Kittay's Response to Michael S.

Here is Dr. Kittay's response to Michael's post:

I have basically two responses to Michael S. 

Of course, I agree that in seeking legislative change, we have to attempt to get a broad coalition.  But the notion of an overlapping consensus requires something besides what looks like a mere modus vivendi, and such coalition building may be merely that. Once a piece of legislation is enacted, we go our separate ways.   Yes we want a richer pluralism to which we bring our whole selves and that is what it means to find an overlapping consensus.  Finding an overlapping consensus involves all parties sharing the principle that people have a right to have differing comprehensive conceptions of the good, which also means these each of these comprehensive conceptions have to allow for those other than our own to differ from our own in significant ways.  These conceptions of the good, as I said at the conference, are not mere momentary preferences.  A comprehensive conception of the good informs our values, the meaning we understand our lives to have, and both prescribes and proscribes behavior. Clearly differing conceptions of the good share understandings of what is valuable, permissible, and desirable, even if these understandings are differently grounded and justified.  But it is just as evident that differing conceptions are also competing conceptions of the good, and differences of some moment do arise. What is important to the idea of an overlapping consensus is that we can convince each other without insisting that the other must accept our own comprehensive conception of the good, and this is what Rawls speaks of as a commitment to public reason. I should be able to convince you of a belief or the acceptability of a practice on grounds that we both can accept.

For example, it is possible that, you a practicing Catholic, and I a secular Jew, can agree that women and men should each be able to contribute both to the realms of work (however that is defined) and to family life (however that is defined).  That men and women alike should be able to reap the benefits of work and family and carry  the burdens associated with each realm. You may hold these views based on beliefs grounded in religious teachings, and you may invoke the writings of Pope John II.  I hold these views based on secular Enlightenment ideals of equality and would try to show that Enlightenment ideas of equality should be realized in equality of opportunity for men and women (and I might cite a number of philosophers beginning with John Stuart Mill and Mary Wollstonecraft).  I would add that if we carefully examine what most of us value having opportunity for, we would find that access to and obligations in the realms of BOTH work and family are equally salient.  (I guess the latter can be justified just "by looking around.") 

On the basis of our shared views we could agree to principles of equal pay for equal work, more flexible work arrangements, paid family and medical leave, among others.  I suspect, however, that the different sources of our beliefs would probably show up when we fill in the details of the desired policies.  We may have differences about who is entitled to 'family' leave. 

At this point, is it really helpful for the religious thinker to insist that her views are deeper, or richer?  Is it really helpful for the secularist to insist that her views are more rational?  Or for either to insist that her views are truer?  Is it not more valuable for us to try to convince each other on the basis of beliefs we share and the sorts of reasons we can each accept?  That is, we have to try to convince each other, not on the basis of our comprehensive conceptions of the good—you will not convince me that a gay man raising a child with another gay man is not entitled to family leave because Catholic teaching on the family does not qualify this as a family.  I will not convince you on the basis of my secular beliefs, which would hold that we have no basis on which to tell anyone whom they may love.

We might however agree that a sick child requires someone at home who cares more about that child than a distant relative or a stranger might.  We might also agree that someone who is raising a child adequately fits the description of someone for whom the child’s welfare is paramount—irrespective of whom that individual chooses as a sexual partner. We might even agree that such a person should be able to go to the sick child not only for the child's sake, but for his own sake--because the well-being of that child is so vitally important to him.  If we can agree to all that than we should be able to agree on a ‘family’ leave policy expansive enough to include gay men or lesbian women raising children.  When I worry about a religious feminism that is too restrictive in what it considers a family to be, I am not necessarily trying to convince that feminist to embrace my view of family as much as I am concerned that limiting family to the heterosexual two-parent monogamous family will stand in the way of achieving the sort of well-being for ourselves and our neighbors that we may both wish to see. 

Which gets me to the second point.  I cannot see how a Christian anthropology provides a sturdier foundation for feminism--for me at least--as I don’t hold to the positions of that Christian anthropology.  Christian anthropology does not serve as a foundation for my beliefs.  I, on the other hand, cannot understand why the fundamental dependency which all humans share should not be understood as a fundamental basis for social, ethical and political values. It is, after all, because of that dependency and vulnerability that humans collect in groups and form social and political organization.  We need each other to help nurture and protect our dependents, and to be protected and nurtured ourselves as we have been or become dependent—and of course we are dependent always in innumerable ways.   Contractarians such as Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant and Rawls have yet to adequately explain why fully independent beings would ever need one another enough to form coherent social organizations.  It is only when feminists begin to uncover the implicit masculine bias and perspective in all these thinkers (even I regret to say, John Rawls) that we begin to see the role women have played in social life, and the role their work in caring for dependents has had in the formation of ethical, social, and political life.

This is not a “sez who” matter.  This is a question of thinking through very difficult questions—looking at what some of our best thinkers have had to say and judging it against the reality in which we live.  Women today have attained a level of participation in public life that they scarcely have had before.  The social technologies that have been in place are changing as a consequence and old theories appear in a new light. Some foundations don’t serve us too well, even when they served others before us—and given the tragedies of the human race we have to wonder how well they have served us.  So I, for one, relish the position of a maverick, in the hope of building better foundations than those on which we have had to rely so far.  I see this as a communal project, one that I very much hope religious and secular feminists can construct together.