Moral Dilemmas of Feminism

Prostitution, Adultery, and Abortion

Laurie Shrage

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415905510
• eBook ISBN: 9781134977765
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Sharge explores the moral pemises of feminist sexual politics, focusing in particular on the emotive issues of abortion, prostitution and adultery, in order to develop an interpretative and pluralist approach to feminist ethics.

1
Eschewing Ethnocentric Ethics

Cinematic and Philosophical Takes on Adultery

In a film titled Ju Don, a woman seduces her husband's nephew. This act, so starkly described, might strike my reader as despicable (depending on who you are), but consider the social context in which this affair takes place. The general context for this cinematic act of adultery is 1920s pre-Communist China. The principals in the story include an elderly dye mill owner (Jinshan Yang) who, at the film's opening, has Just acquired his third wife (Ju Dou). She is a rather young bride, and her purchase has cost him a considerable sum. Jinshan, though advanced in age and previously married, brings no biological offspring into this marriage. Indeed, we soon learn that the point of this new marriage is to create a much desired male heir for the Yang family. Jinshan's previous wives are no longer alive at this point, and one minor character in the film alleges that he tortured them to death when they failed to carry out their customary reproductive duties.

This allegation becomes quite credible when, not long into this film and the marriage it depicts, we see Jinshan forcefully subject Ju Dou to his rather bizarre and violent sexuality. Later on we learn from Ju Dou that “he's sick,” “that he's not human, not a man,” and that “he can't do it.” All, it seems, that he can do is torture the women he tries to impregnate. And, in scenes where he is raping Ju Dou while she is tied up and muffled, he tells her “I bought you, now obey me,” and “when I buy an animal I treat it as I wish and you're no better than an animal.” But he also tells her that if she gives him a son he will be her slave.

As divorce or escape do not seem to be options for Ju Dou, eventually she seeks to interrupt the sexual and physical abuse of herself by getting herself pregnant by other means. (How self-conscious her actions are at this point remains somewhat unclear.) Fortunately, in her husband's household lives his nephew (Tianqing), a man in his forties whom Jinshan adopted when he was orphaned as a child. Jinshan somewhat ruthlessly exploits Tianqing's labor in his dye mill and, because Jinshan does not want extra “mouths to feed,” he has never provided Tianqing with his own wife. Consequently, Tianqing is understandably weary, miserable, lonely, and, most importantly, sexually unfulfilled. And consequently, he begins to fixate on his uncle's new bride. He also begins to sympathize with her plight, as he hears her screams at night, and he knows about his uncle's sexual history. For a short time, though, he becomes a bit of a voyeur, and she an exhibitionist. Perhaps impolitely observing his uncle's wife offers him a refuge from his toil and loneliness. Conversely, accepting and then inviting her nephew's attention, and eventually seducing him, offers her a refuge from her abusive husband. These actions also generate the solution to Ju Dou's problem. That is, Tianqing can impregnate her, and he does.

Ju Don takes a critical perspective on the marital customs followed in the filmmaker's society. It does this, in part, by showing how these customs create intergenerational conflict. For example, Ju Don achieves narrative closure when Tianqing is killed by his own son (Tianbai) for dishonoring his mother. The film emphasizes both the oppressive aspects of conventional marriage and the potentially subversive and liberatory force of adulterous behavior. Consequently, instead of the usual moralistic treatment of adultery that we get in many American pictures (e.g., Fatal Attraction), in Ju Dou, as Caryn James has written, “adultery is explicitly presented as heroic resistance to outmoded traditions."¹

In an influential paper on adultery, Richard Wasserstrom considers whether the moral prohibition against all extramarital sex can be given a philosophical defense.² To defend this absolute prohibition one must demonstrate that acts of adultery are inevitably evil or harmful. Wasserstrom explores the steps of several purported demonstrations and concludes that the essential wickedness of adultery is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to prove. Wasserstrom reaches this conclusion because he recognizes that the evilness we see as inherent to adulterous behavior may only reside in this behavior when it occurs in the context of particular marital norms and practices. Moreover the marital norms with which we are most familiar are neither universally established nor historically invariable. If acts of adultery are only contingently, and not necessarily, evil, then wherever the relevant contingencies are not met, adulterous behaviors may exhibit more neutral (or even positive) moral characteristics. Yet before Wasserstrom can draw this relativistic and skeptical conclusion, he must show that adultery is contingently and not inherently a bad thing.

