Value As Relationality in Feminist and Pragmatist Thought

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This is a working paper version of an essay later published as "Value as Relationality: Feminist, Pragmatist and Process Thought Meet Economics," Journal of Speculative Philosophy 15(2), 2001, pp. 137-151. You may be able to access the published article here.

Value as Relationality:

Feminist, Pragmatist and Process Thought Meet Economics

Julie A. Nelson

Revised, April 2001

Submitted for consideration for the special issue on "Feminism and Pragmatism" to be published in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Shannon Sullivan, editor. I acknowledge the helpful suggestions of Shannon Sullivan and David Lamberth, and the support of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman Fellowship for Research on Caring Labor and the Foundation for Child Development. The usual caveat applies.

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Introduction

Religion was the religion of the medieval period, and science the religion of centuries afterward. In the current era, economics seems to hold this role of cultural hegemony. One sees everywhere references to the pressures of globalization and competition, praise of the efficiency and economic-growth inducing effects of free markets, and emphasis on successful marketing--including the marketing of educational "products" to prospective student "consumers." Ethics are often confined to the realm of the personal and perhaps the political; in the realm of the economic, self-interest and profit maximization are treated as inexorable. John Dewey's words from 1929 seem prescient:

That the economic life, thus exiled from the pale of higher values, takes revenge by declaring that it is the only social reality, and by means of the doctrine of materialistic determination of institutions and conduct in all fields, denies to deliberate morals and politics any share of causal regulation, is not surprising. (1929 (1984), 225)

As an economist, I am aghast at the adherence that the idea of a value-neutral mechanistic economic system seems to currently garner. This adherence is found not only among thinkers on the free-market right, but also among many on the political left. While the right side praises market systems, and the old left excoriates them, both sides tend to share the assumption that capitalist markets form an Adam Smith-ian clockwork system or a Weberian "iron cage," with an existence and an inexorable logic that are independent of human moral deliberation and purposive action.

"Market value" hence has a prime place in contemporary cultural discussions of value. According to standard economic thinking, people make choices about what they will pay for, how much they will pay, and where they will work, and the resulting prices and incomes just fall where they may. Politicians are warned against "interfering" with the working of the system, as violating its presumed laws is said to lead to inefficiency and other undesirable outcomes.

One of the important contemporary practical areas in which market valuation is problematic is that of caring labor. Childcare workers, in the U.S.--overwhelmingly female--make, on average, $6.61 per hour for attending to children--a wage less than that for parking lot attendants who attend to parked cars (Center for the Childcare Workforce, 2000). Care workers in other sectors, such as nurses aides and orderlies, are similarly low paid. Higher-paid health professionals complain that the technical and medical aspects of the work are taking over, while the listening and caring aspects are being squeezed out. U.S. policies concerning parental leave are stingy. Caring in a broader sense--caring for the environment, caring about poverty and injustice--also are far from being central cultural and economic concerns. Preserving, sustaining, nurturing, and caring are undervalued in our society, many reasonable observers conclude. With "market values" presumably determined by a mechanistic system, however, and the terms "family values" and "morality" taken to refer to an exclusively non-economic sphere, values and economics are rent asunder. There is no space for discussion of how care could be economically undervalued, or of how markets could possibly permit, much less promote, priorities of nurturing and sustainability.

The thesis of this paper is that pragmatist and process thought, informed by recent developments in feminist scholarship and the sciences, offers a better formulation of the concept of value--one with which pressing issues of social, political and economic import can be more sensibly addressed. Drawing on the work of John Dewey, Alfred North Whitehead, and others, I will argue that placing human value judgments within the context of a world that is itself vital and creative radically transforms the question. Echoing feminist analysis presented at a social level, these philosophies offer a deeply relational conception of value, that respects the intrinsic integrity of both difference and connection, of both feeling and material outcome.

