[JMP 1.

3 (2004) 293-309]
ISSN 1740-4681

Rawls and Feminism:

What Should Feminists Make of Liberal Neutrality?

ELIZABETH BRAKE
Department of Philosophy
University of Calgary
2500 University Drive NW
Calgary, AB T2N 1N4
Canada
brake@ucalgary.ca

I argue that Rawls’s liberalism is compatible with feminist goals. I focus

primarily on the issue of liberal neutrality, a topic suggested by the work
of Catharine MacKinnon. I discuss two kinds of neutrality: neutrality at
the level of justifying liberalism itself, and state neutrality in political
decision-making. Both kinds are contentious within liberal theory.
Rawls’s argument for justice as fairness has been criticized for non-
neutrality at the justificatory level, a problem noted by Rawls himself in
Political Liberalism. I will defend a qualified account of neutrality at the
justificatory level, taking an epistemic approach to argue for the exclusion
of certain doctrines from the justificatory process. I then argue that the
justification process I describe offers a justificatory stance supportive of
the feminist rejection of state-sponsored gender hierarchy. Further, I
argue that liberal neutrality at the level of political decision-making will
have surprising implications for gender equality. Once the extent of the
state’s involvement in the apparently private spheres of family and civil
society is recognized, and the disproportionate influence of a sexist
conception of the good on those structures—and concomitant promotion
of that ideal—is seen, state neutrality implies substantive change. While—
as Susan Moller Okin avowed—Rawls himself may have remained
ambiguous on how to address gender inequality, his theory implies that
the state must seek to create substantive, not merely formal, equality. I
suggest that those substantive changes will not conflict with liberal
neutrality but instead be required by it.

Introduction
mong feminist philosophers, there has been substantial debate over the
A implications of Rawls’s liberalism for women’s equality. Some feminists,
such as Susan Moller Okin, have accepted the fundamental structure of
Rawls’s liberalism, but have criticized Rawls himself for ignoring gender and
remaining ambiguous regarding the status of the family, the structure of

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which affects women’s life-chances: ‘Rawls’s theory neglect[s]…gender.’1 As

Okin writes in her reply to Political Liberalism, Rawls did not clarify in that
work whether he endorsed substantive or merely formal equality for women.
In her concluding words, she asks, ‘what does Rawls mean to say about jus-
tice between the sexes?’2 However, Okin herself argues that Rawls’s theory of
justice, if applied to the social structures that perpetuate women’s inequality,
has great potential for changing those structures; she accepts Rawls’s theory
(once it is made sensitive to gender) as a suitable theory of feminist justice.3
Other feminists, however, criticize liberalism as an ideology whose promise
of equal rights obscures the mechanisms of oppression. Notably, Catharine
MacKinnon has argued that liberal freedoms serve male power and obscure
the extent of women’s subordination.4 For example, freedom of speech has
been used to protect pornography, which MacKinnon argues is harmful to
women; this freedom, as MacKinnon sees it, protects the interests of men pre-
cisely where those interests are at odds with women’s, while it appears to have
no gender bias (since freedom of speech is every citizen’s right, regardless of

1. Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989),
ch. 5, quotation from p. 89. See also Veronique Munoz-Dardé, ‘John Rawls, Justice in the
Family, and Justice of the Family’, The Philosophical Quarterly 48.192 (1998), pp. 335-52; she
writes of Rawls that ‘the family is both treated as a distinct and fundamental institution,
and never discussed in any detail’, p. 337. As these writers have pointed out, in Theory,
Rawls assumed that the family as it stands is just. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 467-68, and sections 70 and 71.
2. Susan Moller Okin, ‘Political Liberalism, Justice, and Gender’, Ethics 105.1. (1994),
pp. 23-43 (43). Rawls replies to Okin in ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’, in J. Rawls,
The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 129-80, section 5,
and in Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001),
IV.50. Andrew Smith has argued that these replies fail to address the problems raised by
liberal tolerance of religious groups which oppress women; see ‘Closer But Still No Cigar:
On the Inadequacy of Rawls’s Reply to Okin’s “Political Liberalism, Justice, and Gender” ’,
Social Theory and Practice 30.1 (2004), pp. 59-71.
3. See Okin, ‘Political Liberalism, Justice, and Gender’, pp. 42-43. More recently, Okin
has addressed the tensions between liberalism and democracy which arise in the context of
conferring group rights on groups which oppress women. See Susan Moller Okin, with
respondents, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (ed. Joshua Cohen, Matthew Howard and
Martha C. Nussbaum; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
4. See Catharine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987) and Toward a Feminist Theory of the State
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), esp. pp. 157-70. See also Carole
Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988). These feminist critiques of
liberalism are influenced by Marxism. One can compare MacKinnon’s claims to Marxist
claims that liberal ideology serves capitalists while obscuring workers’ oppression. The views
of MacKinnon and Pateman should be distinguished from the feminist critique of liberalism
motivated by an ethics of care or relationality; for an example of that view, see Virginia
Held, ‘Non-Contractual Society: A Feminist View’, in Marsha Hanen and Kai Nielsen
(eds.), Science, Morality, and Feminist Theory, Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary
Volume 13 (1987), pp. 111-37.