To demonstrate that moral badness is an accidental and not essential property of adulterous acts, Wasserstrom does not appeal to the foreign cinema, but rather he appeals to the philosopher's reflective imagination and cultural memory. He remembers that in our recent past (the past of contemporary Americans), there was an exotic group, which we shall refer to as “the sixties counterculture.” The sixties counterculture was relatively peculiar in that it purportedly condoned nonmarital and extramarital casual sex (sex without any serious social purpose, such as procreation, marital bonding, etc.). By promoting sex with nonmarital partners, through “open” style marriages or by eschewing formal marriage altogether, members of the sixties counterculture challenged the marital and sexual norms of their larger society. Wasserstrom examines the countercultural practice of open marriage and uses it to show that extramarital sexual behaviors need not exhibit the characteristics that are generally thought to render them morally bad: deceptiveness, disloyalty, and social disruptiveness.

In an open sixties-style marriage, one can engage in adultery without the usual deception because to participate in an open marriage is to grant each spouse the right to be “open” sexually to nonmarital partners. Moreover each spouse can (and is perhaps encouraged to) communicate openly about her/his extramarital involvements, as well as other sexual interests, and so there is no need to actively deceive one's spouse about one's affairs. Furthermore, neither spouse is vulnerable to passive deception—the deception that occurs through acts of omission—for these marital customs create an expectation of extramarital sexual behavior, rather than an expectation of sexual monogamy. And finally, one can commit adultery in this type of marriage and avoid a deeper type of deception that Wasserstrom identifies: that of deceiving either one's lover or spouse about the state of one's romantic sentiments or the health of one's marriage. One avoids this type of deception because sex with the nonmarital partner can be casual—i.e., free of emotional involvement and social commitments. Thus, to have extramarital sex does not entail being romantically involved with someone other than one's spouse, nor does it entail being committed to an ongoing marriage-like relationship with someone other than one's spouse. Of course, being in an open marriage involves believing in the possibility of casual sex, and so long as all parties involved belong to this sixties culture and have this belief, nobody is deceived.

In an open sixties-style marriage, one can engage in extramarital sex without being disloyal to one's partner for one has not promised to be sexually faithful. In other words, faithfulness, loyalty, or fidelity in an open marriage are not seen as a function of making and carrying out an implicit or explicit vow of sexual exclusivity. And in an open sixties-style marriage, one can engage in adulterous behavior without the socially disruptive consequence of destabilizing the institution of marriage itself, as long as institution we have in mind is the open kind.

Of course, adulterous behavior may weaken the foundations of “non-open” marriage. But to pursue this line of argument in defending the prohibition against all extramarital sex, the moral philosopher must show, according to Wasserstrom, that the social institution of sexually monogamous marriage is worth preserving, especially if it means sacrificing other goods. To show this, the philosopher must understand the institution's practical advantages and disadvantages (i.e., its personal and interpersonal benefits), which may require, Wasserstrom suggests, that she compare American marital practices with those of other cultures and subcultures. Until such examination yields a more generalizable and complete understanding of sexually monogamous marriage and its relationship to other human goods, this instrumental defense of the prohibition against adultery, according to Wasserstrom, remains “seriously incomplete."³

Wasserstrom is certainly correct that, if one's philosophical defense of the prohibition against adultery appeals to the damage adultery causes to a particular social institution, then one's defense needs to include a moral appraisal of the allegedly vulnerable institution. If someone argued that educating slaves threatened the practice of slavery, this would hardly be taken to count as an argument against the practice of educating slaves. The more difficult issue is how we morally evaluate a social institution. How, for example, did various societies (and moral philosophers) come to appreciate the moral evils of slavery? And was their appreciation fostered by a deeper understanding of the institution's practical consequences or through less rationally explicable historical changes, such as in the application of the category “human” and in our assignment of properties to the members of this category? Did rational philosophical reflection and the refinement of practical reasoning promote the enlightenment of modern society on the question of slavery?⁴

Similarly, how can we gain a deeper understanding of the practical benefits or harms that ensue from the practice of sexually monogamous marriage? And must our moral judgments about adultery (at least our philosophically defensible ones) await the outcome of some larger sociological, anthropological, or psychological investigation into our culturally entrenched marital practices? If they must wait, then should not our moral evaluations of other activities await similar investigations of the societal institutions they threaten? If the correct answer to these questions is “yes,” then much of what goes on in the area of normative moral philosophy and applied ethics can be accused of premature theorizing. In the next section I shall address the need for moral theory to assess the practical value of certain human practices and institutions in the course of providing guidelines for moral judgment. In other words, I shall address the question of how practical knowledge of human affairs—to be gained in part by the human or social sciences—is related to the enterprise of moral philosophy. Following this discussion, I will attempt to formulate the central aims of this book.

