Sources & Extracts

Review this excerpt and then go back to the main thread.

When examined, the assumptions and conceptions of contractual thinking seem highly questionable. As descriptions of reality they can be seriously misleading.....

To see contractual relations between self-interested or mutually disinterested individuals as constituting a paradigm of human relations is to take a certain historically specific conception of "economic man" as representative of humanity. And it is, many feminists are beginning to agree, to overlook or to discount in very fundamental ways the experience of women....

In this chapter I look at society from a point of view wholly different from that of economic man. I take the point of view of women, especially of mothers, as the basis for trying to rethink society and its possible goals....

I will try to imagine what society would look like, for both descriptive and prescriptive purposes, if we replaced the paradigm of economic man with the paradigm of mother and child. I will try to explore how society and our goals for it might appear if, instead of thinking of human relations as contractual, we thought of them as like relations between mothers and children....

In any case, if we pay attention to this neglected relation between mother and child, perhaps we can put a stop to the imperialism of the model of economic man and assert with conviction that there are at least some domains where this model is definitely not appropriate....To the extent that some of our relations should be seen as contractual, we should recognize how limited those relations are. And to the extent that some of morality should be understood in terms of what rational contractors would agree to, we should recognize that such a morality can only be suitable for a particular domain of human relations, not a model for morality in general. [Virginia, Held, Feminist Morality, p. 194-196.]