الفهرس 
Autonomy” and the ”Moral Subject” in Kantian and Feminist EthicsOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
 |  | from | 267 |  |  |
| | | from | 267 | | |
Abstract
This thesis is divided into three chapters; chapter one is entitled,
”Autonomy” and the ”Moral Subject” in Kantian and Feminist Ethics.
This chapter tackles two major concepts. First, ”Autonomy”, which is a
key concept in moral philosophy, developed by the German philosopher
Immanuel Kant. ’Autonomy’ in Kant’s philosophy is often used as the
basis for determining moral responsibility for one’s own actions
(Groundwork,p.38). Second, the ”Moral Subject” a term coined by
Karen Green, in her book The Woman of Reason. This term is Green’s
feminist re-working of Kant’s concept of ”Moral Autonomy”. The
difference between both terms is that Kant’s concept is purely intellectual
based on his speculative philosophy and his universal approach, whereas
feminist ethics, on the other hand, locates the female self within a
specifically social-economic environment.
In The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant distinguishes
two parts of moral philosophy: Ethics or moral philosophy may be
divided on the basis of whether it is pure or empirical. Kant states that,
”Pure philosophy” deals ”only with a priori concepts or concepts that
occur to us independent of any experience or sensual perception”(p.217).
By contrast, ”empirical philosophy” ”deals with the objects we experience
in the world around us”(p.217). Kant argues that if moral ideas were
drawn from experience, then they could not be assured universal validity,
for they may be universally valid only if they are based on the validity of
a priori concepts”(p.315). Or in other words, ”our moral thinking is not
based on an understanding of nature or disposition, but rather on
universally applicable concepts that we can apply in all circumstances.
In this sense, the ethics of Immanuel Kant is often contrasted with that
of David Hume. Hume’s moral philosophy or Hume’s approach to ethics
could be called empirical or experimental. In the second book of The
Treatise of Human Nature, Hume seeks to displace a priori conceptions
of human nature and morality with an approach according to which
everything about us is open to empirical investigation and to explanation
in naturalistic terms. Hume’s empirical moral philosophy is grounded in a
posteriori principles, or ”principles inferred through observation or
experience” (Treatise, p.217). On the other hand, Kant assured that
morality’s commands are unconditional and autonomous in such a way
that we could never discover a principle or a moral law that commands all
rational beings with such absolute authority through a method of empirical moral philosophy. Therefore, In The Critique of Practical
Reason, Kant defines ”autonomy” as ”an action which is determined by
the subject’s own free will and the moral action is defined as being
autonomous”(p.74), Kant says when ”we will autonomously we must
abstract from all objects of the will to this extent: that they have no
influence at all on the will”(p.77). This seems to imply that a person wills
autonomously only when he/she completely detaches him/herself from
the influence of his/her own desires and emotions, as well as from all
social and even casual influences.
In Kant’s philosophy, ―Morality works according to categorical
imperative‖. Kant argued that ”a categorical imperative is an absolute,
unconditional requirement where someone was obliged to act morally,
out of duty”(p.90). In Kantian ethics,” duty‖ refers to ―self-constraint in
opposition to inclinations that oppose reason‖ (p.89). Kant gives the name
”duty‖ to all actions we have moral reasons to do. But, of course, human
agents also have subjective impulses, desires and inclinations that may
contradict the dictates of reason. Such imperatives may be called
hypothetical, or that is ”simply stem from laws of self-interest and
feelings”(p.91).
The moral subject in Kantian ethics is identified with and by moral
freedom and the will and reason to enact it. In this sense, the moral
subject acts according to a law, he himself dictates, not according to the
dictates of passion or impulse or rules of action that have been
legislated externally to it. Kant believes that ”freedom does not consist
in being bound by no law, but by laws that are in some sense of one’s own
making”(Groundwork, p.97). A person with a free, autonomous will
does not simply act but is able to reflect and decide whether to act
in a given way. This act of deliberation distinguishes an ’autonomous will’
from a’ heteronomous will’, which is thus defines as ”such a will that is
always submitting itself to some other end, or in other words, submitting
itself to the commands of the hypothetical imperatives, while the
autonomous will, on the other hand, is entirely free and selflegislating”(p.80).
Feminist ethicists suggest that the pure rational autonomous moral
subject of the Kantian tradition is an ethical nightmare in which ethics is
divorced from the emotional and sexual realities of human existence. In
this sense and as long as Kant was insufficiently sensitive to the great
variety of individual experience, feminist ethics is born in women’s
refusal to endure with grace the arrogance, indifference, hostility, and
damage of oppressively sexist environments. Feminist ethicists view that
- 245 -
people men as well as women grow up with different cultures and
different beliefs, and to them it seems that moral laws cannot be universal
only because everybody’s culture and surroundings are not universal. The
major objective of feminist ethics is to criticize Kant’s moral philosophy
for being strictly speculative and ignoring the social and the
psychological conditions which are responsible for woman’s oppression,
thus making her unaware of her moral responsibility towards her own
oppression. Kant had written in ”Groundwork of the Metaphysic of
Morals” ”I hardly believe that the fair sex is capable of principles”(p.29).