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 BRAKE Rawls and Feminism 295

gender).5 In MacKinnon’s view, the supposedly objective, neutral state is in

fact ‘male’.6 By this she means not only that law-makers and justices apply
supposedly gender-neutral laws in sexist ways, but also that those supposedly
gender-neutral laws are themselves subtly, but powerfully, discriminatory.
The best example of this (historically) is the family: the area which liberalism
has protected as private has been precisely the site of women’s oppression.
Given the unequal balance of power between men and women, protecting the
family sphere from judicial scrutiny masked injustices. Again, in MacKinnon’s
view, it is not coincidental that protected freedoms (such as speech) coincide
with the areas in which women’s inequality is now, in her view, maintained.
One of MacKinnon’s central points, drawn from Marxist theory, is that
because many choices are products of oppressive conditioning, liberal free-
dom of choice will perpetuate oppression.
MacKinnon’s view is in contrast to Okin’s liberal feminism, for while Okin
also recognizes that social conditioning and free individual choices perpetuate
sexual inequality, she argues that while ‘Rawls’s Theory…does not discuss such
injustices of gender, [it] has great potential for doing so.’7 Martha Nussbaum
too has defended the project of liberal feminism against MacKinnon’s cri-
tique.8 A crucial difficulty with MacKinnon’s view is that her critique of
liberalism seems to depend on a denial of freedom. Okin and Nussbaum—
like many feminists—are also concerned with how social pressures shape
women’s choices, but MacKinnon goes much further in suggesting that
women’s choices cannot be truly free within a patriarchal society.9 In this
article, I argue that Rawls’s liberalism can indeed be an ally for feminism.
But in contrast to Okin and Nussbaum, I focus primarily on the issue of lib-
eral neutrality, a topic suggested by MacKinnon’s work. While neutrality is
often taken to be at odds with feminism—since, for example, it seems femi-
nist education in schools would conflict with it—I argue that feminists should
welcome neutrality as a moral ideal in the process of justification, and that
neutrality itself will require substantive feminist reform.
From MacKinnon’s perspective, liberal neutrality is a deceptive fiction, con-
cealing the state’s patriarchal bias. In contrast, I argue that the liberal aspira-
tion to neutrality supports feminist goals. I discuss two kinds of neutrality:
neutrality at the level of justifying liberalism itself, and state neutrality in

5. MacKinnon, Toward, pp. 195-214.

6. MacKinnon, Toward, pp. 161-62.
7. Okin, ‘Political Liberalism’, p. 42.
8. Martha Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000),
pp. 77-80. Indeed, though MacKinnon critiques liberalism, Nussbaum writes that we may
see her as ‘a kind of Kantian liberal, inspired by a deep version of personhood and auto-
nomy’, p. 79.
9. See John D. Walker, ‘Liberalism, Consent, and the Problem of Adaptive Prefer-
ences’, Social Theory and Practice 21.3 (1995), pp. 457-71, and Elizabeth Brake, ‘A Liberal
Response to Catharine MacKinnon’, Southwest Philosophical Studies 22 (2000), pp. 17-23.

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political decision-making.10 Both kinds are contentious within liberal theory.

Rawls’s argument for justice as fairness has been criticized for non-neutrality
at the justificatory level. Rawls himself, in Political Liberalism, noted this
problem in A Theory of Justice.11 I will defend a qualified account of neutrality
at the justificatory level, arguing that the exclusion of certain creeds from the
justificatory process is justified. I then argue that the justification process I
describe offers a justificatory stance supportive of the feminist rejection of
state-sponsored gender hierarchy. Further, I argue that liberal neutrality at
the level of political decision-making will have surprising implications for
gender equality. While—as Okin avows—Rawls himself may have remained
ambiguous on how to address gender inequality, his theory implies that the
state must seek to create substantive, not merely formal, equality.

Liberal Neutrality
Liberal neutrality is the doctrine that the state should remain neutral between
competing conceptions of the good, where an individual’s conception of the
good is whatever plan of life she has, subject to certain rational constraints.
Such conceptions may include, for example, commitment to religious beliefs,
or to feminism, or to the traditional gender-structured family.12 Neutrality
has been taken up widely by liberal theorists. For example, Ronald Dworkin
has defined liberalism as the view that the government must ‘treat its
citizens as equals’ and argued that this requires that ‘political decisions must
be, so far as is possible, independent of any conception of the good life, or of
what gives value to life’.13 Thus, the foundational liberal tenet of moral
equality directly implies liberal neutrality. Will Kymlicka writes, ‘[a] central
feature of contemporary liberal theory is its emphasis on “neutrality”—the
view that the state should not reward or penalize particular conceptions of
the good life but, rather, should provide a neutral framework within which
different and conflicting conceptions of the good can be pursued.’14
The doctrine of neutrality is often thought to be problematic, at many
levels. First, some liberals have rejected the aspiration to neutrality between
conceptions of the good, arguing that a commitment to moral equality need

10. More fine-grained distinctions can be made; see pp. 883-84 in Will Kymlicka,
‘Liberal Individualism and Liberal Neutrality’, Ethics 99.4 (1989), pp. 883-905, and Joseph
Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). One might distinguish
the two sorts of neutrality I have in mind by thinking of them as positioned before and after
the original position. Justificatory neutrality is neutrality in the argument for the theory of
justice; political neutrality is the neutrality exercised by the state in accordance with the
principles of justice.
11. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
12. Rawls, Theory, pp. 92-93, and Political Liberalism, p. 19.
13. R. Dworkin, ‘Liberalism’, in Stuart Hampshire (ed.), Public and Private Morality
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 113-43; quotation from pp. 127-29.
14. Kymlicka, ‘Liberal Individualism’, p. 883.

