SOURCE: "Rage and Reason," in The New Republic, August 11, 1997, pp. 36-42.

I.

Prophets don't write like philosophers. Why not, since they seem to have a common goal? Since Socrates, philosophers, like prophets, have been dedicated foes of ethical complacency, and of the many forms of moral disease complacency conceals. Socrates's call to the examined life was inspired by a concern for the health of souls. He once described the insides of his interlocutor as filled with tumorous growths, and his arguments as purgative drugs that would carry away the diseased material. This vivid sense of the ugliness of evil and the urgency of ethical change makes itself felt in the arguments of many of the greatest moral philosophers. Even when philosophers write calmly, as they usually do, an intense engagement with corruption can frequently be detected beneath the serene surface. (It would not be wrong to see the arguments of John Rawls, a deliberately abstract, cool philosopher, as motivated by the ugliness of human dignity violated, and a longing for the world that would be constructed by "purity of heart, if one could attain it.")

And yet, as I have said, philosophers do not write like prophets. If they excoriate evil, or call the heart to an acknowledgment of its transgressions, this is not their immediate business. That lies in the construction and the dissection of theories and arguments, often intricate and rather removed from the practical matters that were their starting point. They address the reader not with a cascade of resonant denunciation, but with delicacy and logic; not with "Woe unto you!" but with "Many different kinds of things are said to be just and unjust…." (That is Rawls, in an Aristotelian mode.)

Why do philosophers proceed in this way, when real evil is at hand? Sometimes it is because they are profoundly unworldly people who just don't know how to confront bad things. (Edmund Husserl, completely bewildered by the evil of Nazism, wrote shortly before his death in 1938 that he hoped soon to be in a "realm of truth," where such things do not exist.) Sometimes, too, it is because they are gentle, polite people who don't feel comfortable denouncing others, even if they know there is evil at hand. Often, though, there is a better reason for their restraint. It is that they share with Socrates a commitment to reason as an indispensable instrument in the struggle for good.

What do philosophers have to believe about people, in order to believe that a logical argument can produce a result in calling the soul to an acknowledgment of its own deficiencies? They have to believe, I think, that at least a part of evil is not innate or necessary, that at least a good part of evil is based on error, whether social or personal. (These errors may be very deep-rooted, shaping emotions as well as thoughts.) They also have to believe that people have many good beliefs and good intentions, so that there is at least a chance that, confronted with an argument that reveals hidden contradictions in their view, they will select the better and reject the worse. They probably need to believe, too, that reason is a morally good way to approach adversaries, one that shows respect for their humanity. Finally, they need to believe that the patient work of theory-construction can deliver a practical benefit in the long run, systematizing the best of our beliefs and intuitions in a way that reveals new possibilities for politics or morality.

All these beliefs, of course, are questionable. No philosopher's work can prove that the conditions for the worth of philosophizing are satisfied in the world, and to that extent all the work of philosophy is built upon what Kant would call a "practical postulate," a faith in a kind of goodness that is not empirically verifiable.

Prophets, by contrast, believe that the urgency and the magnitude of the evils that they see admit of no delay, no calm and patient dialogue. They believe that only by violently shaking the heart can they make progress against the complacency that is evil's great ally. Argument looks too unengaged, theory-construction too remote from the practical task. Jeremiah did not write a theory of justice, nor did Isaiah address the Israelites with dialectic. Even the philosopher's interest in the nuances of individual cases seems to prophets a dangerous detour, when by and large things are so hideously bad. Suppose Jeremiah had said, "The heart of Israel is corrupt utterly, but on the other hand there are some very nice people there." Or suppose Frederick Douglass had excoriated the evils of slavery but pointed to the moral goodness of certain individual slave-owners. Such philosophical delicacy would have undermined their purpose, which was to terrify and thereby to prompt tears and repentance and change.

In any movement for social justice, then, philosophers and prophets are likely to be somewhat at odds. To prophets, philosophical patience looks like collaboration with evil. (This impression is magnified when, as frequently happens, philosophical calm brings academic security, while the prophet is a despised outcast.) Philosophers, on the other hand, are likely to conclude that prophets do not get to the root of the problem, because they aren't patient enough to do the necessary work. They will be suspicious of the prophet's lack of attention to variety and nuance. They may sense that the prophet's way of speaking shows insufficient respect for the adversary's dignity. It just is not true that people are utterly corrupt; and we get the best out of our dealings with them by proceeding on the assumption that they want to think well and to be good.

