Changes from any set of social conditions to another, the kinds of change that feminism requires, demand that those invested in existing conditions bear costs or unless those costs can be offset. Many of the those rendered most vulnerable by such investments are women. Feminists should care about the costs women have to bear as parts of transitions to greater gender justice, for several reasons...we can note that strategies for change that require women to make major well-being sacrificed are unlikely to be effective, that there are moral reasons not to expect women to sacrifice their basic well-being for changes that are risky and long term, and that transferring the costs of change disproportionally onto vulnerable women can itself constitute an injustice...One way Western feminisms are particularly likely to go wrong is by ignoring the costs of change.--Serene Khader (2019) Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethics, p. 71.
Economists often complain that philosophers ignore opportunity and transition costs. Khader's terrific new book (she has published an earlier, excellent one on adaptive preferences)[recall also here]) shows how you need to pay moral and political attention to transition costs of vulnerable populations before you insist they conform to your ideals. She shows how very easy it is, in fact, to slide from well meaning advocacy to be (a sometimes accidental) handmaiden of imperialism. Khader is herself a feminist -- in the sense of opposing women's oppression -- and so her criticism is ultimately immanent to feminism and a reform project.* As regular readers know, I don't think the problem identified by Khader is unique to feminist reform projects; many well meaning liberal interventions flounder for related reasons (recall here).
Recall that (here, here, and here), I understand the transition problem, as how to move from an unjust status quo to an ideal (or vastly improved) state and, in particular, with a population raised under bad institutions (or, if one conceives this [as I would not] in eugenic terms, bad breeding). What I now see, after reading Khader is that there are (at least) two species of the problem: the first version really turns on the challenge of finding or developing the right sort of people (with the right education or dispositions, etc.) to get us from here to there and then to have the skills and temperament to make the new circumstances work out well. The second version is that a population raised under bad institutions may rationally prefer a bad status quo if getting to the better state involves high costs to them.+
Notice that the economists' preferred solution to the second problem -- monetary compensation -- does not quite work here. For as Khader documents, it is often the case that the Western feminists' agenda involve economic empowerment of vulnerable populations.** Khader is no critic of such empowerment. The problem is, however, that in many circumstances the pursuit of women's economic empowerment or abilities to exit local communities means that in order to acquire more money, the vulnerable women have an objectively diminished quality of life: with more paid and unpaid work, less community/solidarity (and social trust) and, sometimes, even more free-riding by men. The extra gain in possible income is accompanied by considerable more risk and fragility and other (more incommensurable) would-be-harms (isolation, longer hours, etc.)
A skeptic may suggest that the problem here is insufficient monetary compensation. There is clearly some truth to this thought. (Khader does not really explore how she would tackle the problem of transition costs, but I don't think she is a priori against more money for the vulnerable.) Providing vulnerable populations with serious monetary transfers, or a basic income, during a transition would undoubtedly allow them to tackle some of the challenges of it. In addition, many features of the welfare state are designed to lower, maybe eliminate transition costs that involve transition of informal networks to cash nexus.
That's to say -- this previous paragraph -- that if one takes transition costs seriously (and a harm principle alongside some even minimal version of Principle of All Affected Interests), one needs to be willing to address quite a bit of structural background conditions that lower the many kinds of costs involved to the most vulnerable. Suddenly, what looks like a fairly focused intervention related to gender inequality or sex-subordination may require considerable political and financial resources in order to develop a systemic response to the challenges of transition. I take this insight as a standing challenge to well meaning gradualists and (trial-and-error-style) incrementalists like myself. Sometimes, the targeted and small scale intervention is really worse than more ambitious projects++ or, as the conservative will claim, no projects at all.
Of course, the previous paragraph ignores one of Khader's key insights. Acknowledging transition costs to vulnerable others as an effect of exporting one's ideals, could be the starting point to question one's ideals for them and, perhaps, for oneself. But about that more soon.
*She is also critical of certain forms of anti-imperialist arguments that fail to adequately combat women's oppression.
+It's precisely the identification of the second problem as a collective action problem (rather than in terms of costs to vulnerable populations) that some misguided liberals have been tempted by Enlightenment despotism as a means to transition to a better status quo. (Liberals were not alone in this; plenty of socialist/marxist modernizers went down this route, too.)
**Regular readers know I dislike the dichotomy western/non-western because it activates all kinds of associative thoughts (advanced/living in the past; civilized/barbarian; egalitarian/patriarchal etc.) that I think are false and also incapacitate self-critical stance.
++I think 'nation-building' was always a cynical rhetoric, but one can see why if, well-intended, it would a response to problem diagnosed here. Of course, I reject forced nation-building.
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