A Feminist Libertarian Dilemma

I’m actually a little ill having read this.  When you write “States ought to respect people’s free choices and thereby tolerate sexism” what I read is “Your ability to disenfranchise me, and systamatically make my life worse for not other reason that your own misconception of the world trumps my right to be an equal human being – not just equal in  your eyes, but equal in front of the law.”
Lets take fair pay, for instance.  As a woman in our society, I’m disenfranchised because – in most situations – if I negotiate for my salary as aggressively as people tell me I should, I’m seen as a augmentative bitch who can’t work well on the team.  If I play it nice, and fit on the team, then I’m just inept at getting what I want.  I can’t win.  The game is rigged.  

When you say that this sort of disenfranchisement is worse than the ability to free-contract, you are saying to me that your right to be wrong headed and affect my life directly in an irrational and negative way trumps my right to fair payment for work rendered.  Tolerating sexism is tolerating the ability to harm another person, and I can’t believe that a libertarian is seriously taking that stance.

You’re wrong on this one.

I agree with berserkrl and, in particular, find the essay linked via his “third way” comment useful.

The key point for my purposes comes in the essay’s quote from Don Lavoie: in brief, there is more to politics in society than merely deciding how to deploy the coercive power of the state. As Lavoie wrote, “Wherever human beings engage in direct discourse with one another about their mutual rights and responsibilities, there is a politics.”

This is relevant to the main post here in the premise that  “Libertarianism instructs states and individuals not to interfere with people’s free choices.”

Yes, libertarianism instructs individuals not to take recourse to the coercive power of the state in interfering with people’s free choices. But still we can “interfere” by voicing objections, by withdrawing from interaction and encouraging others to withdraw from interaction.

By no principle need libertarian tolerate sexism. To the extent a libertarian contemplates any role for state action, and on these point there is a variety of positions, there is no libertarian principle that says such allowed state actions must tolerate unjust cultural practices.

That “insofar as” covers a lot of ground.  There are left-wing libertarians who say the status quo results not primarily from voluntary choices, but from coercive state intervention on behalf of big business, plutocrats, employers, landlords, patriarchy, racial oppression, and authoritarianism in general.  The very fact that workers are slavishly competing for jobs and employers have the whip hand in the hiring process results from state intervention to make land and capital artificially scarce and expensive compared to labor, erect entry barriers to self-employment, impose artificial costs on comfortable subsistence, and otherwise reduce the amount of competition employers face from self-employment. 

“if I negotiate for my salary as aggressively as people tell me I should,
I’m seen as a augmentative bitch who can’t work well on the team. If I play it nice, and fit on the team, then I’m just inept at getting what I want.  I can’t win.  The game is rigged.  ”

I am white, male, straight and basically on the supposedly-powerful side of nearly all the traditional groupings people talk about, yet this dilemma sounds exactly like my own experience of such situations. The grass is nowhere near as much greener over here as you appear to think. I’m not at all convinced this is a gendered problem so much as a human problem. If anything, most women seem better than most men, including me, at understanding the interpersonal dynamics that go into figuring out who it’s wise to ask about such things and at what times.

Now, there are at least two general sorts of strategies for coping with this reality, and I accept that men tend to favour one and women the other. Why that happens is a valid and interesting question, as is whether one is more effective than the other, but it seems to me those are significantly *different* questions than you take yourself to be raising.

Jessica,

I know my comment only speaks  to the first part (the least consequential) of your very excellent post. But I wonder if you’ve looked into the care ethicists like Nel Noddings, Virginia Held, and Michael Slote at all to possibly explain some of the reason that more women do not tend toward libertarianism. Basically, in the 1980′s, psychologist Carol Gilligan (working under Lawrence Kohlberg) began realizing that, at least to a decent degree, women tended to work through ethical dilemmas a bit differently than men (again, as a general trend). Men, for instance, would base many of their moral decisions based on abstract rules to do with autonomy, rights, etc, where women would often base their positions on ideas like care and empathy. And while these two may overlap (one can respect a person’s autonomy out of care for that person), there was significant divergence (when a person is choosing carelessly, respecting their autonomy may require us to refrain from stepping in and exercising our care). 

And, maybe not so surprisingly, care ethicists like Noddings, Held, and Slote ALL either criticize the liberal tradition (that it overvalues autonomy, that it fosters impersonal dealings between people) or seeks to (in Slote’s case) ground the liberal tradition on the idea of care (we respect autonomy and rights out of a generalized care for people) in an unconvincing way. 

I, personally, have been struggling with questions of whether the ethic of care is compatible with the idea of liberalism. But, at very least, Carol Gilligan’s work on care ethics and women (“In a Different Voice”) may be an interesting read to explain at least some of the male-heaviness of libertarian ideas. 

This reads like libertarianism without a complete understanding of the free market’s versatility. Take for instance paid maternity leave for woman. One, companies have a certain allocation of resources, and mandating a certain amount of paid maternity leave requires the reallocation of those resources FROM someplace to another. Does that mean the company will lower take-home pay? Does it mean they will cut down on part-time workers? These are the broken window concepts that mandated benefits like paid maternity leave or childcare don’t take into account. Further, if we lived in a free-market, which admittedly we don’t, demands are often met organically from the mutual contract of two parties. For example, if immigration didn’t receive such a reactionary force from people afraid of losing their jobs, they might realize that increased immigration would likely lower the cost of childcare because unskilled female workers would be willing to nurse/look after children for lower cost. This would offer women more options without restricting the options of any other party. This would be a fairer government policy, because it does not violate the choice of any of its citizens while allowing them the freedom to better their situation. In short, the goal of feminism ought to be equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome, and that is the disconnect between classical liberal feminism and 3rd-wave feminism in many instances.