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not imply a commitment to seeing all ways of life as comparable. Equal

respect for individuals, on this view, does not require equal respect for what-
ever ends and values they possess.15 An argument associated with this view is
that liberal neutrality involves an impoverished view of human life and human
possibility and is likely to produce citizens in thrall to such a view. I will not
address this criticism further here. Second, neutrality in political decision-
making apparently presents serious impediments to such decision-making.
For example, H. Tristram Engelhardt has argued that liberal neutrality con-
flicts with nationalized healthcare. He points out that such a system must
either provide, or not provide, services such as abortion, assisted reproductive
technologies and physician-assisted suicide. Either way, he argues, it will privi-
lege some comprehensive doctrines over others: for instance, a system pro-
viding abortion will privilege doctrines that see it as a legitimate medical
procedure over those which see it as morally impermissible.16 I will return to
this issue in the final section of this article. A third problem is that liberal
neutrality seems to require that the justification for liberalism also be neu-
tral, that is, that instead of basing liberalism on a controversial conception of
human nature or of the good (as Mill arguably did), its defender must rest
his or her case on principles that can be accepted by all reasonable persons.17
This issue is the subject of an important change which Rawls made in
Political Liberalism to the view he defended in Theory of Justice.
The background to this change is that in Theory, Rawls had defined a
political system as stable when it motivates its citizens to act according to its
principles of justice: ‘[o]ne conception of justice is more stable than another
if the sense of justice that it tends to generate is stronger and more likely to
override disruptive inclinations and if the institutions it allows foster weaker
impulses and temptations to act unjustly.’18 To demonstrate the stability of
justice as fairness, Rawls tried to show that citizens would be motivated to
act justly within a system regulated by the principles of justice. To this end,
he argued that the ‘disposition to take up…the standpoint of justice accords
with the individual’s good’, giving as a reason for this ‘the Kantian interpre-
tation [of the theory of justice]: acting justly is something we want to do as
free and equal rational beings’.19 But this argument employs a premise about

15. John Skorupski, ‘Liberal Elitism’, in John Skorupski, Ethical Explorations (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 193-212.
16. Tristram Engelhardt, ‘Freedom and Moral Diversity: The Moral Failures of Health
Care in the Welfare State’, Social Philosophy and Policy 14.2 (1997), pp. 180-96.
17. See, for example, Colin Bird, ‘Mutual Respect and Neutral Justification’, Ethics
107.1 (1996), pp. 62-96: ‘it is not enough that the liberal state embrace an ethic of neu-
trality. The justification for this liberal stance must itself display a certain kind of neutrality
or impartiality by avoiding arguments which rely on ‘controversial’ claims about the nature
of the good life’, p. 62.
18. Rawls, Theory, p. 454. See also Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 142.
19. Rawls, Theory, pp. 567, 572. One way to understand the principles of justice is as
the object of choice of a free rational will. Rawls calls his method ‘Kantian constructivism’:

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the nature of human good. It gives a Kantian conception of the good as a

comprehensive doctrine, one in which acting justly accords with an agent’s
good. Rawls defines a ‘comprehensive doctrine’ as a theory of value which
applies to a wide range of subjects, such as ‘what is of value in human life,
…ideals of personal character, as well as ideals of friendship and of familial
and associational relationships’.20 Liberal neutrality, however, requires neu-
trality between comprehensive doctrines. Thus, since assuming a Kantian
comprehensive doctrine conflicts with neutrality between comprehensive
doctrines, Rawls rejects this move in Political Liberalism.21
Not only did the account of stability illicitly employ a Kantian conception
of the good as a comprehensive doctrine, but moreover, Rawls writes in
Political Liberalism, Theory treated justice as fairness itself as a comprehensive
doctrine. Rawls had there presented a conception of a ‘well-ordered society’
in which ‘everyone accepts and knows that the others accept the same
principles of justice, and the basic social institutions satisfy and are known
to satisfy these principles’.22 However, the idea of a society in which ‘every-
one accepts…the same principles of justice’ conflicts with neutrality if justice
as fairness is understood as a comprehensive doctrine.23 Rawls attempts to
correct these problems in Political Liberalism by adjusting the scope of justice
as fairness; it is not comprehensive, but narrowly political.24 As such, it is the
possible subject of an overlapping consensus between various reasonable
comprehensive doctrines—‘religious, philosophical and moral’—which can
agree to the regulatory principles of justice.25 Justice as fairness, as political,
applies only to the basic structures of society and can slot into the various
comprehensive doctrines found therein.26
In making these changes, Rawls was in part motivated by the circum-
stances of contemporary American society, especially the deep divisions over
religion. In an interview, he explained the focus on religion in Political Libera-
lism as motivated by his concern ‘about the survival, historically, of constitu-
tional democracy…the problem is how do you see religion and comprehensive
secular doctrines as compatible with and supportive of the basic institutions
of a constitutional regime’.27 Nevertheless, it is not clear either that the

his principles, like Kant’s moral law, are constructed through reason rather than intuited
(Political Liberalism, pp. 99-107).
20. Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 13.
21. Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp. xvi-xvii.
22. Rawls, Theory, pp. 453-54. Rawls dismissed this conception of a well-ordered society
as ‘unrealistic’ in Political Liberalism, p. xvi.
23. Rawls, Theory, p. 454, and see Political Liberalism, p. xvi.
24. See Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp. xvi-xvii. He also revises the account of stability.
25. Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 15.
26. Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 11.
27. Interview with Bernard Prusak, ‘Politics, Religion and the Public Good: An Inter-
view with Philosopher John Rawls’s’, Commonweal 125.16 (1998), pp. 12-18.

