1. Dworkin on objectification.  Mumford clip.  Dworkin thinks that men objectify women—they reduce women to objects, and specifically to sex objects.  This is something done to women—all women, not just the ones portrayed.  She has, roughly, three notions of objectification. 

· One objectifies something provided it becomes an object of one’s intellect, something one observes, thinks about, and focuses on some rather than other qualities of. 

o I don’t see what is morally problematic about this.  Everybody does this to everybody, including themselves.  We think about others.  What are we to do?  Be thoughtless?

o Dworkin cites psychological literature about the development of men and their objectification.  I would be willing to bet that the literature talks of men in the generic sense of human beings and not just males.  Women just as much as men must objectify their environment in this sense.

o But I may be uncharitable here.  There is a serious and problematic sense of objectification where one focuses on some qualities of a person, qualities not expressive of her personhood, in such a way that these qualities predominate in one’s conception of her.  For instance, to identify a woman with a skirt, as in Don Giovanni, or with a bunch of body parts, or with the provision of sexual pleasure, or with wealth, or….  Insofar as one’s attitudes towards the person suggest that the salient features of the person are non-personal ones, one has reduced a person to a non-person.  (Interestingly, reduction is not one of the seven senses of objectification in Nussbaum, though she does discuss reduction.)

· A person treats a class of beings as sex objects providing that they have some quality or set of qualities and the presence of these qualities incites sexual desire.

o Observe that objectification in this sense need not be morally wrong.  We might just be given a sex instinct by nature and so we feel sexual desire when we meet someone with a certain set of qualities.  The animals no doubt do this, though what the qualities are differs from species to species.  Desire is just a feeling: it is not something someone does, and hence the occurrence of the feeling is not something that the person need be responsible for.  Of course, Dworkin may say that men ought to go beyond the biological, that men ought to overcome their sexual desire, and…

§ And what?  And not feel it ever again?  Should they castrate themselves?  Or should they not feel it on cue, because of certain properties?  Should they transform themselves into beings that sexually desire at random?  Why would that be better?  Or should sexual desire become entirely a matter of rational choice?  A man meets a woman, and he simply decides: Should I feel sexual desire?  This may require asceticism.  It is an option, one supposes, and it might be rather nice with regard to fidelity.

§ I suspect, though, that Dworkin has something else in mind.  I think she thinks patriarchal society decides which qualities incite sexual desire, and this is wrong of society to do.  But presumably even if society didn’t do anything, some men would find some women sexually attractive (and vice versa!)  There would still be some set of qualities, bigger or smaller, that would determine whom one is interested in.

o And women, too, feel sexual desire on cue.  The cue may be different from woman to woman (just as it is from man to man—Dworkin allows for this in her discussion of fetishism), but there may be some.  There might, for instance, be a woman who feels sexual desire for any physically healthy, brown-eyed, socially responsible, emotionally sophisticated, rich businessman dressed in a suit who is wooing her over a candlelit dinner in a restaurant, while at the same time engaging in intelligent and caring conversation with her.  The qualities here are different from the qualities like breasts and thighs that Dworkin is thinking of, but they are still qualities.

o But Dworkin seems to think women are generally innocent of objectification—it’s a male thing.  Yet in this sense of objectification, probably most women objectify.

o Or does Dworkin want to distinguish appropriate from inappropriate qualities?  Thus, she might say that purely bodily qualities are inappropriate.  But this is not clear from the text.  She clearly does not want to distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate parts of persons.

o There is a valuable point if she did want to distinguish.  If one reduces a woman to breasts and thighs, one is doing something one shouldn’t be.  If one feels sexual desire because the woman is engaging in intelligent conversation over a candlelit table, there is nothing obvious immoral there—unless one thinks sexual desire is immoral in these circumstances.  (Thomas Aquinas thinks that it is wrong to excite sexual desire in oneself or in another if one is not married.  But it does not follow that feeling it is necessarily immoral, as long as one isn’t trying to produce it in oneself.)

· Finally, there is objectification as related to treating someone as a mere instrument.  This Nussbaum considers to be the morally central kind of reprehensible objectification.

o Dworkin gives a number of quotes about this.  Here she seems on the most solid ground. 

o It is not completely clear that women are immune from this.  Take her discussion of how a boy treats his mother as an instrument for satisfying his needs (food, etc.)  Surely a girl does the same thing!  Surely there will be some women who will use men as instruments to improved self-esteem, fame, fortune, sexual pleasure, etc.—just as there are men who use women in this way.

But I don’t think this criticism destroys her point.  The fact that everybody does something doesn’t make it right.  Moreover, she may well be right that men are more likely to sexually objectify women.  (If Skip were a woman…)

2. Nussbaum distinguishes seven kinds of objectification:

• Instrumentality
• Denial of autonomy
• Treating as inert
• Fungibility
• Violability
• Ownership
• Denial of subjectivity

She notes that no one of these, except denial of autonomy, really marks the difference between how one should treat persons and non-persons.  (Some non-persons are inert, others are not.  Etc.)

• A central point for Nussbaum is that certain kinds of objectification have a place in the sexual life.  There can be a reduction to the sexual aspects which enriches the persons by drawing a richer picture.  There can be a surrender of autonomy and of subjectivity, for instance. There can be inertness and fungibility.
• I worry, however, that in those cases where these features are acceptable, they are not really instances of something we would call objectification.  Sure, a focus on the sexual aspects of a person has a place in sexual relations—but as long as it is a focus on the person as expressed sexually, it is not objectification and it is not reduction.  The surrender of autonomy is not at all the same as self-objectification.  In becoming a gift for another and giving oneself as a whole, at least within the context of a mutual relationship, one is not negating one’s autonomy, but expanding the sphere of those in control, moving towards an expanded “we”.  But one is not thereby becoming an object simply by being a part of the greater whole, just as my heart or brain is not simply an object. 
• The surrender of subjectivity and autonomy in the sense of  the giving over of oneself to passion, is, recall, what troubled Aquinas.  However, Aquinas said that such a loss would be acceptable when done for a rational reason.  In other words, when one has rationally chosen to do something that results in a loss of rationality, one is in a sense acting rationally. 
• We may say of a person who went to sleep instead of staying up to await a boring TV show: “Her being asleep is quite rational.”  One’s action is extended through time: she is not rational while asleep, but her sleep is, perhaps, a part of her rational action.  Likewise, one might end up choosing autonomously and with self-consciousness to enter into the kinds of passionate embraces in which one is no longer fully autonomous or self-conscious.  But the embraces are still an autonomous action, chosen self-consciously.  This is true in the case of things other than sex.  Take someone who has to stay up 30 hours with a sick person.  At the end, her feelings of autonomy, self-consciousness, etc., are all greatly abated.  But her action is a deeply personal one: she is not an animal at the end of the 30 hours, but a human being who is acting out rationally, autonomously, self-consciously made choices—she is exercising her autonomy and subjectivity across time.
• And maybe it helps if we think of human beings the way John Paul II suggests.  Rather than focus on the autonomy of persons (as was arguably done by Aristotle, Aquinas and Kant, in their talk of rationality), John Paul sees the essence of the person as the ability to love, give oneself in love, and receive love.  In doing this, in giving oneself totally to another, one is not denying one’s personhood, making oneself into an object.  On the contrary, it would be in acting selfishly that one would be making oneself into a subhuman, an animal.