Still, it is possible for philosophers and prophets to be (uneasy) allies. Philosophers may judge that their own methods are not the only ones that we need to approach human beings in a time of moral unrest, and they may grant that change sometimes requires a more confrontational style of discourse. (Mill's The Subjection of Women didn't have much influence with its calm, rational arguments, and its failure cannot be ascribed to Mill's philosophical insufficiency.) They may also feel some doubts about their practical postulate itself, wondering whether it is merely a convenient way of justifying a personal preference for detachment from politics, or even for personal comfort.

The whole idea of a feminist philosopher can thus be seen, by these philosophers themselves, as a problematic one, and the feminist prophet can prove as compelling as she is disturbing. Is it really right to proceed as if one can make progress by calmly arguing with men? Should one really assume that they are basically good, so that argument can change them? Should one say, "Yes, some are corrupt, but others are very nice"? Or isn't that the very cop-out that Jeremiah rejected?

II.

Andrea Dworkin knows that good men exist. Indeed, among the most moving passages in the autobiographical essay that opens her book (alongside portraits of strong women who inspired or helped her) is the portrait of her father, a gentle man who adored her and treated her with respect, challenging her Socratically to debate and to argument. Once in high school, asked to give an example of a great man in history, she named her father and was ridiculed. "But I meant it—that he had the qualities of true greatness, which I defined as strength, generosity, fairness, and a willingness to sacrifice self for principle." Dworkin also warmly praises her brother, a Jewish scientist who married an Austrian Catholic, also a scientist. They transcended "cultural differences and historical sorrow," she writes, "through personal love, the recognition of each other as individuals, and the exercise of reason, which they both, as scientists, valued." At his funeral, the chief rabbi of Vienna officiated and her father sat with the women, in protest against the Orthodox separation of the sexes. And finally there is the man with whom Dworkin has lived for twenty years: "I love John with my heart and soul…. We share a love of writing and of equality; and we share each and every day. He is a deeply kind person, and it is through the actual dailiness of living with him that I understand the spiritual poverty and the sensual stupidity of eroticizing brutality over kindness."

So: Dworkin, whose history includes child molestation by a stranger, sexual abuse by prison guards, domestic violence and prostitution, also knows that the world is complicated and contains some very good male people. She knows, too, that reason may do some good in this complex world. (Both her father and brother are portrayed sympathetically as reason-loving types, and her Jewish education is praised for teaching her the argumentative skills.) But Dworkin aims to deliver shocks to the heart. Her political hero is not Socrates or Kant, it is Frederick Douglass, "someone whose passion for human rights was both visionary and rooted in action," whose political speech "was suffused with emotion: indignation at human pain, grief at degradation, anguish over suffering, fury at apathy and collusion."

Dworkin's prose is a powerful instrument. (Less so in her fiction, with its frequently turgid stream-of-consciousness.) She is inspired to indignation and grief by the evils of violence against the female body, in rape, in domestic violence, in prostitution: and by the sheer fact that women throughout so much of the world's history have been understood to be mere objects for the use of men. To make a difference (she reports her own earlier reasoning), she will need to write in a way that strikes readers as "nightmarish and impolite," denying them the option of seeing themselves as "innocent bystander[s]." And she will have to give up "sentimentality" toward men in favor of a "militarist's" stance. What this means, among other things, is a focus on the evils perpetrated by "the collective him" and a refusal of sympathy, and of mercy, to many individual hims, each of whom a philosopher might hold to be basically good at heart, and capable of being persuaded.

Life and Death returns to some of the topics of Woman Hating, Pornography and Intercourse, and adds some new topics—the status of women in Israel, the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. But its primary focus is physical violence against women—stalking, misogynistic homicide, rape and, above all, domestic violence. (There is a fine piece on Nicole Brown Simpson.) Dworkin's essays have provoked much hostility, inside feminism and outside it. She is frequently called a man-hater, a foe of free speech, and many other things that are more expressive than precise. So any critical response should begin by trying to get clear about what she has actually claimed.

