QuestionsWhat makes something right?No virtue in obedience
What makes something right?Virtue

No virtue in obedience

Mary Wollstonecraft 1759 · 1797Women share the same reason: educate them accordingly.
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What it claims

A woman raised under this system cannot be virtuous in the proper sense. How can one expect virtue from a slave? For women to be virtuous, they must be free and obey reason alone.

Why

Only virtue that comes from using one's own reason counts, and an education built on obedience prevents it.

In short

"No virtue in obedience" is an argument by Mary Wollstonecraft (Rights of Woman, ch. 2-3) on the question "What makes something right?" (answer: virtue). Its claim: A woman raised under this system cannot be virtuous in the proper sense. How can one expect virtue from a slave? For women to be virtuous, they must be free and obey reason alone. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the conclusion does follow from its 3 premises. AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 2 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Rights of Woman, ch. 2-3
Valid

Rousseau wanted men to be virtuous through their own reason, and women gentle, docile and obedient. Wollstonecraft points out the contradiction: if virtue comes from reason, a woman trained to obey cannot be virtuous. She can only seem good, as long as someone is watching her. "Liberty is the mother of virtue."

P1Only someone whose virtues come from the exercise of their own reason can be called virtuous. Rousseau said so of men; it holds for every human being, since there are no virtues peculiar to one sex.
P2To be raised for dependence is to learn to act according to the will of another fallible being and to submit to power, right or wrong: that is not acting by one's own reason.
P3Yet the education Rousseau proposes for girls makes obedience "the grand lesson" to be impressed with unrelenting rigour.
Therefore a woman raised under this system cannot be virtuous in the proper sense. How can one expect virtue from a slave? For women to be virtuous, they must be free and obey reason alone.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Valid with no hidden premise: every premise is essential. The argument's strength is to start from an idea Rousseau himself accepts (P1, for men) and to show he cannot make an exception for women without saying that virtue changes its nature with sex, which she refuses. To escape, one must either deny P1 (there is a virtue of obedience) or deny P2 (obeying can be a reasonable choice).
Analogy. A pupil who does not cheat because the teacher is watching is not honest: he is watched. We only know he is honest on the day he could cheat and does not, because he understands why he should not.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Rousseau (Emile, Book V) 1762 · attacks premise 1

A woman's first quality is gentleness. Formed to obey a being as imperfect as man, she must learn early to suffer even injustice and to bear a husband's wrongs without complaint. Not for his sake but for hers: gentleness is her own virtue, and bitterness would only make her sufferings worse.

Wollstonecraft replies
Wollstonecraft
All the sacred rights of humanity are violated by insisting on blind obedience. The being who patiently endures injustice and silently bears insults will soon become unjust, or unable to discern right from wrong. Genuine meekness never reaches the heart except as the effect of reflection; the docility that fear stamps on us is only behaviour.
O
Objection: obeying can be reasonable attacks premise 2

Obeying does not always prevent reasoning. A child obeys its parents, an apprentice his master, a patient her doctor: one reasonably judges that the other knows better. Wollstonecraft herself asked the children in her care to follow her advice until their reason was mature.

Wollstonecraft replies
Wollstonecraft
I love man as my fellow; but his sceptre, real or usurped, extends not to me, unless the reason of an individual demands my homage; and even then the submission is to reason, not to man. The conduct of an accountable being must be regulated by the operations of its own reason.
The debate goes on (our summary) So she grants that one may follow the advice of someone wiser, provided one is obeying their reasons. And the obedience she asked of children was temporary: "then you ought to think". What she refuses is a permanent obedience, "right or wrong", imposed on a whole sex. The objector may answer that in real life we often follow an authority without being able to check its reasons (a doctor, for instance): the line between reasonable trust and submission is not always sharp.
The ethics of care (Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice) 1982 · attacks premise 1

Making independent reason the only source of virtue adopts a masculine model of morality. Attention to others, care and loyalty to relationships are real virtues, not slave virtues. Despising them as "women's virtues" loses half of morality.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 1982, after the author's death (1797).
The debate goes on (our summary) Today's readers are divided. Some blame Wollstonecraft for a cold reason that scorns traditionally feminine qualities. Others recall that she warmly recommends affections and family duties, provided they do not replace reason: what she fights is a gentleness imposed by fear, not care itself.