This episode will feature Azzurra Crispino, whom you might recall from our Kant on epistemology episode. We’re reading two works that were significant for the development of her interest in feminist philosophy:

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland(1915) is a utopian novel about a society of all women. Gilman thought that when classic philosophers describe human nature as essentially selfish or competitive, they’re drawing on their experience of men. Their view of women’s nature, if they have any, were warped by the stunting roles that women were shoved into in their societies. Herland portrays an all-female society that works communally and rationally to make the most out of their environment and themselves. Well, okay, it’s not just the absence of men, but also eugenics to breed out the surly ones, the absence of outsiders for thousands of years that might threaten the society, and a number of other factors that make this picture of female nature somewhat unconvincing, though still pretty fun to read. (Read Herland online.)

Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice(1983) instead presents the results of several psychological studies into how women’s patterns of moral reasoning tend to differ from those of men. Where Freud saw maturity as a matter of achieving separation, and Lawrence Kohlberg subsequently described mature moral development as a matter of the recognition of abstract moral principles and non-interference with others’ rights, Gilligan noted that women more often consider the concrete relationships involved instead of abstract principles. Instead of judging these women to be morally underdeveloped, Gilligan suggested a different progression, where women develop a mature sense of care for not only others (self-denying altruism is a middle step on the path she describes), but for oneself. The end result is something that sounds a bit like the “finding oneself” described in our Hegel episode, while the moral reasoning model that considers concrete situations in their individuality rather than abstract principles (a la Kant or Bentham) sounds a lot like the view Churchland was describing (with its roots in Hume and Aristotle).