At the heart of Dworkin's position are two theses, one normative and one diagnostic. The normative thesis is that women deserve to be treated with a dignity equal to that of men, and given rights fully equal to those of men. (This idea is unmistakably Kantian.) The words "dignity," "human rights," "equality," "fairness" suffuse this text, making Dworkin's affiliations with a certain type of radical Enlightenment vision clear. For Dworkin, the central moral sin is treating a human being as an object.

Objectification, as Dworkin defines it, has a number of different aspects, which are not always clearly distinguished. Sometimes to objectify someone is to deny the person's autonomy; sometimes, to show indifference to the person's feelings and experiences; sometimes, to proceed as if the person's boundaries are not deserving of the same respect that one's own deserve; sometimes, to treat the person as fungible, easily replaceable by other similar objects. (Of course, these different ideas are closely linked, and one can well see how one might lead to the others.) But the central concept, I think, is that of instrumental use: what is always morally problematic, for Dworkin, is to treat other human beings as mere tools, rather than as ends in themselves. "The issue here," she concludes, "is the rights of human beings. And if you understand that women are human beings you must ask: What is the right and honorable and proper way for this person to be treated by that person?"

Why would a person treat another person as a mere thing? There may be many reasons in different contexts: but Kant held that this happens inevitably between men and women in the context of a sexual relationship. Sexual desire, he believed, makes people lose their grip on the moral point of view: "as soon as a person becomes an Object of appetite for another, all motives of moral relationship cease to function." Its intense sensations drive out, for a time, all thought of respect for humanity as an end, leading partners to treat one another as mere tools of their own urgent desires for pleasure. At the same time, their keen interest in pleasure leads them to permit themselves to be used as things by one another, indeed, to volunteer eagerly to be dehumanized so that they can dehumanize in turn.

Kant apparently thought that this tendency was intrinsic to sexual desire itself. This led him to conclude that desire should only be expressed within a relationship—marriage, as he saw it—that constructs moral regard institutionally by making the parties promise to care for one another. This proposal completely ignored the asymmetrical character of marriage and the extent to which its conception of women as property reinforces the thing-like treatment of women, giving men limitless sexual rights over women's bodies and making it very unlikely that the law will intervene to protect the women's boundaries from violence.

Without explicitly discussing Kant, Dworkin departs from the Kantian view in two important respects. First, she denies that the baneful tendencies that Kant imputes to sexual desire belong to it inevitably or as such. Indeed, Dworkin thinks that it is always a mistake to read existing social behavior as reflecting desire's underlying "nature," given the depth at which social and political structures contribute to shaping what we find desirable in a partner. And, apart from the social deformations caused by asymmetrical structures of power, Dworkin holds that sexual relationships can express regard for humanity.

Second, she focuses (as Kant did not) on the role of male-female asymmetry in constructing a pernicious form of sexual exchange in which men come to be aroused by the idea of turning a woman into a thing, and women come to find excitement in the thought of volunteering to be used as things. Here Dworkin's analysis lies close to that of Mill, Who argued in The Subjection of Women that men, wishing to make willing rather than unwilling slaves of women, have "put everything in practice to enslave their minds," teaching women that "meekness, submissiveness, and resignation of all individual will" is "an essential part of sexual attractiveness." The idea that women's current behavior reveals their "nature" is scoffed at as much by Mill as by Dworkin, when he says that this is just like putting a tree half in a vapor bath and half in the snow, and then, seeing that one part is luxuriant and the other part withered, saying that it is "the nature of the tree" to be that way.

Dworkin does not speculate about how the sexual objectification of women began, though she suggests (again with Mill) that it is greatly helped along by the legal construction of marriage as involving limitless rights of sexual access. (Mill already argued in 1869 that the absence of laws against marital rape made women's status lower than that of slaves. Today most states in the United States still have some form of spousal exemption for rape.) What she does emphasize—this is her diagnostic thesis—is that men have been pervasively socialized to think that aggression, violence and the treatment of women as objects are just normal male attitudes, "boys being boys," and that women just have to put up with that. Given our society's tendency to glorify and to eroticize male violence, men frequently learn to find sexual satisfaction only in situations of dominance. The cultural portrayal of intercourse as conquest has deformed sexual relations, making it difficult for men to accept women both as sexual partners and as equals. "In order to get a response from men, one has to be the right kind of thing." And "[w]hen you enter the sexual agreement to be a thing, you then narrow your own possibilities for freedom."

