Vol. XXXVIII / 1 - Studia Moralia

THE INJUSTICE OF JUSTICE AND THE JUSTICE OF INJUSTICE 257
area might better equip us to offer them some useful advice in
guiding the discussion. The debate raging over whether women
are morally immature in their thinking compared to men brings
to mind the medieval debate among theologians concerning the
ontological inferiority of women and the justifications according
to natural law of excluding them from equal social participation
based upon their categorization as “defective men” or not “fully
rational.” 60 In retrospect, these arguments and discussions
would appear almost comical, were it not for the fact that they
seem to continue to have force in many of the discussions we are
still witnessing today in the secular realm. While we, from a
distance, are able to see that these arguments, while attempting
to respond to real differences and distinctions, were grounded in
and conditioned by a particular historical and social structure,
our empirically scientific counterparts do not seem to have the
luxury of this position of historical distance.
If our own mistakes in this area teach us anything, they
reveal that the primary difficulty is anthropological and rests in
the categories we use to define what it means to be a full human
being. It revolves around the humanitarian concern at work in
moral thinking. In the contemporary world, human
membership is defined in two ways. There are certain qualities
of human membership that we all share equally. At the same
time, human beings are social beings, and sociality requires a
certain structuring and ordering of our shared life-world. People
are often in fact assigned roles and tasks which are not always
freely chosen. When the assignment is grounded in false
categorizations concerning level of membership, or when the
assignment is gratuitous and arbitrary, questions of injustice
should and do arise. Margolis is right in pointing out that there
are in fact certain tasks that need to be done for society to
continue, and that the real ethical question is whether or not it
would be more just to assign these equally to both men and
women, thereby opening up access to other roles in a more
60
For a good example of this type of argument for the natural inferiority
of women, see St. THOMAS AQUINAS, Summa Theologiae I. q. 92, a. 1-2; II-II, q.
149, a. 4; II-II, q. 177, a. 2.