Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy

EIGHT: Into the Woods: Killer Mothers, Feminist Ethics, and the Problem of Evil

EIGHT ‰ Laurie Zoloth Into the Woods: Killer Mothers, Feminist Ethics, and the Problem of Evil ‰ Introduction Several years ago I was invited to give a philosophical presentation on the topic of “Women and Violence,” and the presumption of the organizers, which was indeed played out at the event itself, was that the important issue about violence, women, and philosophy concerned the situation of the victim and her rescue. Women were subjects of violence by individual men, or by a society constructed by patriarchy, and it was the structure of the world itself, as prepared and dominated by patriarchy and its manifestations that was the root source of evil and violent deeds. It is a familiar enough theme and it is, of course,in part a correct theme, but I decided to tack off in a different direction to ask another sort of question. I wrote instead about what we think and how we reason as philosophers and as feminists when women are not the victims, but the perpetrators, the evildoers, the enactors of evil. It seemed to me then, that while moral philosophy had a tradition of literature on evil, as of yet feminist moral philosophy had not considered the issue in as robust a way as was needed. I therefore turned to my interest in Jewish ethics for resources. Since a traditional place to begin in philosophy is de¤nitional, I began by trying to de¤ne evil. I was well along into this problem when events overtook me, and the news of a child-killing mother, Susan Smith, hit the press. 205 Into the Woods Susan Smith was a beautiful, young, white woman, married and raising two little boys and working as a secretary in a small town in rural Appalachia , and she claimed that she and her sons were car-jacked by a black man who abducted her sons when he stole her car. After their loss, Smith was seen for days with piteous appearances on national TV, begging for their release. However, then their bodies were found strapped to the children’s car seats, drowned in the car, which was dredged from a nearby lake. It turned out further that there was no black man at all—Smith herself had gunned the car with the children inside into the lake deliberately to kill them so as to be free to pursue her boss’s son, who was not interested in an affair with a woman with children. This was an act of such violence, and of such evil that it dominated American attention, and so I wrote with this problem in mind. When the editor of this volume asked for a submission about how feminism and philosophy and Jewish thought inform my discipline of social ethics, I returned to this theme. Once again, events provided a powerful context. It was three years later, in the summer of 2001 as I was writing the¤nal draft that killer mothers were again the subject of national re¶ection; a Texas mother of ¤ve drowned her babies one by one, and placed them neatly on their beds. But in September of 2001, all previous re¶ections on evil were recon ¤gured. Suddenly, the discourse on evil in which I had been an ironic observer consumed us all as surely as the ¶ames in New York and Washington. All Americans were suddenly confronted with not only a new physical vulnerability , but a sense of the paucity of our explanatory systems, and in particular , the explanatory capacities about good and evil. I watched the events unfold on CNN, and since I was working at that moment on this chapter, I had books on evil in my briefcase: Ted Peters, Elaine Pagels, Hannah Arendt, Alain Badiou, and Richard Rorty. Without a robust theory of evil, without a careful and complex understanding of evil, philosophy, especially feminist philosophy, cannot understand nor interpret the world, and hence cannot begin to do that which ethics must do—apply reason to the storm of history, create an argument for the moral gesture, oppose evil, allow for judgment. Without taking on the problem of evil, there is a terrible lacuna in our theory and hence in our capacity to respond. Without a theory of evil, we turn to psychology, or to the thin accounts of a politics of materialism, as if goodness were something more readily available to the privileged. This chapter represents preliminary notes toward a reconstruction of the moral truth claims we make about our...