Dworkin has frequently been portrayed as holding that all sexual intercourse is rape. Some of her more sweeping statements have supported such a reading. She should have been more circumspect here, demarcating her claims more precisely. Still, examining her rhetoric with care, one may discern a far more plausible and interesting thesis: that the sexualization of dominance and submission, and the perpetuation of these structures through unequal laws (such as the failure to criminalize marital rape or to prosecute domestic violence effectively), have so pervasively infected the development of desire in our society that "you cannot separate the so-called abuses of women from the so-called normal uses of women." This sentence certainly does not say that all acts of intercourse are abuses. It does say that the dominant paradigms of the normal are themselves culpable, so we can't simply write off the acts of rapists and batterers by saying that they are "abnormal." Gendered violence is too deep in our entire culture.

Dworkin observes that, no matter how often males use violence against other males, nobody concludes that men like being beaten up, or that it is in the nature of men to provoke violence by their bodily appearance. But women who do not leave abusive marriages, on account of economic dependence or terror or a conviction that they will die sooner or later anyway, are often portrayed as wanting abuse, and the abuse is often portrayed as a natural reflex of the jealous male nature. Again, until very recently it was standard courtroom policy to portray a rape victim as someone who "asked for it"; but such judgments are rarely made about men who get mugged. "There's a different standard of dignity," Dworkin concludes. What we should say, in both cases equally, is that human rights have been violated. But we don't say that frequently enough about women.

Up to this point, Dworkin says what few feminists today would find controversial. The legal proposals that her arguments have promoted or supported now enjoy widespread support in our society. Most feminists welcome the changes that have made it possible to complain of sexual harassment in the workplace and to demonstrate that an asymmetry of power is frequently at the root of what creates a "hostile work environment." These concepts, developed by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, are now commonplace in our legal culture, and have been validated recently in workplace opinions by such non-radical judges as William Rehnquist and Richard Posner.

Most feminists would hardly wish to return to the situation of thirty years ago, where a raped woman would have to show that she resisted "to the utmost" or was physically harmed in a struggle, and where a woman's prior sexual history would be used against her as evidence in a rape trial, to show that she "asked for it." Most feminists also would gladly concur with Dworkin's central conclusion in her new book: that laws against domestic violence should be far more effectively enforced, and that our society should intervene in many more ways to provide women with alternatives to staying in abusive relationships. Dworkin's suggestion that women who retaliate violently against their batterers should in some cases be allowed to plead self-defense also enjoys widespread support.

It is a curious feature of contemporary feminism that one repeatedly encounters women who denounce MacKinnon and Dworkin as man-haters, but who gladly enjoy, and even take credit for, the legal reforms that were made possible only through concepts they introduced. Dworkin and MacKinnon are radicals; but their radicalism has proven broadly acceptable, in large part because they call a culture based on rights and equal dignity to full consistency with itself.

III.

Pornography is a different matter. Life and Death describes the episode in Dworkin's career that has, more than any other, led to widespread vilification: her association with MacKinnon working for legal changes in this area. It is extremely common to hear the two assailed as apostles of censorship; but often the ideas themselves are not described with any precision.

Dworkin's persuasive argument about cultural patterns of objectification prompts an obvious question. How are these bad attitudes about women reproduced, in a culture that in some respects accords women equal dignity as persons? Dworkin answers that a key part of the causal story is violent and humiliating pornography. Pornographic images repeatedly portray women as dirty and debased, as asking to be raped, as deserving violent or abusive treatment. Pornography commonly portrays the will of women from a fictive male viewpoint, expressing the thought that they want to be used as things for male pleasure. Describing a photograph in which a pregnant woman gleefully sticks a hose up herself, Dworkin comments: "This is not a human being. One cannot look at such a photograph and say. This is a human being, she has rights, she has freedom. She has dignity, she is someone. One cannot. That is what pornography does to women."

