The Reason as the Tool of Exclusion. The Feministic Criticism of John Locke

Abstract

According to John Locke, the reason makes a human being and decides about moral autonomy and freedom. Every man is potentially reasonable but, in practice, to achieve the appropriate reasonability level, we need time and effort. Due to these conditions, not every person can do it. Among not the reasonable enough are also women, and they can be deprived of public rights due to that or regarded as eternal children. That point of view has been criticised since the Enlightenment (Mary Wollstonecraft). Feminists, then and currently, have cautioned against the oppression of women as a result of the Enlightenment conception of reason and reasonability. But some of them believed that the conception had sufficient emancipatory potential to make a change. The more radical questioned the binary distinction between the rational and not rational.