Janna Thompson

Women and war

Abstract As the pursuit of war becomes more and more irrational, it is important to consider whether women (or any other group) are likely to offer effective resistance to the war-like inclinations of their governments and societies. In this paper I examine, first of all, how the exclusion of women from warfare affects and is affected by the status of the warrior and the status of women; how the activities and opportunities of women have been influenced by changes in the nature of war; and how these changes affect the attitudes of women to war and of society toward women. Are there deeper psychological forces and inclinations that affect the way women and men react to war? I consider this question in light of Freuds theory of group psychology, and argue that the changing relations between men and women, changes that have in part been brought about by war, could help to make group behavior more rational and thus have a pacifying effect on the politics of societies.

Towards a green World order: Environment and World politics

Global environmental problems need a political solution. One of the most difficult problems for environmental political theory is to determine what this solution would be. There are two basic conditions that any proposed ‘world order’ must satisfy: it must ensure that individuals and communities comply with environmental prescriptions, and that decision‐making is flexible enough to cope with environmental problems in all their complexity. Common conceptions of a world political order, centralist and anarchist, are not likely to satisfy these conditions. It must be considered also what developments in world society are most likely to bring about a world order capable of solving environmental and related problems.

Ethics for a Broken World: Imagining Philosophy after Catastrophe, by Tim Mulgan

‘Greats’, where they each studied philosophy under and alongside various British Idealists, the philosophers themselves, as Mander observes, focused upon art as a central philosophical issue, and many were influenced by contemporary poetry. The analytic philosophy would bring a new and particular focus upon the philosophical study of language, however; and one of Mander’s innovations is to recognise the crucial importance of language and style for British Idealism. Green and many of his followers cite poetry and make it integral to their arguments. In some cases rhetoric replaces argument, while several Idealists champion contemporary poets as fellow philosophers, most notably Henry Jones in his books and papers on Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson. A. C. Bradley, the younger brother of F. H. Bradley, who was taught by, and then taught with, Green at Balliol, became better known for his literary critical lectures on Shakespeare and on poetry, which remained in print and on university reading lists for a century after their publication. While there is a sort of heroism in the integrity and independence of such late figures as the atheist J. M. E. McTaggart, the work of some of these peripheral figures, marooned by history on their islands of speculation, suggest that the British Idealist exercise of completing and maintaining a priori a metaphysical wholeness to reality may be simply an aesthetic ambition, furnishing systems of thought parallel to the complete and coherent, but fictitious, worlds of George Eliot’s Middlemarch or James Joyce’s Ulysses. In the philosophical importance they attach to form and style, the British Idealists bear an unexpected affinity with Nietzsche, the continental peer of many of them. Like Nietzsche and Wilde, F. H. Bradley fixed upon the form of the aphorism to try to grasp a modern evanescent apprehension of reality (‘An aphorism is true where it has fixed the impression of a genuine experience’ [quoted by Mander, 351]). Mander’s British Idealism is remarkably successful and compelling in distilling the dynamism of the developments within this complex and curious school of thought, as it traces the generations of thought from Green and his students to their proliferent (and sometimes profligate) successors late in the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth. Marred at several points by flurries of typographical errors, the book itself is written in an easy and lively style, with all of its rich and various conceptual material explained and organized clearly. This makes it not only the most complete and definitive study of British Idealism thus far, but an accessible work that recommends itself to a wide readership not only in philosophy but also in the fields of history, politics, education, religious studies, literature and art history.

Response to Loane Skene, ‘should Women Be Paid for Donating Their Eggs for Human Embryo Research?’

Professor Skene presents two arguments for legalising payments for egg donation. First of all, embryos are needed for important research that has the potential to save many lives and cure terrible diseases, and the only feasible way of obtaining the great number of embryos that are needed is to pay women for their eggs. The second argument is that donating eggs is onerous and invasive and it is only fair to pay women for undergoing this ordeal. Payment, she says, counts as compensation; women are not selling their eggs. The two arguments do not sit well together. The first proposes payment in order to bring supply in line with demand – surely a form of commercialisation. The second proposes payment based on risk, time and trouble. The reason for making such a payment would exist even if plenty of eggs were being donated. Since Skene is, above all, concerned with increasing the supply of eggs, I will assume that the first argument provides the main justification for her proposal. Despite her disclaimer, selling eggs is what it involves. Skene does not intend to question the ‘Australian tradition of altruistic donation and research participation’. But more life saving blood would undoubtedly be donated if people were paid for donation, and people would probably be more prepared to donate kidneys to strangers if they were highly rewarded for their time and trouble. Given the emphasis she places on the good that would be done by paying women for their eggs, it is not clear how she would draw a line between payment for this purpose and paying people for donation of blood, cells, semen, kidneys, and use of wombs when there is good reason to think that doing so could provide significant benefits. (Whether we represent this payment as a commercial transaction or a compensation for time and trouble is probably not important as long as it has the desired effect.) A response to her proposal thus cannot avoid a reconsideration of the ‘Australian tradition’. What, if anything, is wrong with the selling of bodily parts? There are two considerations that seem to me to support a resistance to commercialisation. One is that bodily intimacy is extremely important to most people. How a person uses her body and how she allows her body to be used are forms of self-expression that are intrinsically tied to her self-conception and the value she puts on her relationships with others. This is why rape is the violation of a person and not merely a crime of property. This is one ARTICLES