In Dworkin's view, of course, our whole culture is suffused with such attitudes, and pornography is far from being their only source. Yet she argues, drawing both on experimental evidence and on testimony from women whose batterers made them re-enact pornographic scenarios, that it is a very prominent cause of the "boys-will-be-boys" indifference to violence. (It is hard not to think this way, when Larry Flynt, who portrayed the dismemberment of a woman in a meat grinder as arousing, is canonized as a saint of free speech, while the Nazis who marched in Skokie are regarded as despicable scum whose rights just might be protected by the First Amendment. What does this difference show us about ourselves?) Regarding pornography as rather like a dangerous drug that causes harm, she and MacKinnon have attempted to create a legal remedy for women who are victims of these harms.

Neither MacKinnon nor Dworkin recommends using the criminal law to punish the makers or the distributors of pornography. Nor have they called for censorship of pornographic materials. What they have proposed (with brief success in Indianapolis, before a federal appellate court ruled against them) is a civil ordinance, under which women who have been harmed by pornography can sue its makers and distributors for damages, and ask an administrative agency to issue an injunction against the offenders. The potential plaintiffs were envisaged as of two types: actresses who are harmed while making pornographic films, and battered women who can show a sufficient causal connection between the abuse and the man's use of pornographic materials. The category of material that would be potentially actionable is both narrower and broader than the materials that are potentially illegal under current obscenity law: narrower because sexual explicitness by itself is not found problematic, if there is no humiliation or violence; broader because there is no escape clause for redeeming social value, and no permissible appeal to the sense of the work as a whole to establish such redeeming value.

People who attack this proposal simply on the grounds that they are in favor of the First Amendment are not saying anything intellectually respectable. The First Amendment has never covered all speech; bribery, threats, extortionate offers, misleading advertising, perjury and unlicensed medical advice are all unprotected. Indeed, in 1918, when Eugene Debbs went to jail for sedition on account of speeches urging people to resist military service, the First Amendment wasn't even held to cover the type of political speech that is currently recognized as lying at its very core. So the argument cannot be that pornography is speech, so it must be protected. Instead, the argument must be made that it is the type of speech that ought to be protected by the First Amendment.

Such an argument against Dworkin must be based on extensive legal analysis, something that many of her opponents (but not all of them) fail to offer. They need to grapple also with the fact that we currently have a legal obscenity standard that renders illegal (on other grounds) most of the materials that concern Dworkin; and that we also have a variety of other laws—against cigarette and alcohol advertising, for example—that reflect our society's view that some speech is harmful and needs regulation. Moreover, we now permit people harmed by tobacco products and the advertising surrounding them to sue the makers of those products for damages. Under certain circumstances, sellers of alcohol are also liable for damages their products have caused. (But we do not currently allow damage suits against those who speak or write in praise of alcohol or tobacco.) Most Western democracies, moreover, allow more regulation of hate speech than we do: Germany's restrictions on anti-Semitic speech and Britain's Race Relations Act, for example, need to be considered as we ponder what we really want to say.

How, then, should one object to the MacKinnon-Dworkin proposal? Certainly one should begin by acknowledging that it addresses the proper moral target, in the sense that material depicting the abuse of women as sexy is morally problematic in a way that the traditional category of the "obscene" does not seem to be. (Defined in terms of the vague notion of appeal to "prurient interest," that category has frequently led to a focus on depictions of reciprocal sex that are just a little too frank for some judge's taste—as with Lady Chatterley's Lover.) One should also grant that such representations of women as made for abuse are likely to contribute in some way to the general climate of violence against women that is among our pressing social problems. And then the objections should begin.

One reasonable objection might be that MacKinnon and Dworkin have never satisfactorily articulated a theory of the distinction between law and morals, and that we need a general account of this notoriously problematic line in order to carry the argument further. Many bad things aren't, and shouldn't be, illegal. Even under Mill's "harm" principle, a case can surely be argued for some regulation of pornography. But Dworkin never argues such a case, though she seems to agree with Mill's objection to laws against the merely offensive. More argument might have clarified her position.

Next, given the ubiquity of violence in our society, the causal links between pornography and any particular case of harm are probably too difficult to establish. With cigarette smoking, we have a control group cigarette smoking, we have control group of non-smokers to examine. Men in America have been exposed to a wide range of images of women, in the media, in advertising and, in many cases, in pornography. Perhaps we cannot adequately distinguish the contributions of these different sources, showing that in a given a case of abuse pornography, and not the man's earlier socialization, was the primary cause.