And in his view, women’s philosophy is not to reason, but to sense. On
the basis of this weakness, the woman legitimately asks for masculine
protection. Because of their natural fear, women are also viewed as
unsuited for scholarly work. Kant mockingly describes the scholarly
women who ”use their books somewhat like a watch, that is, they wear
the watch so it can be noticed that they have one, although it is usually
broken or does not show the correct time” (Anthropology, p.221).
Feminist ethics, by contrast, begins from the convictions that the
subordination of women is morally wrong and that the moral experience
of women is as worthy of respect as that of men. ’Feminist Ethics’, is a
branch of contemporary feminist philosophy based on the argument that
classical philosophy, pioneered by Kant, tackles ethics from a strictly
masculine perspective under the guise of a universal moral philosophy,
thus, deliberately overlooking women’s own personal moral experience in
a male dominated, oppressive culture worldwide. The idea that women
have the capacity to offer a more thoroughly human, rational and ethical
vision is crystallized in Karen Green’s book “The Woman of Reason”, in
which she argues that; the assumptions about the individual as a formal
entity, autonomous of social and historical relations are evident in
Kantian philosophical traditional ethics, in which the moral subject must
separate her or himself from all social and historical relations in order to
achieve the rationality and objectivity necessary for a moral universal
decision. On the other hand, she views that woman as a moral subject is
not a completed, closed entity that may attain her full power only through
speculation. Green believes that ―becoming a moral subject means
recognizing that morality is a structure of socio-historical relations, not a
detached calculus performed by autonomous individuals. By this
recognition, women will no longer collude in their oppression and so that
they can attempt to change conditions of life negation and alienation into
conditions of affirmation and fulfillment‖. (p.250)
Karen Green also further explained that Kant’s patriarchal morality is
based on the desire for power over the other, beginning with sexual power over women and extending to political power over nations.
She criticizes the idea that when women and morality are discussed
together, the subject often becomes sexual morality, rather than the full
range of human actions, struggles to create a good society, or human
yearnings for justice and fulfilment. She accuses Kant who writes that
―woman is carnal and hence too closely associated with the evil impulses
of the body; she is without that self-control necessary for disciplined
moral action; she is too emotional and lacks the dispassionate rationality
necessary for good moral judgment‖ (Groundwork, p.129). Also Kant
thought that; women were generally incapable of deep thought and
of sustained mental activity against obstacles… women were
essentially incapable of acting otherwise than in accordance with their
immediate inclinations and feelings. (p.120). Kant regards women as
weaker than men not only physically but also intellectually and he
thought it is appropriate that they should be ”in a permanent condition of
civil guardianship represented in the public sphere by their fathers or
husbands”(Groundwork, p.129). He also accepted the social and political
subordination of women that prevailed in his time and in some of his
writings on Anthropology, he expressed views that can be described only
as racist.
Therefore, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a wide
variety of thinkers including Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill,
Gerda Lerner, Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings addressed topics to
”women’s morality‖. All of them have objected to Kant’s
characterization of the ethics. Both Wollstonecraft and Mill in their books
A Vindication of the Rights of Women and The Subjection of Women
argued that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be only
because they lack education. They extended their analysis of the
corrupting influence of inequalities of power to explain the situation of
women, suggesting that both men and women are corrupted by a situation
in which women are slaves, brought up to have no means of supporting
themselves except by entering into marriages with men, who
consequently have a complete licence to tyrannize over them.
Accordingly, Gerda Lerner also views in her book The Creation of
Patriarchy that women were exchanged in marriage and men had certain
rights in women, which women did not have in men. Women’s sexuality
and reproductive potential became a commodity to be exchanged or
acquired for the service of families; thus, women were thought of as a
group with less autonomy than men. In this sense, the kind of character
development which makes for a mind capable of seeing new connections
and fashioning a new order of abstractions has been exactly the opposite
- 247 -
of that required of women, trained to accept their subordinate and service
oriented position in society. Lerner states that; ―the way to think
abstractly is to define precisely, to create models in the mind and
generalize from them. Such thought, Kant have emphasized, must be
based on the exclusion of feelings, while women’s knowledge is of
feelings mixed with thought, of value judgments colouring
abstractions‖(p.134). Women always live in a world in which they are
devalued, and they have learned to mistrust their own experience and
devalue it. Therefore, Lerner wonders; ―What source of knowledge in the
milk-filled breast? What food for abstraction in the daily routine of
feeding and cleaning?‖(p.135)
Women’s interests, then, are located within the sphere of care, and
men’s are located within the sphere of justice. Therefore, the ethic of care
is much more devalued than the ethic of justice. Both Carol Gilligan and
Nel Noddings, stressed that traditional western ethical theory is deficient
to the degree that it ignores or demeans those traits of personality and
virtues of character culturally associated with women. They discovered
that women more often focus upon ”care” while men focus upon
”justice”. The ”care orientation” as Gilligan defines focuses upon
”emotional relationships of attachment and networks of concrete
relationships, connections, loyalties, and circles of concern” whereas the
”justice orientation” focuses upon ”equality, impartiality, universality,
rules and rights”(In a Different Voice, p.51). Both Gilligan and Noddings
view that both orientations are crucial to correct moral reasoning and an
adequate understanding of moral life. Thus, the ethics of justice and the
ethics of care are not in fact rivalling, alternative moral theories.
