Sex, Culture, and Justice: The Limits of Choice (36 page)

20. Ibid., 383.

ture, and which maximize opportunities for change and va- riety.

Once all that has been taken as read it remains the case that every pursuit has its form, according to which certain modes of behavior are disloyal to it, incompatible with dedication to it. These are the ones which signify more than a change of heart. They may come of that but they are, if persisted in, the marks of failure.
21

If we are anxious to avoid failure, then, and if we cannot be certain that we will stick to a chosen way of life, we had better make sure that we choose one which does not demand commitment. If we do choose such ways of life, we can protect our autonomy only by sticking to them and adhering to all of their ingredients.

The problem with this argument is not Raz’s assertion that aban- doning some ways of life represents failure: clearly, if a nun leaves a convent, she has failed at being a nun. The problem is with Raz’s equa- tion of failure to fulfill certain goals with a failure of autonomy as such. For people who choose ways of life that demand commitment, autonomy becomes a once-in-a-lifetime affair: it depends not on the sort of life which they are living, or on their current attitude toward it and their ability to claim current authorship of it, but on whether they have, at some time in the past, consciously chosen or accepted their way of life. The fact that life may be restrictive, or may turn out to contradict the individual’s fundamental beliefs, cannot be taken into account.

Consider nun Eva Heymann’s thoughts about the Roman Catholic Church’s attitude to homosexuality. This is an issue on which she has strong feelings, in part because she works with people who suffer from HIV and
aids
, many of whom are homosexual. She says:

What never ceases to amaze me is the quality of love which many gay couples have for each other, and this is what makes me so angry about the stance of the Church. It
really
makes me angry. The phrase of the early Church, ‘‘See how these Christians love one another,’’ is what I see, whether they’re Christians or not in the formal sense. It’s such an example to

21. Ibid., 384.

a judgmental Church. . . . If I were challenged on this point—as I am sometimes—I hope I would have the courage of my convictions. I hope I would not be pushed to make a decision about whether to remain a member of the Roman Catholic Church with the views I have about homosexuality, because then in conscience I know I might have to make a decision which may or may not keep me within the institution. I
hope
it would never come to that.
22

Eva hopes that she would not be made to choose between continued membership in the Church and the convent and her convictions on homosexuality. However, she implies that, if she were forced to choose, she would remain true to her convictions and leave the convent. Re- gardless of whether one agrees with her views on this issue, and re- gardless of whether leaving the Church and convent would mean that she had failed as a nun (for in one sense it clearly would), it seems difficult to say that she would not be acting autonomously. She may lack autonomy by being forced to choose, but Raz’s views on loyalty seem to imply something further: that she would be nonautonomous if and only if she were to make the choice to leave. For, since convent life is life in which one must make a complete commitment to perma- nent membership and permanent obedience (like the monastic life to which Raz specifically refers), loyalty to that life requires that one nei- ther questions nor leaves it. Loyalty this may well be, but loyalty in this sense seems incompatible with autonomy.

The issue at stake is the following. If an individual second-order autonomously chooses a comprehensive goal, knowing that powerful others, traditions, or social norms dictate that that comprehensive goal has certain ingredients, does it thereby follow that the individual in question can be said to have first-order autonomously chosen those ingredients? For Raz, it seems the answer must be ‘‘yes’’: second-order autonomous choice of a comprehensive goal must imply first-order autonomous choice of the individual practices that are part of that com- prehensive goal, unless the goal itself allows for deviation. For if sec- ond-order autonomy is the choice of a comprehensive goal, and if a comprehensive goal is defined by Raz as a
socially defined
set of pursuits and activities, it follows that one cannot autonomously choose a sec-

1. Loudon,
   Unveiled,
   81; emphasis in the original.
   

   ond-order comprehensive goal that does not allow for deviation without
   thereby
   choosing the pursuits and activities that, according to social norms, define it. In other words, if Eva is to fulfill her second-order goal of being a nun, she must fulfill it in the manner in which it is defined by her social context. Since being a nun is a social form that does not allow for deviation, that means submitting to the rule that her letters be opened, and denouncing homosexuality as a sin. If she re- jects these requirements, she is not conforming to social definitions and is not in fact a nun at all. She cannot be autonomous without submitting to surveillance and condemning homosexuality, because an autonomous desire to be a nun entails an autonomous desire to be obedient.
   

   This strategy, the transformation approach, enables Raz to maintain the social forms thesis, the value of autonomy, and the possibility of individuals leading lives of obedience and advance commitments. Con- vent life does not have to be rejected as antithetical to autonomy. It can be embraced as part of that ideal, since an individual who chooses convent life can be understood as
   maintaining
   her autonomy.
   

   The idea that second-order autonomous choice implies first-order autonomy is, then, a central part of the social forms thesis. But this strategy of transforming second-order autonomy into first-order auton- omy is problematic in two ways. First, it is conceptually impoverished. People certainly can choose and endorse ways of life without endorsing every aspect of them. This feature is familiar to us all—we might au- tonomously choose our careers and yet not choose the hours we work,
   23
   or autonomously choose our religion and yet not endorse every tenet or religious leader. Second, the transformation of second-order auton- omy into first-order autonomy is normatively impoverished, for it con- demns individuals to accepting the interpretations of group leaders or
   

2. There clearly are some ingredients of a comprehensive goal that are necessary to that goal. It would not make much sense, for example, for a presenter of BBC Radio 4’s breakfast- time
   Today
   program to say that she had autonomously chosen to present the program but had not autonomously chosen to get up extremely early, for it is an essential ingredient of that program that it is broadcast early in the morning. It is quite simply impossible to present a live breakfast-time program without rising early, and so the choice to be the presenter does seem to
   imply
   the choice to get up early. On the other hand, as the proponents of family- friendly and flexible working hours have long argued, it is not essential to many jobs that they be performed in traditional office hours. If this is the case, it is entirely possible to make the second-order autonomous choice to be a civil servant, for example, without at the same time making the first-order autonomous choice to work in an office from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday.
   

   other entrenched interests as to the true meaning of their social form. If the social forms thesis were correct, there would be no grounds for reform of problematic, inegalitarian, or unjust ingredients, since, in endorsing the relevant comprehensive goal or social form writ large, individuals would be deemed to have autonomously chosen its socially defined ingredients. This result sits uneasily with liberal egalitarianism and, ultimately, with Raz’s own normative commitments, since Raz does argue in favor of the cultural reform in the direction of liberalism. Something, then, has to give.
   

