Janet Radcliffe Richards on Men and Women's Natures

This is Philosophy Bites with me, David Edmonds. And me Nigel Warburton. Philosophy Bites is available at www.philosophybites.com.

Are men different from women by nature? If so, what follows? Does it follow that women and men should be pushed or encouraged into different spheres, different types of jobs, for example, different roles at home? In his groundbreaking book, The Subjection of Women, the 19th Century philosopher John Stuart Mill can lay claim to being one of the most important male feminists to date. There, he challenged many of the unquestioned assumptions of his age. Janet Radcliffe Richards, author of Human Nature After Darwin, explores Mill's ideas about what is natural.

Janet Radcliffe Richards, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you.

The topic we're going to talk about today is human nature, whether men and women have different natures and if so, so what? And I guess one place to start would be John Stuart Mill, who addressed this question.

Yes, he was trying to achieve the legal equality of women in the second half of the 19th century. And all his opponents were saying men and women are completely different by nature and that's why we should have different laws governing the treatment of them. And Mill was trying to argue that we should have the same laws governing the treatment of them. He was particularly concerned with two issues. There were a lot of rules keeping women out of men's territory, education, the professions, the vote and so on. And there were also a great many laws keeping women in subjection to their husbands. And he wanted what he said was a principle of perfect equality.

And the argument of his opponents was that this was women's nature to be in the kitchen to be domesticated creatures.

The argument was men and women are completely different by nature and therefore it would be cruel to treat them as if they were the same. A lot of them specifically argued that men were superior to women by nature. Later on, you got a gentler version that they were equal but different, but they should still be in separate spheres.

And what was Mill's view? Did he believe that men and women were fundamentally the same?

Mill said that in the present constitution of society, we could not tell whether they were the same or not. He said that everybody knew that there were men and women who did not fit the pattern that was alleged to be true of them because he said everything women are alleged not to be able to do, some women have done. And for all that women were said to like their position of subservient to men, we knew that there were many who had protested. So he said, first we know that it isn't a universal truth about women. But secondly, even to the extent that it is true from our observation that women aren't as good as men at this or that, and women like their domestic lives, he said, we can't infer anything from this, because women are systematically subjected to a different education from men where they're told that this is what they should be doing. And furthermore, their opportunities are completely different. As he says, women are tied in marriage to men and entirely dependent on them because of this legal subjection. Therefore, it would be straightforwardly dangerous for many women to protest. So he's saying simply, that we do not know how different the sexes are by nature.

And had you been able to show to John Stuart Mill that in fact women and men were different, would that have persuaded him that separate laws would be appropriate for men and women?

Not at all. And it's interesting that Mill pretty obviously did think it was very likely that men and women were different by nature. But what he said was, we don't know. And he said it's entirely irrelevant to this question, because what about all these rules keeping women out of men's terrain? Well, he said, what women by nature cannot do, it is quite superfluous to forbid them from doing what they can do, but not so well as the men who are their competitors, the competition suffices to exclude them from. In other words, if women can't do this, the rules keeping them out are pointless because they wouldn't get in anyway. Conversely, if the rules keeping them out have any point, it's because women can do it. So he's saying it's absolutely irrelevant. You should say what needs to be done and then have a competition to do it. You don't need to mention women.

It sounds pretty watertight, did it convince his opponents?

It didn't. The extraordinary thing was that Mill was, for instance, inter alia, trying to argue that women should be let into parliament. He in fact proposed putting person instead of man in the 1867 Reform Act, but there wasn't a chance. And it's very interesting because his argument seemed so watertight.

Why were his opponents not convinced?

Well, I've always found this rather puzzling. The usual feminist reply is that this was because the men had the power and they wanted to keep it. But I don't think this is true. I don't think the men who argued like this were consciously or even unconsciously trying to keep their power necessarily. Also, a great many women disagreed with Mill. They wanted their traditional position. So why was this? And I was particularly interested when I saw a very detailed reply to Mill from a conservative judge by the name of James Fitzjames Stephen. Because in spite of the fact that he was explicitly replying to Mill, there somehow seemed to be no connection between the two kinds of argument. Stephen simply asserted it's obvious that men are different from the crown of their head to the soles of their feet, he said, different textures of the brain, different everything. He knew perfectly well that men and women had different educations because this was what he was arguing for. And the thing that really puzzled me at the time was that James Fitzjames Stephen said, the whole function of law is to keep society in the form it naturally assumes. Now Mill would say, if it naturally assumes it, what on earth are you doing having laws to push it into it? So this was obviously something interesting going on in the idea of the natural here. And it wasn't until years later when I'd been working on Darwin that I worked out what this was.

