Feminist Metaphysics

These are some thoughts I had recently after a meeting of my reading group at Sheffield on Feminism. I should make it clear from the outset that I consider myself a feminist, though some of what follows will no doubt strike some as somehow antithetical to contemporary philosophical feminism. I don't see it that way, but as ever I welcome comments and criticism...

Is there such a thing as ‘feminist metaphysics’? I don’t think so. Sally Haslanger (in her piece on Feminism & Metaphysics in Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy) rightly observes that whether you’re a realist or anti-realist is essentially irrelevant to central feminist concerns about how women are treated. Sure, sexist individuals may try to appeal to some ‘essential features of’ or ‘biological facts about’ women in order to justify treating them differently. Those people make a very familiar error – trying to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. One can believe in a fixed essence for women and still consider that essence quite irrelevant to questions of social policy, just as one can admit to various biological facts about the difference between people of African and Caucasian descent without thinking it has any moral or political significance for how we should treat the two groups. Once that’s been conceded, we can recognise that one’s stance on metaphysical issues has nothing to do with one’s stance on feminist issues.

In our reading group on this article, someone suggested the following responses to this line of thought. First, ordinary metaphysicians do not, by and large, concern themselves with analysing the concept ‘woman’, nor with any other concepts generally of most interest to feminists (they’re usually too busy worrying about time, causation, dispositions, etc.). Whilst it may not matter to questions of social policy what constitutes a ‘woman’, it MAY matter, and even if it doesn’t, what makes a person a woman will certainly be interesting for feminists investigating (e.g.) issues about gender identity, trans-sexuality, etc. Thus, feminism has a role to play in metaphysics in the following sense: feminists should start working on those neglected areas of metaphysics that are interesting to and relevant for feminists. In doing so, the thought goes, they are doing ‘feminist metaphysics’, since there is a clear political agenda in the offing (to draw attention to feminist issues and if possible get them to command some respect among ‘ordinary’ metaphysicians).

This is clearly a laudable enterprise. Nevertheless, I remains unconvinced that it shows there is such a thing as feminist metaphysics.

If Sally is doing a scientific investigation into the nature of a virus, she is doing virology. Sally is still doing virology if her motivation is to save the lives of millions of innocent people. Just as Sally is still doing virology if her motivation is that she thinks that viruses are neat. Motivation does not define an area of inquiry.

If the results of Sally’s inquiry are of interest to terrorists who want to manufacture biological weapons, that does not mean that Sally is doing Terrorist Virology. Sally is still doing plain old Virology. The people to whom the results of an inquiry are relevant also does not define the area of inquiry in question, since any inquiry may be relevant to any number of different groups.

My intuition is that what defines an area of inquiry is most likely to be its subject-matter, perhaps combined with the methods employed. If that’s right, then feminists doing metaphysics are, to the best of my knowledge, doing plain old metaphysics, regardless of their motives and regardless of whether their results are interesting or important for feminist philosophy.

So, the only sense I can make of the idea of ‘feminist metaphysics’ is that it is ordinary metaphysics that is (a) motivated by feminist concerns, (b) relevant or interesting to feminists or (c) done by someone who happens to be a feminist. All of those things still seem to be plain old metaphysics to me, though I don’t dispute that having a label for those areas of inquiry might be rather useful (though I wonder if such a label could possibly have a determinate extension).