   Indeed, it seems likely that many of the nuns interviewed in Lou- don’s book would not be happy with this normative conclusion, since they do express disagreement with the Church or certain rules of the convent. Several of the nuns feel that women should be able to be priests, for example.
   24
   Eva says:
   

   I just hope I live long enough to see the ordination of women. It makes such enormous sense to me. I feel equally strongly on the marriage of clergy in the Catholic church. . . . I remember watching the film of the installation of the first woman bishop, and it was a deeply moving experience. It filled me with enor- mous sadness that this is not a universal practice, particularly in terms of black women in the Church: the Church is still so white. So for me, being a woman or being black are not sepa- rate issues; they’re both part of the whole issue of allowing God’s creativity in the diversity of color, race, sex to be the Church. It’s not for us to decide who we want to choose out of that medley of creativity. So I would campaign for the ordina- tion of women.
   25
   

   It is not only Eva, living as she does in an apostolic convent (one in which the nuns leave the convent to engage in community work) who has such progressive—one might even say heretical—views. Barbara
   

3. The fact that women cannot be priests also lessens the extent to which nuns can be thought of as autonomous, since it means that a woman who has a religious calling can fulfill it only by becoming a nun. A man who has a religious calling can follow it either by becoming a monk or by becoming a priest, but a woman is denied this choice. Thus we could describe a nun who would have preferred to become a priest as lacking first-order autonomy: she might have chosen to follow a religious life, but she was unable to choose how to follow it. I am grateful to Andrew Lewis for observations on this point.
   

4. Loudon,
   Unveiled,
   78.
   

Anne, the member of a mixed apostolic and contemplative order in Oxfordshire, says:

I think that the Church needs women who are able to be as fully functioning within the Church as men. I certainly don’t think sex and gender should be determining factors in terms of ministry, and I sense a crisis in the priesthood, which is reflected in the kind of arguments men use to say that women should not be ordained. I feel strongly about it because the arguments say much more about the inadequate understand- ing of the priesthood than about the ordination, or lack of ordi- nation, of women. So I think it’s the priesthood that’s in ques- tion rather than whether women should or shouldn’t be ordained.

Tradition is important, but tradition is not God.
26

One of the few expressions of support for the Catholic ban on women priests in Loudon’s collection of interviews comes from Angela The´- re` se, a thirty-nine-year-old member of the enclosed Roman Catholic Carmelite Community in Darlington. Surprisingly, however, even she does not explain her opposition by saying that, as a nun, she must obey the rules laid down by the Vatican and her own convent. Instead she gives her own idiosyncratic explanation:

The priesthood? No! Absolutely not! Absolutely not, no; anath- ema to me. It just seems totally wrong. The whole concept seems weird to me, the woman priesthood, I mean. I can’t explain why, but I’ll give you an example instead.

We have an ecumenical service here every year, and a couple of years back there was a lady Methodist minister. She was an absolutely lovely person and she was great in the parlour and all that, but when I saw her trudging into the sanctuary, well I’m afraid most of us—I can’t explain it, but it just does some- thing to me, it’s just weird. It’s a butch image almost, with a dog collar and everything. It just has a strange effect on me. Ugh. No thanks.
27

26. Ibid., 237.

27. Ibid., 39.

And yet even Angela The´re` se, with her traditional views on the male priesthood, does not hold that tradition and authority should be the guiding forces of convent life. She argues that convents in her Carmel- ite order, which Loudon describes as ‘‘the strictest of the female or- ders,’’
28
must update and renew themselves so as to ‘‘make it acceptable to somebody of our day and age.’’
29
An example she gives of such re- newal is the vow of obedience itself:

Obedience is if one knows that one should be in a certain place at a certain time right through the day, which is why it is free- ing rather than something which ties you up in knots. In days gone by, it was blind obedience, in the sense that even if the Prioress gave you three or four conflicting jobs to do you wouldn’t have questioned it; you would have said ‘‘Yes, Mother.’’ So there’s much more of a personal responsibility angle that wasn’t there before. And we have dropped the term ‘‘Mother’’ now, incidentally, [as the result of] a community vote round about 1984, 1985.
30

What do these testimonies show us? Well, on the one hand they lend support to several of Raz’s claims. Angela The´re` se’s argument that her convent must update itself seems to support Raz’s idea that one cannot be successful in a liberal society without autonomy—if the convent does not adapt to this fact, then it will fail. Indeed, the use of a commu- nity vote as one method of bringing about change surely epitomizes autonomy. But this case alerts us to the implausibility of saying that autonomy is nothing more than second-order autonomy, that auton- omy is simply the choice of a way of life that is then determined by its own social form. For it surely makes sense to say that the nuns in Angela The´re` se’s convent are more autonomous once the vow of obedi- ence is interpreted in terms of personal responsibility rather than in terms of blind obedience, and that they are more autonomous if issues are decided by community vote rather than by the Mother Superior alone. If it does make sense to say that they are more autonomous after the changes, then it follows straightforwardly that they are less autonomous before the changes—
despite the fact that, before the changes