So what was it?

Well, I think it was a completely different conception of what you understand by the nature of something. Because when James Fitzjames Stephen says the laws are necessary to keep society in the place which it naturally assumes, he does accept that there are aberrant people. But he says this is like correcting a bent leg with irons. He believes that there is a natural order. And you get aberrant individuals who are going out of that order and have to be kept straight.

Give me a concrete example.

Well, he would I presume say that if a woman showed signs of being somebody who wanted to be in a different position, she wanted to be dominant over her husband. She wanted to be ruling the country or something. He would say that was just the kind of aberration from nature which you needed the rules to correct. You would rock the whole boat. In fact, he actually talks about if the first mate challenges the captain. This shows a base unworthy mutinous disposition. And I think that's how James Fitzjames Stephen and all the other people who agreed with him were seeing it. He said that the two sexes can no more have different interests than the different parts of the same body. So Mill, as it were, was seeing the world as a sort of mess of raw materials and the purpose of law to make the best job you could, of making these materials work well. Whereas James Fitzjames Stephen was seeing the raw materials as having a kind of natural tendency to a certain kind of order. And our job was to maintain that order.

Why would that be our job? What would be wrong in having a few aberrations as James Fitzjames Stephen would have seen, the women who wanted to enter men's domain?

It's very deep in our tradition. If you go back to ancient Greece, the Greek idea of the cosmos, especially as it came out in Aristotle, everything had a natural place. And as long as everything was in that natural place, you had a kind of harmonious hole. And when things got out of the place they were supposed to be in, you got disorder and chaos.

He was worried about anarchy breaking out.

Yes, he was saying that to make any kind of entity work harmoniously, you have to have people with particular functions. Now one idea of this is just there being a kind of natural cosmos. But of course, Christianity, which James Fitzjames Stephen was in the thick of, also came out of the Judaic tradition, where there was a God who brought order out of chaos. That's what happened in Genesis. And God said this is the way things are supposed to be. And if you deviate from this, what you have is getting smitten with fire and brimstone. So you have two traditions coming together in Christianity, according to which there is a natural order which the law ought to be maintaining. Now, as it happens when Mill was writing, this was also exactly when Darwin was writing. People were beginning to question the idea of there being a natural harmony. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection was the first time somebody could explain how order came out of chaos without there being a designer to do it. Now if you've got a designer, you've probably got a designer who intends that there will be a whole of a particular kind, and your job is to go along with that. If you can have the natural order without a designer, that means the natural order and the moral order can be completely separate from each other. And I think this is what essentially Darwin and the utilitarian philosophers were recognising, that the natural order and the moral order were completely different things. And you could understand scientifically what the nature of things was without any conclusion at all about what they ought to be doing.

Do you think Darwinism can give us some insight into whether men and women do have different natures?

Yes, well that's what's so interesting because Mill was saying as a proper philosopher of science, we can't tell how different the sexes are by nature because they've been in systematically different environments. Now the trouble is that 20th-century feminism began to insist that there was no difference between the sexes and everything was culturally and socially determined. This is a very difficult issue to decide if you try to control the environment, to start with the limits to which you can control the environment without unacceptable infringements of freedom. And secondly, if men and women still keep coming out differently, you may just think you've missed some kind of subtle difference in the environment. The interesting thing about the evolutionary approach is that it gives you a different direction from which to answer this same question. Because Darwin realised very early on that as soon as you got creatures complex enough to have psychologists, to have minds, and feelings, the nature of those feelings was going to determine their reproductive success just as much as anything else about them. Males and females are quite simply physiologically different in certain ways. They're reproductively different. In particular with humans, there's a real limit to the number of offspring that any female can have. In principle, there's almost no limit to the offspring that any man can have if he can get enough females and keep the other males off. Now this begins to suggest that over evolutionary time, you would expect them to develop different strategies for reproduction. For instance, you might expect that the females would think it's no use by having a lot of males. What I need is males who are going to produce high-caliber offspring and ideally, who are around to help me to bring the child up through this long childhood of a human. Whereas males will always have a vested interest in opportunistic sex and impregnating other women because you might get some other poor man to bring up his offspring or even if the woman's on her own, she might do better than nothing. So this begins to suggest that you would expect systematic differences of all kinds between males and females. What is alarming to a lot of feminists is that a lot of these differences sound exactly like the ones that James Fitzjames Stephen, might have attributed to the sexes.