Gilligan also argues that while women define themselves through
relationships with others, or through a web of relationships of intimacy
and care rather than through a hierarchy based on separation and selffulfilment, therefore, the Kantian conception of autonomy is obviously
inadequate, because it is not in isolation, but in conjunction with others
that woman’s autonomy as a moral agent first takes form. For Kant,
―women have weak ego boundaries, poor self-definition, problems with
separation, autonomy, and a weaker sense of justice. He, thus, concluded
that ―women were thereby deficient in moral reasoning‖. (Critique of
Practical Reason, p.113). Gilligan responded that if women have a
problem with separation, men have a problem with connection. She
reported that women tended to find safety in intimacy and danger in
isolation while men tended to find danger in intimacy and safety in
independence.Then the researcher is going to proceed with the second major focal
point in this thesis by associating the principles of Kantian moral
philosophy with the beliefs of ’Feminist ethics’ in order to apply all
what is previously illustrated to the plays of two writers who are the
forerunners of feminist drama, Ann Jellicoe and Caryl Churchill. Both
writers are devising new forms of unconventional techniques of writing;
and this is highly apparent and manifested in portraying their autonomous
women characters. The following two chapters of this thesis will cover
the lives of their heroines, dedicating one chapter for the plays of each
author. Women characters of different ages and circumstances will be
discussed throughout these chapters, through their relationships to men as
well as their societies, as their oppression, their lack of autonomy and
their sense of inferiority do not occur in isolation. The conflict of these
characters stems from their eager desire for autonomy and self-assertion
as moral subjects within social, economic, political and even religious
conditions that offer neither.
Chapter Two of this thesis tackles the analysis of Ann Jellicoe’s most
important plays in terms of the feminist ethics’ moral subject. This
chapter is an intensive analysis of the plays of Ann Jellicoe in light of her
own personal assimilation of the concepts of feminist ethics which are
then transformed into dramatic and theatrical representations which have
made of her theatre a model of the feminist experimental political theatre.
The main element that makes Ann Jellicoe a forerunner of feminist
writers is her treatment of the crucial problem of women’s sexuality when
it is threatened by the repercussions of a male-dominated authoritative
society, such as rape, domestic violence, and ultimately war through
destructive militarism. Jellicoe also does not free women from the
responsibility of their own subordination to men. In this sense, she is very
aware of the distinction between sex and gender, or the biological
specification of women as a species and their gender roles which are
socially determined by the patriarchal society. It is in the latter that
Jellicoe lays the blame on women, namely in their complicity with
patriarchal authority by submitting to the inferior gender role imposed
upon them, and their reluctance to rebel against it.
For Jellicoe human relations in any society, revolve around the
relationship between man and woman. According to Jellicoe, when this
relationship becomes distorted ,or even blemished, as a result of ethical
conditions, patterns of behavior arise which range from slight aggression,
both mental and physical to the most destructive ones on the personal and
social levels. Hence, when the innermost human relation between man
and woman, or the safety valve of all human relations, goes astray, total
- 249 -
entropy is the logical conclusion. Jellicoe is frequently included in
feminist studies, mentioned as an early feminist who, like others in her
time, rebelled against constrictive domestic roles for women. Strong
female characters abound in her plays, along with themes like female
creativity and sexual prowess.
The Third Chapter tackles the dramatic and theatrical transformations
of Caryl Churchill’s feminist politics combined with the concepts of
feminist ethics to create her socialist-feminist drama. Churchill also is
known for her use of non- naturalistic techniques and feminist themes,
dramatization of the abuses of power and exploration of gender and
sexuality. Her playwriting career and political outlook have consciously
been shaped by a continuing commitment to feminism and to socialism.
Churchill believes that socialism and feminism are not synonymous but
as she explained in her writings that she feels strongly about both and
wouldn’t be concerned in a form of one that did not include the other.
Thus, her drama re-iterates how meaningful change is impossible while
women continue to oppress one another and while economic and political
structures perpetuate patriarchy.
Caryl Churchill is a playwright preoccupied with the discussion of the
traditional relations of power. She challenges social and dramatic
conventions through her innovative exploration of the male gaze, the
objectification of women, the performativity of gender, and women as
objects of exchange within a masculine economy. She views that the
blatant abuse of women in male dominated societies had resulted in a
continuous struggle by them throughout history that lead women to fight
for equal opportunities as they attempted to improve their positions in
society they live in. In this regard, Churchill illustrates some subversive
characters among these oppressed women that although cannot change
the present situation, they defy the conventional norms and challenge for
their rights. This chapter places its crucial lens on portraying these
impressive autonomous female characters in Churchill’s most important
plays.
Then this thesis ends with the Conclusion which is an analysis of the
conclusions reached in the previous three chapters with the end of
formulating a synthesis between the concepts of feminist ethics and
feminist drama, in general, and the plays of Ann Jellicoe and Caryl
Churchill in particular.