ABSTRACT
Feminists are helping to reshape the research agenda of contemporary political philosophy in many exciting ways. Consider two puzzles raised by feminist philosophers. One concerns the most plausible way to think about gender inequality. Using somewhat oversimplified categories, we can distinguish between the approaches of liberal and radical feminists
respectively. The former see inequality between men and women as a matter of the unequal social and economic circumstances in which men and women are placed. In consequence, liberal feminists tend to think of the wrongs visited upon women in terms of the unjustified discrimination they suffer on grounds of gender. Radical feminists, on the other hand, see gender inequality as a matter of relations of domination and subordination that exist between men and women. On their view, men as a social group dominate women as a social group. For these feminists, unequal circumstances are symptoms or evidence of domination; they are not what inequality consists of. So we have a puzzle: is gender basically a matter of inequality in things like rights or access to goods, or is it, in addition, a matter of asymmetrical relations of group power? The second puzzle concerns the role, if any, that a normative conception of human nature should play in our thought about gender relations. Again using simplified categories, we can distinguish between ethical naturalists and ethical constructivists. The former maintain that there is something significant to be said about the role of human nature in accounting for the wrongs of gender inequality, while the latter maintain that there is no room for a normative idea of human nature in grounding our rejection of gender inequalities.