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changes made in the later work will increase the appeal of his theory for
those already holding incompatible comprehensive doctrines or that Rawls has
made a plausible case for the stability of justice in a society deeply divided
over questions of value.28 Some have suggested that the original account
makes a more convincing case for the stability of the principles.29 Moreover,
Political Liberalism’s restriction of the scope of justice continues to fail to be
neutral between all comprehensive doctrines.
First, the argument for justice as fairness depends on a claim of moral
equality. Rawls claims that human beings are morally equal in virtue of
possessing the potential ‘for a conception of the good…[and] for a sense of
justice’.30 But the features of individuals which Rawls picks out as constitu-
tive of moral equality are themselves not neutral, because they reflect a
conception of what is important about human beings.31 Justice as fairness is
not neutral in one respect in which it claims to be neutral because it privi-
leges one conception of the good, that is, one in which the individual’s plan
of life is an object of rational choice. Someone who believes that autonomy is
not especially important, or that humans are not equal in more important
respects, might resist this claim. Thus, Rawls’s derivation of the principles of
justice appears illegitimately to ignore competing conceptions of the good.32
The response that neutrality is not foundational but derived from the ideal
of moral equality appears to beg the question.
Distinguishing between political and comprehensive doctrines, as Rawls
does in Political Liberalism, does not meet this objection, because such a dis-
tinction is itself controversial. For by assuming that the political conception
of the individual and its associated model of moral equality are the basis for
defining political principles, Rawls has ignored comprehensive conceptions
which would model political principles on alternative conceptions of the indi-

28. See Michael Huemer, ‘Rawls’s Problem of Stability’, Social Theory and Practice 22.3
(1996), pp. 375-96. For further discussion, see also Samuel Scheffler, ‘The Appeal of
Political Liberalism’, Ethics 105.1 (1994), pp. 4-22.
29. See for example, Okin’s ‘Political Liberalism, Justice, and Gender’. Also, Susan
Mendus has argued that Rawls’s argument for the congruence of justice with the agent’s
good need not invoke a comprehensive conception of the good, and so the account in Theory
need not be inconsistent—see ‘The Importance of Love in Rawls’s Theory of Justice’, British
Journal of Political Science 29.1 (1999), pp. 57-75.
30. Rawls, Theory, p. 561.
31. To review some of the difficulties associated with establishing an account of moral
equality, see Bernard Williams, ‘The Idea of Equality’, in B. Williams, Problems of the Self
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 230-49.
32. A related criticism, made by Adina Schwartz in ‘Moral Neutrality and Primary
Goods’, Ethics 83.4 (1973), pp. 294-307, and by Thomas Nagel in ‘Rawls on Justice’,
Philosophical Review 82.2 (1973), pp. 220-34, is that Rawls’s individualism and his argument
that contractors in the original position will seek to maximize their primary goods is
incompatible with socialist views of the good, or indeed, with those of members of religious
orders who take vows of poverty. See also Kymlicka, ‘Liberal Individualism’, pp. 886-93.

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vidual and his or her morally significant features.33 For instance, a compre-
hensive doctrine might simply deny that the political sphere is separable:
examples of religions that would base law on religious teachings spring
readily to mind. Thus the religious believer who seeks unity of church and
state, or a legal system based on the Old Testament, might respond to Rawls
that his restriction of the scope of justice does not make the theory either
neutral or acceptable to the believer.34 Or, a doctrine might allow such a dis-
tinction, but carve it differently: some feminist analyses of oppression are an
example (consider the claim that ‘the personal is political’). Thus, MacKinnon
might say in response to Political Liberalism that the distinction between com-
prehensive doctrines and the political implicitly excludes feminist considera-
tions (which take issue with the content of various comprehensive doctrines
and their effects in society) from justice as fairness.35 In the next section, I
turn to the question of the extent to which such a response is justified.

Feminism, Justificatory Neutrality and William Clifford

In the next section I will argue that neutrality at the level of political decision-
making can serve feminist goals. Here I will argue that the restriction of jus-
tice as fairness to the political is less fruitful; moreover, neutrality at the level
of theory justification must be qualified as ‘skeptical’ or ‘agnostic’, not plural-
ist. Such a procedure derives the ideal of moral equality and the policy of
political neutrality (in decision-making by the liberal state) from the absence
of any justification for unequal treatment. The procedure I will sketch is
morally neutral—since it presupposes no claims about the good—but uses an
epistemic argument to exclude doctrines that deny equality. It retains neu-
trality at the justificatory level only in a qualified manner. While some illiberal
comprehensive doctrines must be tolerated, and their expression protected, in
a liberal state, they can be ignored in the derivation of the principles gov-
erning such a state. My account is closer to Theory, which I see as more com-
patible with a feminist perspective in this respect, than to Political Liberalism.36
From a feminist perspective, it may be a mistake not to see justice as a
comprehensive doctrine. Recall that a comprehensive doctrine applies to
‘what is of value in human life, …ideals of personal character, as well as
ideals of friendship and of familial and associational relationships’.37

33. Paul F. Campos raises such a criticism in ‘Secular Fundamentalism’, Columbia Law
Review 94.6 (1994), pp. 1814-27.
34. Of course, Rawls means only for justice as fairness to be compatible with all
reasonable comprehensive doctrines (Political Liberalism, p. 210), and he would surely view a
doctrine which denied the separation of church and state as unreasonable. It should be
obvious why this response will not placate the believer in question.
35. This is also Okin’s concern; but the concern deepens in proportion to the range of
social practices which one sees as constitutive of, and reinforcing, inequality.
36. Compare Okin’s ‘Political Liberalism, Justice, and Gender’ on this point.
37. Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 13.