I admit at the outset, however, that I find value a supremely difficult subject to write on, and in fact took on the writing of this paper in the spirit of forcing myself to directly grapple with it. Academic writing is full of implicit or explicit exhortations to do one thing or the other--to maximize efficiency, to pay caring work more, to attend to linguistic relations, to refine symbolic logic, to value this argument and throw that one away, etc. But the issue of why one should do any of these things, not their converse--why any of it matters, are rarely discussed. Terms like "human survival and flourishing" or "growth" only signal towards an intermediate target. Why only human, in an age of ecological consciousness? Is it good to advocate survival for a comatose ninety-year-old on a respirator? What is meant by flourishing? Growth of what, and in what direction? And, exhortations notwithstanding, why should any individual take any of this as her or his own concern or responsibility? The well-trained contemporary secular academic, feminist included, balks at using words evocative of spirituality or religiosity, fearful of seeming weak-in-the-head or of being seen to propound some exclusionary denominational allegiance. The early sections of this paper lay out historical background and somewhat analytical arguments, while the last section of this paper ventures onto this risky ground in drawing out pragmatist insights compatible with process theology.

Feminism and Mainstream Economics

Economics was decades behind the humanities and other social sciences in developing an internal feminist critique. Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics (Ferber and Nelson), was a groundbreaking book in this area, reaching publication in 1993. In it, an in the considerable work that has followed, the masculinist biases of the mainstream neoclassical school of economics have been pointed out.[1]

Academically-trained economists are not centrally concerned with business management, as many outsiders assume, nor with studying problems like unemployment, inflation, or poverty. Since the 1930's, economics has increasingly been defined as the study of choice in the face of scarcity. The agents who do the choosing are assumed to be rational, autonomous, self-interested, with preferences given in advance. Mathematical modeling of economic phenomena as the outcome of rational choice behavior is the "research" strategy of greatest prestige, with data-related work the poor stepsister. (Qualitative work is completely beyond the pale.) Economists tend to see themselves as neutrally explaining how the economy works. If policymakers use this knowledge for social betterment, that is seen as a separate issue.

To pragmatist scholars, the Cartesian bias of this approach will be glaringly apparent. Feminist scholars will point out that these biases are also masculinist (Keller 1985, Harding 1986, Bordo 1987 ). The economics discipline consistently takes from the traditional dualisms of mind/body, individual/social, rationality/emotion, autonomy/dependence, self-interest/altruism, competition/cooperation, mathematical/verbal, abstract/concrete, detachment/commitment, and objectivity/subjectivity the first, masculine-associated part of each pair. In the process, any concept or tool that might suggest that humans are in any way connected, feeling, embodied, or needy is meticulously avoided. The leading macroeconomist of the 1980's, for example, stated that the puzzle of unemployment is to explain why some people prefer it to other activities (Lucas 1987, 54).[2]

Unlike in the other social sciences, in which a variety of paradigms may simultaneously be pursued, in economics the neoclassical approach is for the most part the only game in town. Though some intelligent economists still succeed in doing quality, socially engaged research, this is more in spite of disciplinary training than because of it.

The presumed autonomy of "economic man" has been a particular focus of feminist critique. Borrowing the term "separative self" from the work of theologian Catherine Keller (1986), feminists writing on economics have pointed out that the image of the individual who is utterly independent of social influence, and whose bodily requirements are not worthy of intellectual attention, has a flip side (England 1993).. The necessary partner is the "soluble self." The traditional wife, whose identity symbolically dissolved into her husband in the taking of his name, is the caretaker of people in their dependencies of youth, illness and age, the maintainer of social relations and the supplier of food and clothing for the bodies. Freed of the need to attend to such ties himself, "economic man" need only interact at arms length, though markets, with the only necessarily communication being a list of prices. Standard economics, then, is deeply non-relational. All the relational aspects of human life are split off and projected onto the silent, invisible partner, coded female, who is as a result lost in merger, and whose individuality disappears.

