Actual Arguments Research Articles

Mill and the Subjection of Women

When Mill's The Subjection of Women was published in 1869 it was ahead of its time in boldly championing feminism. It failed to inaugurate a respectable intellectual debate. Feminist writers have tended to refer to it with respect but without any serious attempt to come to grips with Mill's actual arguments. Kate Millett's chapter in Sexual Politics is the only sustained discussion of Mill in the feminist literature that I am aware of, but it is not from a philosophical viewpoint, and deals with Mill only in the service of an extended comparison with Ruskin. Philosophical books on Mill give the essay short measure. Alan Ryan in J. S. Mill heads one chapter ‘Liberty and The Subjection of Women’, but the former work gets twenty-six pages and the latter only four. Ryan says that ‘it is almost entirely concerned with the legal disabilities of women in Victorian England’. H. J. McCloskey, injfohn Stuart Mill: A Critical Study, gives the essay one and a half pages, commenting that it reads ‘like a series of truisms’ and seems so unimportant today because equality of the sexes has been achieved!

Moral Expertise

Abstract: Current philosophical trends in North America are again raising the issue as to whether or not there can be ‘ moral experts’. An expert is defined here as one who predicts and explains better than the layman m a particular domain on the basis of his specialized underlying knowledge of it This analysis is then applied to the domain of morality. Special attention is given to the claim that moral philosophers are professionally more capable of critically thinking through the nature of moral problems. It is argued that philosophers tend to neglect the area of actual argumentation about specific moral issues, and that it is here, at the point of contact with living moral experience and empirical research into it that the possibility of ‘ moral expertise’ lies.

Toward An American Theology by Herbert W. Richardson

BOOK REVIEWS Toward An American Theology. By HERBERT W. RrcHARDSON. New York: Harper & Row, 1967. Pp. 18~. $3.95. It is rather refreshing these days to be told by a theologian that the notion of a personal God is not necessarily opposed to a concern for science, to the individual and his freedom or to a new metaphysics. In his first essay on the sociotechnic age Dr. Richardson rejects most of the assumptions of the theologians of the secular age or of the death of God. In his opinion they are asking antiquated or false questions. They are criticizing a notion of God which is itself a modern invention or they are confusing problems of principle with problems of practice. Atheism is the sign of a period of transition and crisis not only in religion but in the whole culture. If we have already entered a sociotechnic age in which the methodology of science is fully accepted and the organization of society is governed by technology, the positive task is not to criticize the past but to discover God as the unity of that particular, highly differentiated type of social structure. It seems, therefore, that Dr. Richardson is not accepting secularization as the inevitable outcome of modern history but, on the contrary, is advocating the integration and the sanctification of sociotechnics in and by Christian tradition. This vocation is particularly given to American theology because it understands the sociotechnic culture and has in its tradition the right answers to the new needs (Chapter 5). One of the answers is the emphasis on faith as the power of reconciliation going beyond the relativism of fragmented perspectives and striving toward unity. To discover this, it is necessary to distinguish five forms of secularism: gnosticism, rationalism, naturalism, skepticism, relativism, correlated to five kinds of faith: crucificiens, quaerens, perficiens, formans, reconcilians? This categorizing seems a little artificial in view of the complexity of history and the unity of biblical faith. What is more interesting is the effort to go beyond relativism. The scientific culture is highly differentiated and specialized and is in danger of advocating a variety of disciplines and points of view unrelated and purely relativistic. The gain of modern culture is the differentiation of many approaches to reality, but it may become a sheer multiplicity without unity. The author's intent is to keep the differentiation but to find a principle of unity. He is therefore using as instruments of the faith reconcilians what he calls a metacritical knowledge and a philosophy of unity. The metacritical point of view is a philosophy which does not deny the critical approach of science but uses it without by-passing or absolutizing it. In Dr. Richardson 's view this metacriticism requires a metaphysic of unity. Relativism 127 us BOOK REVIEWS cannot be overcome by a universal sociology of knowledge but by an implicit or explicit ontology. Plotinus and Thomas Aquinas (ens et unum convertuntur) appear on the horizon. But Dr. Richardson begs to differ with them. His unity is not formal and is somehow above being. (The difference with Thomas Aquinas is not clear.) There are three hypostases of unity: wholeness, individuality and relationality allowing a plurality of category-systems but leading or implying, finally, a unity of unities. The actual argument for the existence of God is henological. Dr. Richardson's argument is less developed than Henry Dumery's phenomenological approach to the same problem. He does not seem aware of the difficulty that henology presents for the doctrine of creation. The last part of the book is devoted to the outline of an American theology . Three questions are raised concerning the reasons of creation, incarnation and the sending of the Holy Spirit. The author stresses the meaning of the puritan and theocratic Sabbath as the sanctification of the world, the glory of God in the Incarnation instead of the need for redemption in man and the real indwelling of the Holy Spirit. The main points are not sin and redemption but the glorification of God and the sanctification of man. One wonders if it is with tongue in cheek that Dr. Richardson is finding a Christological, trinitarian, Mariological and spiritual theology typically American? But...

The statistical theory of errors

It is maintained that the adjustment of observations is not a statistical problem. In § 1 the problem is stated. In § 2 it is argued that there is no proof that the conditions necessary for a statistical theory of errors exist. In § 3 it is argued that the process of adjustment adopted by experimenters can be justified apart from statistical considerations. In § 4 the conclusions thus attained are reviewed. The actual argument cannot be summarized.