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According to most feminist views, justice should regulate these spheres—

especially that of the family.38 Justice is not only a virtue of political insti-
tutions but is a virtue within the apparently private spheres of family and
civil society.39 Some qualifications are important. The scope of justice should
be distinguished from the question of the legitimate extent of state interfer-
ence in individual lives. The state might promote, but not enforce, the ideal
of justice in all spheres of life. Also, justice is not the only virtue. Principles
of justice can be supplemented with other comprehensive doctrines. Third,
the content of principles of justice may be different at micro and macro levels
(for example, the difference principle might not be the relevant principle of
distribution within the family). But the underlying theory of justice, deriving
from the ideal of moral equality and equal respect, should be consistent from
the macro to the micro level.
From the liberal feminist viewpoint, in which justice should apply to the
family, the restriction of justice to the political makes the theory less attrac-
tive. From the Marxist feminist viewpoint, restricting justice to the political
begs the question of how the political ought to be defined (for example, if
the political is defined as any relationship characterized by a dynamic of
power, Rawls’s distinction is incorrect). And within liberal theory, the restric-
tion to the political does not seem to offer a significant advantage. As I have
indicated above, it does not speak to those whose alienation from the theory
Rawls sought to overcome, such as religious fundamentalists.40 However,
allowing justice to be comprehensive conflicts with neutrality at the level of
political decision-making, so I will defer this question.
To return to the issue of justification, I think a defender of Rawls can give
good epistemic reasons for rejecting certain creeds from consideration in the
justification procedure, creeds which, for instance, would define humans as
unequal or maintain that the church ought to be the highest arbiter in
political affairs. Rawls restricts himself to being neutral among reasonable
views, but he allows religious views to be counted as reasonable.41 I will
suggest that a stronger account of rational constraints on belief shows why it

38. See Jean Hampton, ‘Feminist Contractarianism’, in Louise Antony and Charlotte
Witt (eds.), A Mind of One’s Own (Oxford: Westview Press, 1993), pp. 227-56.
39. I use ‘civil society’ in Hegel’s sense. On this point, see Okin, Justice, Gender, and the
Family, and John Tomasi, ‘Individual Rights and Community Virtues’, Ethics 101.3 (1991),
pp. 521-36.
40. Making justice comprehensive suggests a much stronger liberalism. For example, it
allows that the liberal view of justice will come into conflict with comprehensive views about
the good, which include belief in gender hierarchy. This will produce social instability; if
liberalism is to be stable, it must inculcate the principles of justice and associated ideals in
education. This is the conflict Okin discusses in Multiculturalism. In response to the idea that
restricting justice to the political will promote stability, I say that justice, whether political
or comprehensive, will be unstable unless ideals of moral equality are taught.
41. Rawls distinguishes the rational and the reasonable. Rational applies to means-end
reasoning, and reasonable to a willingness to enter discussions.

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is legitimate for certain conceptions of the good to be disregarded at the level

of political justification. Of course, this may not appeal to the believer, but
as I have pointed out, Rawls’s more conciliatory approach is unlikely to
either. This approach will illuminate the appeal of Rawls’s liberalism to femi-
nism, for it begins with an ideal of moral equality incompatible with views of
gender hierarchy. Indeed, most sexist and racist views (and other forms of
illegitimate discrimination) are excluded from the justificatory process on the
view I will describe.42
In an 1877 paper, William Clifford argued that it was ethically wrong to
hold religious beliefs, or at least, to hold any beliefs ‘without sufficient evi-
dence’.43 Clifford argued that there is a normative requirement to evaluate
our beliefs: ‘it is wrong always, everywhere, and for any one, to believe any-
thing upon insufficient evidence’.44 Clifford gives an example of a ship-owner
who sends his ship to sea sincerely believing in its sea-worthiness although
he lacks sufficient evidence for this belief. The ship-owner is guilty of the
deaths of the passengers when the ship sinks. Even had it not sunk, Clifford
adds, he would still have been guilty, for he had no right to believe as he did.
Clifford aims to establish a duty to doubt on several grounds, both con-
sequentialist and deontological.
Clifford’s consequentialist arguments are interestingly resonant with dis-
cussions of feminism, liberalism and stability. Where feminists warn that
belief in gender hierarchy has subtle effects on women’s actual status, Clifford
somewhat confusingly paraphrases Jesus: ‘[h]e who truly believes that which
prompts him to an action has looked upon the action to lust after it, he has
committed it already in his heart.’45 Believing without warrant leads the
incautious believer down the wide plain road of epistemological vice. Since
belief is not ‘a private matter’ but helps create society, vicious habits of belief

42. Of course, on Rawls’s description, they should be excluded in the original position
because the contractors do not know their own race or sex. But my comments here respond
to the objector who asks why Rawls is entitled to set up the original position in a race- or
gender-blind way.
43. Clifford’s view has been challenged. William James responded to it in ‘The Will to
Believe’ (1896), reprinted in John J. McDermott (ed.), The Writings of William James
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 717-35. Susan Haack has more recently
argued that it is too demanding in her ‘The Ethics of Belief Reconsidered’, in Lewis Hahn
(ed.), The Philosophy of Roderick M. Chisholm (Chicago: Open Court, 1997), pp. 129-44. A
major problem with Clifford’s view is the difficulty of specifying what evidence counts as
sufficient. I will bracket these serious worries for two reasons. First, I am concerned with
ruling out certain value judgments and religious beliefs from the justificatory process, not
establishing that belief in them is ethically wrong. Second, I am more interested in com-
paring Clifford’s arguments with Rawls’s than with defending Clifford’s conclusions.
44. William Kingdon Clifford, ‘The Ethics of Belief’, in his Lectures and Essays (ed. Leslie
Stephen and Frederick Pollock; London: Macmillan, 2nd edn, 1886), pp. 339-63 (346),
originally published in Contemporary Review (1877).
45. Clifford, ‘Belief’, p. 342.

