sexual behaviour, in his large tome called The Social Organization of Sexuality, said that the biggest problem that emerged from his careful survey of American sexual behaviour was a tremendous discrepancy between men’s perception of what is force in the sexual situation and women’s. Men simply don’t believe that they’re using force if the woman is drunk and they just go right ahead. And then the woman does think that that was force. So I think we made progress in having a social dialogue about that. But when Andrea Dworkin wrote, we hadn’t had that dialogue yet. Still in some states in America, we haven’t had it. Here is one case that was decided in Illinois quite recently. A woman who weighed 95 pounds was riding her bicycle in a forest preserve. A man who weighed 200 pounds came up to her and said: “Will you come with me into the forest? My girlfriend doesn’t satisfy my needs”. There is no one around, and he just picks her up off the bicycle and without struggling or fighting she goes along with his sexual demands in the woods. He was first convicted of rape, but the high court threw out the conviction saying she hadn’t struggled to the utmost. You see, she was alone; she probably would have died if she had struggled! That’s the kind of thing Andrea Dworkin is talking about. And the best criminal lawyers are very inspired by her and try to rewrite rape law and try to make it more adequate.
I think MacKinnon and Dworkin have made great contributions. MacKinnon happens to be a very good friend of mine by now also, but she is a great thinker I believe. I think MacKinnon is misunderstood as being a man-hater and that seems to me quite wrong. It’s not as if she hasn’t got some of the blame to bear for that because her writings are not systematic works. They’re public speeches that she delivered in the heat of the moment that were recorded and then published. If my only works were my recorded interviews I would probably be misunderstood. But she should have written a more patient philosophical book. A Feminist Theory of the State is not really that book, because it was her dissertation. It does not answer the questions that philosophers raise about her views. Her new book on international law and women’s human rights is in some ways her best, because its conceptual clarity is very evident.
Again, the full interview can be read here.
–Ann Bartow
Wonderful stuff: I’m sure I would not have come across this on my own. I think Nussbaum is one of our best contemporary philosophers. Her interests are wide and politically relevant, and she can speak outside the halls of professional philosophy without pandering to common prejudice or without the least bit condescension. And yet her scholarly erudition and intellectual acumen remains impeccable. [Although her fondness for Aristotle has not altered my conviction that Plato was–and is–the better philosopher.]
I concur on every point except the final one. I don’t disagree with your final point, I simply have no opinion as to whther Aristotle or Plato was the better philosopher!