On Moral Unintelligibility: Beauvoir’s Genealogy of Morality in the Second Sex

The Monist 105 (4):521-540 (2022)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

This paper offers a reading of Beauvoir’s Second Sex as a genealogy of ‘morality’: the patriarchal system of values that maintains a moral distinction between men and women. This value system construes many of women’s experiences under oppression as evidence of women’s immorality, obscuring the agential role of those who provoke such experiences. Beauvoir’s examination of the origin for this value system provides an important counterexample to the prevailing debate over whether genealogical method functions to debunk or to vindicate: while the currently dominant moral system may have been historically necessary at certain stages in human development, Beauvoir nevertheless debunks it; only the value system itself now remains, without its precipitating needs. Thus, Beauvoir’s critique reveals what I call the moral unintelligibility of women’s experiences of oppression: women encounter difficulty in making sense of the harms wrought against them because the operative value system obscures them as harms in the first place, instead construing women themselves as immoral. Against the prevailing construction of moral blame and responsibility, Beauvoir’s solution is the political virtue of moral invention, a virtue epistemic as well as moral, collective as well as individual.

Other Versions

No versions found

Similar books and articles

The Degendering of Virtue.Felicity Joseph - 2024 - Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 10 (3).
Simone de Beauvoir, Women's Oppression and Existential Freedom.Patricia Hill Collins - 2017 - In Laura Hengehold & Nancy Bauer (eds.), A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir. Hoboken: Wiley. pp. 325–338.
Femininity, love, and alienation: the genius of The Second Sex.Kate Kirkpatrick - 2024 - Journal of the British Academy 12 (1/2):1-26.
Useless Mouths.Anne van Leeuwen - 2022 - Simone de Beauvoir Studies 32 (2):325-344.
de Beauvoir.Kate Fullbrook - 1998 - In Simon Critchley & William Ralph Schroeder (eds.), A Companion to Continental Philosophy. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 269–280.
Criticizing Women: Simone de Beauvoir on Complicity and Bad Faith.Filipa Melo Lopes - 2024 - In Berislav Marusić & Mark Schroeder (eds.), Analytic Existentialism. Oxford University Press.

Analytics

Added to PP
2022-09-14

Downloads
736 (#34,136)

6 months
137 (#35,745)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Sabina Vaccarino Bremner
University of Pennsylvania

Citations of this work

Thinking with Simone de Beauvoir Today.Manon Garcia - 2023 - Analyse & Kritik 45 (2):195-214.

Add more citations