Rebecca Kukla: evaluation

Transcript context

…Is it the best way of understanding misogyny? What percentage of misogyny is it explaining, to be an economist for a moment? [laughs] That’s fair. Okay. To be both a philosopher and an economist for a moment, I think that, as a philosopher, what I’m going to say is that terms like misogyny, as they’re used in lay language, don’t have single meanings. People’s actual uses of them on the ground are messy and conflictual and so on. When we say, “Is this the proper understanding of misogyny?” we always have to understand that as a kind of a normative or prescriptive project as much as a descriptive project. What we’re saying is, “Is this the most useful, productive way of understanding misogyny?” Understanding that there’s going to be lots of other things that people mean by it that don’t fall under this heading, and lots of other things that we could’ve called misogyny that aren’t going to fit, and so on. But is this a productive strategy? And if that’s how I’m understanding the question, then I think, yes, I think it’s a very productive understanding of misogyny that’s going to go a long way towards making clear a lot of social phenomena. What I like most about it . . . I disagree with Kate Manne in some of the details, but what I really appreciate most about her account is that misogyny becomes about social structures and social norms rather than about particular men having particular icky ideas or intentions in their head. In general, I think trying to figure out what’s going on inside people’s heads, or what they’re feeling, or what they’re intending, is kind of morally uninteresting and epistemologically impossible. We never know what’s going on in people’s heads. In fact, the empirical evidence shows that we don’t know what’s going on in our own heads very well either. You can prove that people don’t understand their own intentions or the contents of their own minds very well. So I think understanding misogyny as hateful attitudes towards women, or ill intentions towards women, is a nonstarter. What I love about Professor Manne’s version is, what she wants to say is misogyny is a system of social norms that are embedded in our practices and in our environments, in our institutions that serve to punish women who step out of their proper gender roles and keep women in various ways in the primary role of serving men’s needs. And that part at that level of generality I think is extremely helpful. What are the systematic cognitive biases in the American understanding of pregnancy?…

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