It is unclear, moreover, under what circumstances we should hold the producer of a work liable for the harms that it inflicts. Crime and Punishment gave rise to copycat murders. Nietzsche's writings influenced the Nazis. In both cases, the murderers were to some extent misreading the work, whereas the batterer who imitates a violent porn book or video is not misreading (except in the sense that the maker of the work plainly aimed at masturbation, not real-life enactment). But MacKinnon and Dworkin probably cannot use this distinction, given their rejection of the appeal to the sense of the work as a whole. It seems plausible, then, that making authors liable for what copycat criminals do will exert a stifling effect on some valuable speech.

Fourth, we might object that such an ordinance is very likely to be abused in practice. Judges are likely to prove bad analysts of sexual stereotypes and their effect. The history of obscenity law shows us that work of high human value is likely to be targeted, while much harmful trash escapes unscathed. Indeed, insofar as they refuse appeal to the sense of the work as a whole, MacKinnon and Dworkin make it possible to indict some feminist work—say, Dworkin's fiction—that graphically portrays the sexual abuse of women, with the overall purpose of sensitizing us to its terrible character. James Lindgren has shown that 63 percent of students who were shown an extract from Dworkin's novel Mercy ranked it as pornographic under MacKinnon's and Dworkin's own definition of pornography (almost as high a proportion as The Story of O, one of Dworkin's central examples of pornography)—though they did not rank it as obscene under a modified version of the current Supreme Court obscenity test.

This points to another and more fundamental issue. There is value in Dworkin's prophetic examination of the pornographic; the ability to study troubling cultural representations without fear of legal penalty is an important part of affecting social change, and so even someone convinced of the moral case against pornography might plausibly be disturbed by the legal pressures such an ordinance might create. But should we accept Dworkin's moral thesis? Many objectors have defended the value of a type of pornography that she does not attack (works involving consensual, nonhumiliating activity that would be far more likely to be targeted by the current obscenity test than by her test). Others have simply refused to acknowledge that there is any moral problem in the representation of women as meant for abuse and humiliation. (This, I think, is an implausible position.) But there is another position, one that appeals to the all-important issue of context and sense in the work as a whole.

Sexual objectification of various types occurs within many relationships that are, in their larger structure, relationships of equality and respect. Within such an established context, forms of treatment that might otherwise undermine dignity (for example, treating a person, for a time, as identical with his or her bodily parts) do not undermine dignity. One might reformulate Kant's position as the claim that one moral goal of an intimate relationship is to establish a context within which respect can be taken on trust, so that acts that would elsewhere mean domination and subordination do not, therefore, mean this. Dworkin allows that in individual lives penetration and receptivity may have other meanings; but the ordinance that she proposes makes no distinctions of context, and thus it might be used to target representations that even a sympathizer with Dworkin's argument might judge morally good.

For a combination of these reasons, I am inclined to oppose the MacKinnon-Dworkin ordinance as a legal remedy for the harms of violent pornography. Still, Dworkin has identified an urgent problem that needs to be treated with moral seriousness. Feminists who deny this should ask whether women can really make progress in areas such as rape law and the prosecution of domestic abuse, when a jury of their peers has been raised on images that depict such abuses as exactly what women are about.

IV.

Prophets may also be false prophets. That is how many feminists view Dworkin's attacks on sexual corruption. A calm examination of Dworkin's views can help to articulate more precisely the sense of her claims, and to show what is plausible and valuable in them; but that is not the end of the matter, even philosophically. There are some general worries about the nature of Dworkin's undertaking that must be faced.

The first worry concerns Dworkin's obsessive focus on the sexual as the locus of women's subordination, and her apparent indifference to economic issues. Dworkin holds that it is because men view women as sex objects that women do not enjoy equal dignity. She therefore sees a change in socially constructed forms of sexual desire as the key to women's equality. Yet men have traditionally viewed women in other ways as well: as bearers of, and carers for, children; as homemakers; as performers of domestic labor. It is plausible to think that these powerful interests reinforce and perpetuate the more narrowly sexual forms of subordination, and may even collude in their creation.

