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Promoting the Good: Fekete on Equity Advocacy in Canada*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2010
Extract
Social and political topics of public concern shift and reconfigure themselves with volatility as well as speed in contemporary life. Issues ignite and arouse constituencies of response, in alliance and opposition, with a quite uncertain degree of predictability, even if with periodicities and a detectable routing circuitry about which it is easy to become cynical, or at least fatigued. Something burns, now, among us; and we would prefer not to think much about the fact that it, or a close relative, burned a year and a half before—sometimes even more recently—in other places more plausibly a fountain and fundament of currents of Western cultural life. The issues must feel real; they must be seen as urgent, abstract matters of right and wrong, shocking disclosure, heroic resistance, without reference to anywhere else than here and anyone else but us.
- Type
- Critical Notices/Études critiques
- Information
- Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , Spring 1996 , pp. 343 - 358
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1996
References
Notes
1 He writes, above all, about Changing the Landscape, the Final Report of the Canadian Panel on Violence Against Women (1993).
2 Sommers, Christina Hoff, Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).Google Scholar
4 Murray, A. Strauss, “The Conflict Tactics Scales and Its Critics: An Evaluation and New Data on Validity and Reliability,” in Physical Violence in American Families, edited by Murray, A. Strauss and Richard, J Gelles (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1990), pp. 49–71.Google Scholar
4 For example, “98% of Canadian women are sexually violated” (from the Final Report of the Canadian Panel on Violence Against Women, cited by Fekete, p. 38); “approximately 83 percent of women with a disability will be sexually assaulted during their lifetime” (Stimpson, L. and Best, M. C., Courage Above All: Sexual Assault against Women with Disabilities [Toronto: Disabled Women's Network-Toronto, 1991], p. 68, cited by Fekete, p. 138.Google Scholar
5 Hume, D., Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, edited by Selby-Bigge, L. A. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), pp. 39, 43.Google Scholar
6 Berlin, I., “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969).Google Scholar
7 Positive liberty and some other analyses also sometimes see the weight of past inequality or other negative influence (e.g., particular demoralizing historical experiences of particular groups) as so heavy that, even if not supported by structures in the present, it would need active interventions to offset or modify. It may be remarked as well that few, if any, actuated by positive-liberty convictions appear to consider that some systemic changes may simply take some time to realize themselves. Armies of Ph.D.'d members of the affirmativeaction target groups–women, aboriginal people, the handicapped, “visible minorities”–cannot, for example, be produced on demand. This may not be a good reason to believe that large numbers of persons so qualified will not appear, and find places, within institutions they will both change and be changed by, as years go by.
8 The term ‘feminism’ is rather imprecise, and problematically so in the present cultural-historical context. Some affirm that feminism is simply the idea that women are people (so says a popular bumper-sticker). If meant non-rhetorically this definition would make it unclear whether there are very many nonfeminists. In fact more than merely this seems a necessary component of the idea. Key, I think, is the idea of the exploitation, oppression and deliberate disadvantaging of women. Liberal feminists (or what Sommers calls “equity” feminists) see this oppression as primarily a feature of the past, at least in Western societies. Most other feminists–Sommers calls them collectively gender feminists–see this oppression as a continuing and central structural feature of Western and other societies. Since gender feminists are more numerous, certainly more vocal, among those who clearly and publicly identify themselves as feminists, it seems reasonable to use the term ‘feminist’, without qualification or adjective, for them, at least in many contexts. So understood, feminism will imply that most women in most societies (and certainly including most Western and capitalist societies) are systematically oppressed, exploited and deliberately disadvantaged, in virtue of their being women. (Just as Marxism implies that most non-owners of significant amounts of valuable property in most societies–at any rate all capitalist ones–are systematically oppressed, exploited and deliberately disadvantaged, in virtue of their nonpossession of property.)
9 I should perhaps remark that I write in July 1995, and that I have no other sources of information about the U.B.C. case than press reports (chiefly in The Globe and Mail) and such background as Fekete's book provides.
10 The cases vary considerably, and it is not germane to my purpose here to discuss any of them explicitly or in detail. One of the cases–that of Lamy at the University of Ottawa–seemed to me even more appalling (that is, the university's prosecution of the individual was even more indefensible) than Fekete affirms. Another case (that of Vedanand, at Manitoba) seemed hastily put together by Fekete (the reader is not even supplied with the given name of the individual in question), and the case is neither clearly explained nor of obvious relevance to Fekete's themes.
11 Sometimes the author achieves an aphoristic perspicacity of moral and psychological analysis. Two examples, both from the same page: “Nobody is entitled to or capable of a life free of all unwanted experiences” (p. 162). “The medium of our interactions is ambiguity, ambivalence, and a mixed economy of initiative, responsiveness, and reticence; and our own motives are no more unequivocally transparent to ourselves than they are to others” (Ibid..).