Human Diversity and Moral Theory

What is the relationship between practical reason and practical knowledge? How much practical knowledge of human institutions and practices must we have in order to determine what institutions and practices are good? And is the knowledge we gain about human institutions and practices informally by living our own lives sufficient for this purpose? Although this is sometimes all a moral theorist seems to have to go on—her own limited and quirky set of experiences—it may not be sufficient for the purposes of moral theorizing. For, just as the theater critic needs to have seen an abundance of plays before she can generate serious art criticism, the moral and social critic probably should be exposed to a great deal of social life before she can construct authoritative moral analyses.

On the “traditional” picture of moral philosophy—that is, the intellectual tradition we have inherited from our European Enlightenment ancestors—skill in practical reasoning is not proportional to practical knowledge or experience. Alasdair Maclntyre describes this picture well in discussing Kant:

Practical reason, according to Kant, employs no criterion external to itself. It appeals to no content derived from experience…It is of the essence of reason that it lays down principles which are universal, categorical and internally consistent. Hence a rational morality will lay down principles which both can and ought to be held by all men, independent of circumstances and conditions, and which could consistently be obeyed by every rational agent on every occasion.⁵

Those who subscribe to this picture may even fear that “content derived from experience” will bias the outcome of practical reason and, if they do, then perhaps they will see adeptness in practical reasoning as inversely proportional to practical experience. In other words, the moral thinker is probably better off, on this view, if she retreats from the world than if she immerses herself in it. Retreating from the world is allowable because, according to this picture, the moral dimensions of behaviors are apparent by directly reflecting on the behaviors themselves, not by situating these behaviors in their cultural and historical contexts. For instance, on this view, the moral thinker can assess the moral dimensions of the adulterous actions cin-ematically depicted in Ju Don, and those imagined and projected back into the sixties by Wasserstrom, without knowing much about 1920s China or 1960s America.

Yet when we compare radically diverse adulteries such as these, we see that they are not easily reducible to one another. We see, that is, that there are moral dimensions to these actions that we may miss by failing to understand the human institutions and societies in which the principal characters participated. For this reason and many others, some philosophers, including Maclntyre, have begun to repudiate the Enlightenment picture of practical reason. Without going into all the reasons for rejecting this picture of practical reason, for my purposes it will simply do to note that if we reject it, we have no reason to think that we can think or reason well about practical affairs when we are ignorant about the diversity of human practices.

In her essay “Why Philosophers Should Become Sociologists (and Vice Versa),"⁶ Kathryn Pyne Addelson joins Maclntyre in encouraging philosophers to dispose of their Enlightenment notions about practical reason and moral theory. And once properly disposed of, we can no longer legitimate the armchair moral theorizing that these notions encouraged. For this reason, Addelson challenges us to learn more about social life, and to do this in particular by appropriating the anti-Enlightenment methods of a school of thought in contemporary sociology known as “symbolic interactionism."

To demonstrate the usefulness of symbolic interactionism, Addelson contrasts the critical methodologies of this school with those of more positivist social science. She states,

The Enlightenment world was one of objects and concepts that could be objectively observed and neutrally reported. In contrast, the postanalytic philosophers and the symbolic interactionists agree that the human world is a world not of objects but of action and interpretation.⁷

By differentiating these two conceptions of the human sciences, Addelson suggests that it is not enough simply to reject Enlightenment notions of practical reason; moral philosophy should also reject Enlightenment conceptions of scientific knowledge. The Enlightenment model of practical knowledge, as Addelson notes, is one where the methodologies and tools for analyzing the human world are similar to those employed for scientifically analyzing the so-called natural world. By contrast, on a post-Enlightenment model—exemplified in the work of symbolic interactionists—we adapt the critical tools and concepts employed for the analysis of language or symbolic forms to describe human beings and the worlds they create. I will briefly describe each model and its implications for how the social sciences can assist moral philosophy.

Some moral philosophers—even some “postanalytic” ones—who seek to ground their theories on social scientific knowledge about particular human practices assume an Enlightenment model of how the social sciences operate. On this view, coming to know about humans and what they do involves becoming familiar with available objective, scientific, neutral and detached third person descriptions of people and their behavior. On this positivistic model, the moral philosopher who approaches the social sciences can expect to be presented with numerically expressed sets of empirical data, as well as various causal conjectures or theories about human behavior that these data support or ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Thinking Gender
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Eschewing Ethnocentric Ethics
• 2 Interpreting Adultery
• 3 Fetal Ideologies and Maternal Desires: A Post-Enlightenment Account of Abortion
• 4 Feminism and Sexuality
• 5 Comparing Prostitutions
• 6 Exotic Erotica and Erotic Exotica: Sex Commerce in Some Contemporary Urban Centers
• 7 Interpretive Ethics, Cultural Relativism, and Feminist Theory
• Notes
• Index