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infect posterity.46 The person who believes without warrant makes herself
credulous, and thereby does a ‘great wrong towards Man’, for (like Mill in On
Liberty), Clifford claims that if society becomes a den of the easily convinced,
it is poised to ‘sink back into savagery’.47 These arguments take the critical
examination of beliefs as instrumentally valuable.
Clifford also suggests that ‘the faculty of belief’ is valuable for its own sake
and that failing to reflect critically on our beliefs fails to respect it: ‘[b]elief,
that sacred faculty which prompts the decisions of our will, and knits into
harmonious working all the compacted energies of our being, is ours not for
ourselves, but for humanity.’48 He castigates credulity, like lying, as a failure
to revere the truth:
Habitual want of care about what I believe leads to habitual want of care in
others about the truth of what is told to me… It may matter little to me, in my
cloud-castle of sweet illusions and darling lies; but it matters much to Man that
I have made my neighbors ready to deceive. The credulous man is father to the
liar and the cheat.49

A credulous citizenry is, indeed, perhaps as great a threat to the stability of

a liberal state as a quarrelsome but critical one. However, I am not equipped
to evaluate these causal claims. I want to investigate the following ideas,
suggested by Clifford, as relevant to Rawls’s justification procedure: credu-
lity, belief on insufficient evidence, is irrational (a bad strategy), and beliefs
formed without sufficient evidence are unreasonable and lacking in respect
for humanity.
First, credulity is a bad strategy, both for the individual and the group, in
policy debate. When discussion is undertaken for some purpose—such as
choosing principles of justice—a rule of honesty is rationally justified since
the knowledge that one’s interlocutors may be lying will make progress much
more difficult. But credulity will also undermine debate by making truth-
telling unnecessary. (A rule against credulity might also be thought of as part
of a Habermasian discourse ethic.) Someone might respond that lying is a
sophisticated and time-saving form of communication; honesty is not always
the best policy. But even if lying might be rational, believing too easily would
never seem to be a good strategy in debate. In some cases, believing some-
thing we ought not to believe (on purely epistemic grounds) could be the best
strategy (for example, when the belief will motivate us to action). But while
credulity might be rational when one chooses it to motivate oneself, the dan-
gers of indiscriminate credulity in debates of consequence clearly outweigh
the possibilities of benefit. In most human interactions, doubt is rational.
Though there may be isolated exceptions, doubt as a habit is rational, for

46. Clifford, ‘Belief’, p. 342.

47. Clifford, ‘Belief’, p. 345; John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (London: Penguin Books,
1985 [1859]).
48. Clifford, ‘Belief’, p. 343.
49. Clifford, ‘Belief’, pp. 345-46.

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credulity lets reason linger, in paraphrase Clifford, in cloud-castles of illusion,

where its keenness may atrophy in the delights of darling lies.50 One might,
therefore, justify the exclusion of the beliefs of the credulous from the original
position by introducing a rule of doubt.
At the more fundamental level of justification, Clifford’s suggestion that
credulity is an epistemological vice explains why beliefs without sufficient
evidence are not reasonable, that is, why they fail to respect the process of
the giving of reasons. Credulity eases the distinction between the true and
the false.51 Clifford suggests that the truth demands reverence: belief is no
light matter. To believe the truth of some claim is to make a judgment about
the nature of the world. Further, belief invests the believer in its object. Our
ability to believe, or not to believe, is basic to our rational maneuverings. The
metaphysical magician, who waves the wand of his conviction without dis-
crimination, granting this hypothesis truth and that not, mocks reason itself.
Believing without sufficient evidence undermines the distinction between
truth and falsity because it fails to be precise about that distinction; if I take
to be true what could just as easily, to my knowledge, be false, I have failed
to acknowledge the proper boundary between the two and the gravity of my
judgment, both as it reflects on the world and as it implicates me. If this is
right, credulity abuses humanity just as lying does in Kant’s view, by failing
to show respect for rational nature in oneself and others.52 Unwarranted
belief fails to respect reason as an end in itself by using it as a toy to indulge
prejudice, inclination and fancy.
Rawls argues that political justification must be reasonable, in the sense that
such justification gives reasons which one could expect another to accept
(whether or not they do in practice). According to Rawls’s idea of political
legitimacy, the ‘exercise of political power is fully proper only when it is exer-
cised in accordance with a constitution the essentials of which all citizens as
free and equal may reasonably be expected to endorse in the light of principles
and ideals acceptable to their common human reason’.53 Rawls invokes this
principle in justifying the idea of a public reason, that is, that considerations
introduced into deliberations be limited to principles that citizens can rea-
sonably be expected to endorse. Of course, reasonable people can disagree due
to burdens of judgment. But Rawls would count more beliefs as reasonable

50. Clifford, ‘Belief’, p. 346.

51. As a character in David Lean’s 1962 film ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ suggestively says, ‘A
man who tells lies, like me, merely hides the truth. But a man who tells half lies has
forgotten where he put it’.
52. Kant’s views on lying extend beyond the famous false promising example in the
Groundwork; in the ‘Doctrine of Virtue’ Book 1 Chapter 1, he writes that ‘[b]y a lie a human
being throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity as a human being’. Part of the
argument he gives for this is that lying contradicts the purpose of the faculty of com-
munication. Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy (ed. and trans. Mary Gregor; Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 552-53.
53. Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 137.

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than would my proposed Cliffordian constraints. My suggestion extends the

