Why can’t a man be more like a woman, and other problems in moral philosophy

Richard Rorty

• Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics by Annette Baier
  Harvard, 368 pp, £33.95, February 1994, ISBN 0 674 58715 4

The applause which greeted the conclusion of Annette Baier’s presidential address to a 1990 meeting of the American Philosophical Association masked a faint susurrus, caused by a thousand male philosophers trying hard not to ask themselves why a woman can’t be more like a man. Men, as Henry Higgins pointed out, are so decent, so morally straight. They never mix the personal with the professional. They would never take advantage of a presidential address in order to indict the organisation over which they are presiding. Women allowed to occupy traditionally male offices are expected to be happy to be treated as honorary men, and to play it cool.