One can see why men would be more promiscuous, but people often say that men are more aggressive, men are more dominant. What's that got to do with reproduction?

To start with you had to distinguish between being aggressive to other males and dominating females, but reproductively a male should have a very strong incentive to keep an eye on the female and make sure she is sexually faithful. Otherwise, he might end up bringing up some other males' offspring, which would be an evolutionary disaster for his genes. So that's dominating women, being aggressive to other men, if you mean keeping other men off your females, yes, that has an obvious advantage, but also reproductively the higher you are in the hierarchy, the more attractive you are to females. If they're looking for high-calibre males who can also put resources into their offspring.

So some might say if men are more aggressive by nature, perhaps more ambitious by nature, that offers one explanation for why say, there are more male chief executives in business than women. Whereas a feminist might say it's nothing to do with that. It's explained entirely by discrimination or culture.

Well, I don't know, I'm pretty agnostic about it all too. There's obviously a great deal of culture. And if women have come into a workplace which has been entirely set up by men who've had their wives and children at home, you wouldn't expect women to do as well in it. So I'm completely open about what men's and women's abilities are. I would just not be at all surprised if they were very different from each other. I'm not surprised, for instance, if men are more monomaniacal and women are more capable of seeing a lot of things going on. For instance, I would have suspected it was rather important for a female who was trying to protect her offspring to be acutely aware of any environmental threat, which a male who was bent on other things might not be.

So even if we accept there are these average differences, should a feminist be threatened by this argument?

I don't think so at all. The real problem is that when traditionalists said the sexes were different by nature, they thought that understanding the nature of something showed where that thing ought to be in the scheme of things. Now there's a great tendency for people not to realise how much Darwinism has changed things, and they're inclined still to think that if we say something is like this by nature, we're saying that it ought to be like that, but we're not.

It sounds like quite a dangerous idea because people might say, well, we now have the explanation for why men are paid more or why women choose to spend more time with their families. We don't need to work hard at making, let's say, the workplace more equal between the sexes.

Well, I certainly think there are problems about sex equality. The kind of sex equality John Stuart Mill was wanting to achieve was just not having differentiated laws for the two. That is entirely separate from the question of whether they end up in the same position or doing the same things. I think it's a completely open question whether we'll find a kind of workplace in which men and women flourish equally or whether men and women are going to end up equal in different achievements. I think it's overwhelmingly likely that they are different, and I can see no reason at all why we should regard those differences as equally valuable. It depends entirely on how things turn out. Maybe the things that men are good at should be suppressed because they're dangerous. You have to remember that in the early days of intelligence testing, women came up better on IQ tests than men, and for that specific reason, they introduced the pattern recognition parts of the test which men were better at than women. I personally don't think that sex equality of outcome should be one of our aims, but this takes a great deal of arguing. But whether or not it should be one of our aims has nothing to do with whether we're different by nature.

So feminists who worry about these kinds of arguments, who worry about any evidence showing that men and women have different natures, are showing a misplaced anxiety.

It's misplaced in one way. It's not misplaced in another because that is still how most people think. Most people still misinterpret Darwinian theory as having direct normative implications, that if this is the way things are by nature, this is something we shouldn't interfere with. That's what's wrong. And I think what feminists should be doing is arguing against that mistake. But I certainly think it's a disastrous mistake not to investigate them as far as we can because this is terrible for women too. We may be forcing women into things that are uncongenial, making demands which aren't suitable. We need to understand the nature of the raw material we're working with if we're to achieve anything good with it.

Janet Radcliffe Richards, thank you very much.

Thank you very much.