category of the unreasonable to include beliefs without sufficient evidence,
which I take to include most forms of revealed religion, atheism, and beliefs
about the essential natures of particular races, men, or women. For what
Clifford’s arguments purport to do is raise the bar for the reasonable—for
what we can, or should, take as a reason.54
Rawls’s view that political justification must be reasonable involves norma-
tive assumptions about respect for individuals and the justification for the
exercise of power over them. Giving reasons—or at least acting in a way for
which one could give reasons which others could reasonably be expected to
accept—is required (in Kantian terms) to treat others as ends in themselves,
or ‘as beings who must. . .be able to contain in themselves [or share] the end
of the very same action’.55 Rawls’s political constructivism locates political
legitimacy precisely in the possibility of agreement, or sharing of ends. As I
have noted above, such a conception of political justification is not neutral
between comprehensive doctrines, since some will reject reason as the appro-
priate form of political justification. My suggestion has been that, given this
account of political justification, liberalism may exclude all unwarranted
beliefs from its justificatory process. This is not to argue, however, that a lib-
eral society should not be tolerant of different conceptions of the good, for
such tolerance is fundamental to liberalism. Political neutrality issues from
the veil of ignorance.
Thus, the justification for liberalism need be even less neutral, with regard
to competing doctrines, than Rawls suggests. An ‘agnostic’ neutrality can
exclude more competing doctrines from consideration. Further, the motivating
ideal of liberalism can be generated on Cliffordian grounds, for the Rawlsian
ideal of moral equality can be defended epistemically by ruling out unreason-
able doctrines. Claims of essential inequality cannot be defended because
individual exceptions can always be found, and it is difficult to see what
evidence could be produced to justify claims about, for instance, women’s
nature. Predictions about the abilities of classes of people cannot be made
with accuracy, so no legitimate reason for unequal distribution of rights
between men and women can be given. Further, as John Stuart Mill argued
in The Subjection of Women, we cannot make inferences about women’s ‘nature’
from the characteristics women exhibit in an unequal society in which women
and men are subject to different expectations and upbringings. Under cur-
rent conditions, we can have no grounds for making general claims about
women’s innate propensities and abilities.56 Someone might suggest instead

54. Rawls in fact claims the theory of justice is reasonable, not true, so Clifford’s
comments would have to be adjusted, mutatis mutandis, to emphasize the evaluation of
reasons as opposed to the evaluation of true belief.
55. From Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, also to be found in Gregor’s
Practical Philosophy, p. 80 (4:430).
56. John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (ed. Susan Moller Okin; Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1988 [1869]).

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that the distribution of rights or primary goods be proportionate to abilities.

But how could the relevance of abilities be proven? The thought is that an
unequal distribution of rights must be justified, and no sufficient evidence
can be given for privileging certain groups or abilities. In the absence of such
evidence, the default must be equality.
Rawls’s defense of reasonableness in political justification (and my ex-
tended version of it) cohere with feminist values by excluding sexist beliefs
and hierarchical political systems. The exclusion of such beliefs avoids gender
bias in the theory; Rawls’s liberalism is radically, foundationally, egalitarian.
MacKinnon’s critique of liberal neutrality as essentially male may have pur-
chase instead as a critique of the misguided application of liberal principles.
For example, as suggested before, the historical exclusion of marriage from
justice reflected a gender bias in the construction, and the application, of the
law. This construction failed to appreciate that serious injustices which called
for legal recourse existed in the supposedly private realm, and, further, that
the privacy of marriage (if privacy is understood as absence of interference
by the state) was illusory since the borders of that privacy, and aspects of the
interaction within it, were regulated by law.

Feminism and Political Neutrality

Liberal feminism has drawn on the principle of equal opportunity to argue
that liberalism is committed to state action to reverse gender inequality.
When this principle is applied to gender inequality and the gendered struc-
tures of society, it requires the state to address these conditions through law
and redistributive measures such as state-supported child-care, equitable laws
of property division during marriage and on divorce, flexible working hours,
parental leave for both parents, and gender-free schooling.57 As a basic struc-
ture of society—by Rawls’s admission—the family is subject to the principles
of justice.58 Prima facie, some feminist reforms, such as education in moral
equality, seem incompatible with state neutrality. For example, many feminists
hold that justice between the genders cannot be achieved so long as childcare
remains primarily women’s responsibility. Shared parenting, flexible work
hours and state-supported crèches may support this goal and be compatible

57. Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family, pp. 175-79. Okin also bases her arguments on
the family’s influence on moral development, in response to Rawls’s account of moral
psychology in Part III of Theory. She argues that citizens will not develop a sense of justice
so long as fathers and mothers possess unequal shares of power. Like Mill, she notes that
habitual inequality in personal life ill equips us to treat others, in any circumstances, as free
and equal. Also see Karen Green, ‘Rawls, Women, and the Priority of Liberty’, in Janna L.
Thompson (ed.), Women and Philosophy, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary
Volume 64 (1986), pp. 26-36. Green uses the liberty principle, as well as the principle of
equal opportunity, in an argument for liberal feminism; however, invoking the liberty prin-
ciple in this context seems to me problematic.
58. Rawls, Theory, p. 7.

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with neutrality. But education that encourages boys and girls equally to
envision themselves as care-givers—or billboard advertisements encouraging
men to change diapers—might conflict with neutrality by teaching children a
controversial conception of the good. However, again deferring this conflict
between neutrality and feminism, I want to focus on different implications
that neutrality will have for feminist goals.
MacKinnon’s complaints about liberal neutrality focus on how the abstrac-
tion of liberal theory ignores the concrete context and effects of its applica-
tion. Thus, a right to free speech in a (hypothetical) context where the media
is controlled by sexist men will secure the protection of sexist speech, with
ensuing bad consequences for women. However, if we accept MacKinnon’s
view that standing practices often have a deeply patriarchal element, then
neutrality in practice will require radical change. First, certain apparently pri-
vate social structures arguably impede women’s equality. But, second, these
structures are not purely private—for instance, it is mistaken to conceptualize
civil society as a distinct sphere from the state and as free from state inter-
ference. Thus, state neutrality will require substantive change in state policies
regulating these apparently private spheres, when standing regulation is pre-
mised on or promotes a certain conception of the good. Raz and Kymlicka
have distinguished neutrality in deliberation—the state’s avoidance of invok-
ing conceptions of the good in policy-making—and in consequences—the
state’s avoidance of promoting, as a result of its actions, a conception of the
good.59 I will adduce both kinds in the following discussion.
Take the example of having children and a career. Women are formally
free to choose a career, but, to a much greater extent than men, face a con-
flict between pursuing a career and having children. External obstacles to
pursuing both include the expense of good childcare and the lack of flexi-
bility in working hours imposed by many careers. The structures for pursuit
of social primary goods are fitted for someone without the responsibilities of
parenting. Because women typically take on greater childcare responsibilities
than do men, these structures unduly penalize women and tend to reinforce
the gendered division of labor by forcing parenting women out of the work-
place. Green argues that such situations call for state redress on the basis of
equal opportunity, since changes are needed to ensure that all individuals
can pursue their conceptions of the good.60 But it is also the case that such
structures are not neutral. The arrangement of working hours, for example,
was historically formed on the basis of a gendered division of labor. Further,
their effects unduly promote one conception of the good—that in which
primary care-givers for young children stay home, while their partners work
outside the home to support the family.