If one sees things this way, one will think that the key to women's equality is to promote their economic advantage, focusing on employment, credit, land rights and other issues of daily self-sufficiency. In developing countries today, feminists are split over these issues: some reject projects as non-feminist if they do not focus, Dworkin-style, on the criticism of sex roles, while others insist that such criticism can never bear fruit unless women first enjoy greater economic self-sufficiency. There is no necessary incompatibility between the two approaches; but Dworkin's failure to acknowledge the economic aspect of inequality means that she offers very uncertain guidance for practical change, especially in the developing world.

Another worry concerns Dworkin's attitude to reasoned persuasion. In her new book, one finds less hostility to argument than in her other writings, but Dworkin's contemptuous attitude to her opponents, and her failure to engage in calm exchanges of ideas, has not disappeared, and it is troubling. Maybe Dworkin is right. Maybe most people are so distracted, or obtuse, or jaded, that only highly colored rhetoric can shake them, and a calm argument will leave their prejudices untouched. But it seems more productive to believe that people are innocent of the refusal of reason until proven guilty over a long period of time, and that we should always make the first move toward them on the assumption that they would like to search along with us for an adequate account. Doesn't prophetic rhetoric of Dworkin's sort objectify people in its own way, reducing them to their sins rather than regarding them with respect, as ends in themselves?

I have referred to Dworkin's "fire-and-brimstone" rhetoric. My deepest concern about her project lies here. Dworkin's attitude to men exemplifies the unattractive traits that are commonly, and falsely, attributed to the Jewish god: a focus on retributive justice, a total absence of compassion and mercy. Her novel Mercy is all about why it is correct to refuse mercy to men, and best to regard them in the light of strict retributive justice, paying them back in kind for the wrongs that they have done to women. Like most old-time retributivists, Dworkin doesn't even think it terribly important which individual gets the punishment, since the sins are understood to belong to the whole "house" or race, and individuals are guilty in virtue of this membership.

Life and Death, too, contains the denunciation of evil without the vision of reconciliation, fury without mercy, hatred without love. Indeed, Dworkin repeatedly expresses sympathy with violent extralegal resistance against male violence: "If we have to fight back with arms, then we have to fight back with arms. One way or another we have to disarm men." Dworkin is right to claim that feminists have used "extraordinary patience and self-restraint" by responding with words and not with violence, as have most other oppressed groups; but this does not mean that a commitment to nonviolence is not a good feminist choice. Surely it must not be a source of shame. ("I have a long history of violence against me, and I say, to my increasing shame, that everyone who has hurt me is still walking around.")

One might favor legal and nonviolent means while still being a strict retributivist, opposed to sympathy and mercy. Kant, who denied a right to revolution, also held that only the retributive attitude expresses respect for the criminal's personhood. Pleas for sympathy (attributing the wrong, for example, to bad cultural forces rather than personal evil) are seen as diminishing personhood by negating responsibility. (Justice Thomas has recently followed Kant's lead in his remarks about criminal sentencing of minority defendants.) But sympathy and mercy need not diminish personhood. They may simply express the thought that all human beings are weak and fallible, in part the creation of their social milieu and not fully culpable for evils that are bred into them by the unjust conditions they inhabit.

Such an idea is a valuable one for a prophet of social change, for it can forge a link between the corrupt world that the prophet decries and a new world of equality and respect. Martin Luther King Jr. understood this well. He saw that a prophet must lead people out of something bad and into something good. His use of prophetic language created a space within which love might come to exist, and a world made ugly by hierarchy might be redeemed by the beauty of equality. Dworkin's rhetoric, by contrast, contains no space for reconciliation, no positive vision. Her non-forgiveness toward men, like her refusal of reason, is itself an act of violent aggression, expressing the thought that men will be punished forever for their bad acts by being refused entry into any world that is good.

This is a message that is ultimately at odds with Dworkin's own view of the possibilities of human life, though it is perhaps entailed by her decision to talk about a "collective him" rather than to make more fine-grained distinctions. Certainly it is a vision that cripples social progress by identifying the call for justice with a state of permanent hostility. Mercy may be given from a position of weakness, because one has been taught that women are sympathetic creatures who shouldn't demand their rights. Yet it may also be given from a position of strength, because one is confident that one has dignity, and one has some confidence in the possibilities of reason and reconciliation. Nietzsche once said that mercy toward the aggressor is "the self-overcoming of justice." Dworkin gives us the call for justice without any space for its self-overcoming.