APA Newsletters
Fall 1999
Volume 99, Number 1

To the Editor:

I am pleased to see a feminist criticizing Mary Daly’s view that biotechnology is uniformly "evil" or "necrophilic" (see Wendy Lee-Lampshire’s report on Mary Daly, Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy, Spring 1999). In fact, I think it is Daly’s view that is evil and necrophilic. I doubt Daly has ever needed a heart, kidney, or liver transplant, and she shows scant regard for her "sisters" who do. Blanket rejection of medical technology may be titillating to the healthy and able-bodied, but it means death for the thousands of ill and/or disabled women who need medical technology in order to survive and who have the temerity to value their lives as much as Mary Daly values hers.

Norah Martin’s piece, "The Technological Dream and the Intersections of Gender and Bioscience" (appearing in the same issue of the Newsletter), also raises issues about respect for seriously ill women. Her uncritical endorsement of the view that panels evaluating breast cancer treatments should include as consumers not just breast cancer survivors but also family members cries out for critical examination. The blurring of the distinction between patient and family is increasingly fashionable nowadays. But what if the patient’s and the family’s interests conflict? What if a treatment prolongs the lives of breast cancer patients but reduces the "quality of life" of family members, whose lives would be made easier by the patient’s demise?

What does a feminist standpoint give priority, the lives of breast cancer patients or the reactions of their families?

Yours truly,

Felicia Ackerman
Professor of Philosophy
Brown University

To the Editor:

I very much enjoyed reading the reviews of the sessions of the meeting of the International Association of Women Philosophers in the recent Newsletter. However, there were several serious errors in the representation of my argument. The summary of my presentation, "Ethical Considerations Concerning Ressentiment and Power," appears in Spring 1999, Volume 98, number 2, page 84.

My argument, part of a larger project I call "Epistemological Explorations in Ethical Ontology," is not that "an ethic of care . . . results in ressentiment." Rather, the disruption of the desire for power—the existential-phenomenological embodiment of which is ressentiment—results in so-called caring traits and practices that resemble, in general, ethics of oppressed peoples. Ressentiment is an aspect of Nietzsche’s power theory that I appropriate to articulate a self-deception involved in disregarding what we really want, and claiming we want what we really do not. When women’s desire for power is disrupted by normative practices of sexual dualism and sexism, women’s ressentiment-based apparent desires may be for any number of objects or states of being, and may bring on a variety of behaviors, traits, and practices, not necessarily related to "the ability to manipulate," a word I do not use in my work. Whereas women may gain considerable status in obedience to ontologically dualistic gender roles, power—understood not as domination, but as capacity for "over-coming"—will remain beyond grasp. An "ethic of power" is needed.

Sincerely,

Janet Borgerson
Providence, RI