No Justice Without Autonomy! Olympe de Gouges and Susan Moller Okin

According to a common feminist critique of liberal conceptions of justice, the supposed neutrality of the autonomous individual subject results, because of gender-based assumptions, in paradox and injustice. This paper addresses this critique, asking how liberal theories of justice should be reformed accordingly (first section). The two philosophers considered are Olympe de Gouges and Susan Moller Okin, responding respectively to the French-revolutionary Republicanism and John Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness. Both Gouges and Okin criticize the contradiction between the allegedly neutral universalism of liberal theories and their actual non-inclusive character toward women (and not only), but they pursue this criticism in different ways. De Gouges, while presenting women as independent, does not have autonomy has her goal, but rather social cohesion, morality, and happiness. Faced with the ambiguities of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, she adopts herself an ambiguous position (second section). Such ambiguities are avoided by Okin (third section), whose egalitarian claim firmly relies on individual autonomy. Rather than criticizing the neutral autonomous subject as intrinsically non-inclusive, she convincingly criticizes its use as a descriptive tool, while putting it forward as a normative ideal for both social reform and conceptions of justice.