Embodying autonomy : women and moral agency

Abstract

This thesis has three connected aims: to argue that, despite recent feminist criticisms, the ideal of autonomous self-constitution is essential to a feminist account of women's moral agency; to show that, within our philosophical and cultural heritage, we have no adequate ideal of what it is for women qua women to be autonomous agents; and to attempt to articulate an ideal of autonomy which can incorporate a recognition both of the embededness of moral agents and of their different bodily perspectives. My argument is that such a recognition does not entail a commitment to a sexually specific ethic. However it does entail that in articulating what it means for women to act as autonomous moral agents in circumstances which are sexually specific we must recognise the specificity of women's bodily perspectives. The thesis comprises four parts and six chapters. In Part I (Chapter One), I sketch out an initial account of the ideal of autonomy, drawing on both contemporary philosophical analyses and feminist criticisms of the ideal. In Part II (Chapters Two and Three), through a discussion of the ideal of autonomous agency in the work of Simone de Beauvoir, I examine some of the reasons why autonomy has been seen as an achievement which it is difficult for women to attain: because autonomy has often been defined as control over the passive body by the active will; and because women's bodies have become a cultural metaphor for unconscious passivity. I argue however that, despite some of the difficulties with her work, de Beauvoir's idea that subjectivity is constituted in and through both our bodily perspectives and our relations with others, also points in the direction of a more adequate understanding of autonomy. Part III (Chapters Four and Five) investigates some of the historical origins of the opposition between autonomy and femininity - in the contrasts between public and private; reason and feeling; and reason and nature. Chapter Four consists mainly of a detailed examination of the different ideals of autonomy, but overlapping accounts of women's ethical life, in the works of Rousseau and Hegel. My argument here is that in their works the contrast between autonomy and women's ethical life arises out of an attempt to resolve deep tensions within the Enlightenment conception of social life. Their attempted resolutions however entail the political subordination of women and give rise to a representation of women's bodies as passive 'natural' bodies. Chapter Five is a reading of the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft in which I show that the main concerns of Wollstonecraft's life and writings were to try to articulate what it means for women to act as autonomous moral agents, and to envisage the social and political changes necessary for them to do so. In contrast to some contemporary feminist commentators, I argue that Wollstonecraft does not merely preserve the oppositions between public and private, reason and feeling, and masculine and feminine ethical life but, especially in her later writings, realises that somehow these oppositions must be integrated. In the Introduction to Part IV I outline a conception of subjectivity as intersubjective and as constituted through the constitution of a bodily perspective. My claim is that this view of subjectivity opens up the space for a conception of autonomy that can recognise the different situations and bodily perspectives of different moral agents. Chapter Six provides an example of what such a recognition might entail, through the example of women's autonomous agency in the context of pregnancy and abortion.