Susan Moller Okin

Reason and Feeling in Thinking about Justice

Recent feminist scholarship has challenged the corpus of Western political thought in two new ways. Some works focus first on either the absence or the assumed subordination of women in a political theory, and then go on to ask how the theory would have to change in order to include women on an equal basis with men. Some focus more immediately on how the gendered structure of the societies in which theorists have lived has shaped their central ideas and arguments and consider how these ideas and arguments are affected by the adoption of a feminist perspective. 1 In this paper, I hope to contribute something to the second project. I raise, though do not by any means fully answer, some questions about the effects that assumptions about the gendered structure of society have had on thinking about social justice. In so doing, I suggest that some recent distinctions that have been made between an ethic of justice and an ethic of care may be at least overdrawn, if not false. They may obfuscate rather than aid our attempts to achieve a moral and political theory that we can find acceptable in a world in which gender is becoming an increasingly indefensible mode of social organization.2

“Mistresses of Their Own Destiny”: Group Rights, Gender, and Realistic Rights of Exit*

Many recent arguments for rights or exemptions for religious or other cultural groups that may not themselves be liberal are based on liberal premises—whether the central liberal value be individual autonomy or tolerance for diversity of ways of life. Any consistent defense of group rights or exemptions that is based on liberal premises has to ensure that at least one individual right—the right to exit one’s group of origin—trumps any group right. What this entails will be explored later, but for several reasons, the claim itself seems prima facie incontrovert-

Justice, Gender and the Family.

In the first feminist critique of modern political theory, Okin shows how the failure to apply theories of justice to the family not only undermines our most cherished democratic values but has led to a major crisis over gender-related issues.