Women’s rights should not arise from seeing women as isolated individuals, to be evaluated for “merit” and included or excluded from opportunities on that basis. Women’s rights should arise from seeing women as beneficiaries of and contributors to a society that honours the ability of its citizens to seek good lives for themselves and to help others to seek good lives in return.
We support the ability of women to seek professional success because a just society ought to be particularly solicitous toward its citizens’ ability to seek good things. This includes freedom of religion, of course, and also the freedom to reject religion in favour of other philosophies or indeed in favour of something you can’t define. It includes personal excellences, be they physical or intellectual. It includes interpersonal relationships, in the form of the ability to associate with other people. It includes family formation (and not just for traditional families). It includes the ability to contribute to society by working a job.
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The good is a contested category, and sometimes we don’t know, ourselves, why we want a thing, even when we’re right to want it. Liberalism lets us go for it anyway. But if you want me to justify my love of mathematics now? I barely even need to invoke the questionable authority of my own mathematically-inflected spiritual experience. As a tool for learning to seek objective truth, goodness and beauty, mathematics is a classic. In fact, it is the classic, ever since Plato.
Yet this argument is too easy, and too small. I don’t just want a little carve-out that “of course Gemma will be allowed to study mathematics.” The freedom to seek the good is so much bigger than a single subject, or a single person. I would like to believe that the good is singular, but I’m pretty sure that different people find it in different ways. We should care about people’s ability to seek a wide variety of experiences.
Fundamental to my position here is that it can be genuinely difficult to say, for any given person, what they ought to be doing with their lives. Finding a good path is hard. A conservative might respond that this is why we need society to provide us with guidance. People sometimes do not know what is good for them, so can we really leave these things up to the individual to decide?
The problem with this response is not that we can be assumed to know what is good for ourselves—sometimes we do not—but rather that we are not always good at knowing what is good for other people, either. A liberal order provides us with some support, and some limitations, while leaving the highest (and hardest) questions about the good to open debates and freely-accepted quests.
From the article:
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