PEA Soup

Not in My Interests

BBC has estimated that, in the UK, about 85.000 women were raped in the year 2006. In the US, during the same year, 92.455 rapes were reported to law-enforcement officers and we know that there were far more unreported cases than that. These sorts of numbers support the feminist view that we are dealing with a wide-spread social practice rather than merely with discrete acts of individuals who are morally corrupt and perhaps mentally ill.

     I find the feminist analyses of rape appealing even if I want to try to amend them in one respect. Many feminist philosophers claim that it is not only the raped women who are harmed by this practice. Instead, all women suffer as a group because of it. This seems plausible. However, the feminists then go on to argue that it is not only the rapist men who benefit. Rather, all non-rapist men benefit. It is this claim that I want to challenge. I want to also suggest that even the rapists themselves are worse off for raping women whether they get caught or not. If this is right, then rape is a deeply irrational practice even before we get to the moral considerations – it harms all of us.

Institutions, Systems, Structures

Folks who work on oppression often distinguish oppression attributable to individuals from oppression attributable to institutions.  Thus, there's a lot of discussion about institutional racism or sexism, say, as well as discussion of systematic or structural racism or sexism.  Here's a quick question: anyone have any thoughts on the nature of the relation between the institutional, the systematic, and the structural?  Are these terms just being used as synonyms, at least in the relevant literature?  I have a vague feeling that it is possible to have non-systematic and non-structural institutions, but (since the relevant systems and structures are all social systems and structures, I presume), I'm not sure that there are any non-institutional (social) structures or (social) systems.  Any thoughts?

Sexism and Philosophy

Today's (Sept. 10) Inside Higher Ed has a news story about Sally Haslanger's paper on Sexism in academic Philosophy