The feminist critique in economics, then, overlaps and draws on extensive feminist discussions of the gender-laden dualism of separation vs. connection in psychology, ethics, epistemology, and the history of science (e.g., see Mackenzie and Stoljar 2000 for current work, or the initial groundbreaking work by Chodorow 1978 and Gilligan 1982). Feminists have called into question the Cartesian image of the separative self, pointing out how ethics defined as justice in the abstract ignores ethics as care for concrete, particular others (Benhabib 1987), and how knowledge conceived of as detached veils the embeddedness and embodiment of the knower. The questioning of the supposed universality and neutrality of rational choice models (e.g., Ferber and Nelson 1993) resonates with other anti-foundationalist projects.

Gender and Value

Compared to the considerable attention given to ethics and epistemology, feminist philosophical literature to date, however, seems relatively lacking in other areas. Discussions of ontology and metaphysics (concerning of the nature of reality) and axiology (concerning value), tend to be focused on the gendered nature of human, social reality; discussion in a more cosmological sense is rare. Certain feminist insights into the role of separation and connection can, however, reach far beyond the realm of social gender relations, and are consistent with worldviews expressed in pragmatist thought.

In earlier work, I designed a simple tool which I call a gender-value compass, that may be useful when considering how to work past typical associations of gender and value (Nelson, 1992). Rather than typical associations of masculinity (e.g. males, as well as characteristics like hardness, precision, etc.) with superiority and femininity (e.g. females, as well as softness, vagueness, etc.), which could be pictured as

Masculine (+)

Feminine (-)

consider what happens when the axes are split:

Positive

masculine, positive feminine, positive

Masculine Feminine

masculine, negative feminine, negative

Negative

The vertical axis signals value: the top half of the diagram will contain positively valued characteristics, and the two top terms will form a positive complementarity. One top term in isolation, however, will degenerate into the negative term, pictured as directly below, and the two negative terms will form a negative complementarity. For example, in discussions of social science methodology or philosophical debate, where "hard" arguments are preferred to those perceived as "soft," we might contrast a coding of "hard" as M+ and "soft" as F- with an expanded understanding of

M+ F+

strong flexible

Hard Soft

M– F–

rigid weak

"Hard" can mean strong, but strength without weakness gives rigidity. "Soft" can mean weak, but it can also indicate flexibility. An argument that is both strong and flexible is resilient and difficult to refute; one that is both rigid and weak is brittle and easily overcome.[3] The gender-value compass is not intended to be a panacea for all ills, but rather I presented it as a simple tool for beginning to break up pernicious hierarchical dualisms.

The separation/connection dualism can be similarly expanded. Rejecting an essentialist view that men are in some way more intrinsically separate from others and nature, and women more connected, it is more helpful to think of the separative self and the soluble self as mythical overlays to a more integrated reality. No one, in fact, could survive (or even be born) completely autonomously, just as giving over control of one's life does not actually erase ones individuality. To capture the idea that we live as persons-in-relation, but have conceptually split this into perverse poles of gendered separation and connection, I put value on a vertical axis and the two modes on the horizontal axis, along with their cultural gender associations:

M+ F+

individual related

separated connected

M– F–

separative soluble

Cultural understandings of "man" as individual, and women as invisible, take only the M+/F- diagonal, and in the process of denying relatedness create the myth of the separative self. An understanding of persons-in-relation, applicable to both sexes, would neither over-value individuality nor over-value connection. Such an understanding of the relationship of separation and connection can offer a way to overcome a cultural devaluation of connected caring, while at the same time avoiding the merger-traps of romanticization of the mother-child immersion or idealization of doormat-like selflessness.

While extended only into the social and inter-personal realm in such feminist thought, this model also contains a way in which to enter more general discussion of ontology and axiology. I suspect that the reason many feminist thinkers have held back from metaphysical exploration is that, traditionally, such discourse had tended to be characterized by a strong tendency towards false universalization and excessive fascination with abstraction. I would argue, however, that some sort of metaphysical beliefs underlie any understanding of the social and natural worlds, that it is better to have these beliefs out in the open, and that one can understand metaphysics to be about the nature of reality without understanding it to be about absolutes and ideals.