59. See Kymlicka, ‘Liberal Individualism’, pp. 883-84. Raz argues that Rawls endorsed
neutrality in consequences, and Kymlicka that Rawls endorsed justificatory neutrality. Since
both are implicated in the same way in my argument, I will consider both.
60. Green, ‘Rawls’, p. 35.

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It is crucial to my argument to note that the state directly maintains the

working environment predicated on this conception in a host of ways. The
state sets minimum wage and overtime laws, places constraints on working
hours, and regulates employee rights through labor law; indirectly, it supports
companies through government contracts; and as an employer, it enforces its
own policies for those employed by the state. It also has more indirect effects
through provision of services such as public transport (which affects access to
employment). Once we consider the state’s involvement in all of these areas,
it becomes clear that the state has substantial effects on working conditions.
Neutrality between conceptions of the good in this area will require creating
policy on grounds that respect the variety of lifestyles persons might choose,
and seeking to ensure that the consequences of policy do not indirectly
promote one conception of the good.
Another example is marriage. As Okin argues, although the family has
been seen as private, it is a major determinant in the distribution of social
goods, and thus family arrangements must meet the demands of justice. It is
a life-shaping institution, the ‘gender structure [of which] is itself a major
obstacle to equality of opportunity’, affecting the ‘opportunities of girls and
women’.61 Again, reform of the family seems required on grounds of equal
opportunity. But neutrality too requires substantial change to marriage and
family law. Simply by recognizing marriage, the state fails to be neutral—and
even if marriage were extended to same-sex partnerships, this would be the
case. For by recognizing marriage, the state picks out a certain type of rela-
tionship—monogamous, permanent, between two persons—as worthy of
recognition. Again, both in deliberation and effects, the state privileges this
type of relationship—corresponding to a certain conception of the good—
over other arrangements.62 When we consider how many of the basic struc-
tures of society are shaped by state regulation, and recognize—through femi-
nist or other critique—how those structures assume and promote controversial
conceptions of the good, it seems that neutrality will require substantial
change.
Ronald Dworkin has argued that a liberal state is required by neutrality to
act to secure a conception of the good under threat. Taking the example of
environmental conservation, he argues that a liberal state is not permitted to
support conservation on the grounds that it is part of ‘a superior conception
of what a truly worthwhile life is’. But it may be permitted and even required
to do so on the basis that non-intervention ‘is not neutral amongst competing
ideas of the good life, but in fact destructive of the very possibility of some

61. Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family, p. 16.

62. Feminists and Marxists have argued that monogamous marriage indirectly promotes
other conceptions of the good (such as the value of property ownership). See Christine
Overall, ‘Monogamy, Non-Monogamy, and Identity’, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy
13.4 (1998), pp. 1-17 and John McMurtry, ‘Monogamy: A Critique’, The Monist 56 (1972),
pp. 587-99.

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 BRAKE Rawls and Feminism 309

of these’.63 If wildlife and nature are destroyed, the conception of the good
which involves them will no longer be open to pursuit.
Similarly, gender-structured social practices destroy the possibilities that
would be available to women if they were fully equal members of society. The
gendered division of labor within the family, the devaluing of women’s work,
and employment that penalizes those with small children close off alternatives
that should be left open. Different courses of action are made unavailable by
the social conditions themselves. Just as environmental destruction destroys
the possibility of outdoor pursuits, the hegemony of gender-structured social
practices destroys the possibility for women to live as they could in a society
in which women were not systematically disadvantaged. The force of this
point is not that women’s lives could be better. The point is that the world
that is made impossible by social practices is one in which women could live
without the impediments to success and the strains on their psychology,
their social relations, and their attitudes to and expectations of work, love
and parenting, which currently exist as a consequence of oppression. The
closure of this possibility is unjust, and not just because it violates equal
opportunity, but because it violates neutrality. Even when individual women
are able to overcome barriers, they do not have access to conceptions of the
good that would be available to them in a society where women were fully
equal. Also eliminated are the unknown possibilities of the good, for women,
of living as fully equal members of society.
In this article, I have tried to show that feminism has more to gain from
state neutrality than has been widely recognized. Justificatory neutrality as
agnostic, like the foundational ideal of moral equality, implies a rejection of
sexist and other oppressive doctrines. In practice, state neutrality implies
substantial change, once the state’s involvement in the apparently private
sphere is recognized, and the disproportionate influence of a sexist concep-
tion of the good on those structures—and concomitant promotion of that
ideal—is seen. Liberal neutrality need not be inconsistent with feminist
goals; indeed, it may support them. In fact, if neutrality does require these
far-reaching changes, the other conflicts between feminism and neutrality, or
neutrality and justice as a comprehensive doctrine, may become less pressing.
Attitudinal change or feminist education may be less important when pri-
mary care-givers are no longer penalized in their pursuit of a career, the law
of marriage and divorce is reformed, and other substantial economic and
legal changes are effected.

63. Dworkin, ‘Liberalism’, p. 141.

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