Question Is it morally defensible that men are allowed to go topless in certain public situations while women are not (e.g., at the beach or pool, park, gym, etc.)? Are the people opposed to women gaining this right prudes, or do they have a legitimate ethical basis for their position?

Accepted:
November 12, 2009

Comments

Your question raises a number of really interesting issues.

One of these is how to distinguish ethical questions from non-ethicsones. Could it be the case that your question about toplessness doesnot raise any moral issues at all and so isn't the sort of questionthat can be answered by appeal to ethics? You are right, of course,that questions of nudity strike an emotionally-charged nerve in ourculture. But does this necessarily mean that these responses are bestunderstood or assessed as ethical responses? For example, people in ourculture feel strongly about table manners but these seem to beculturally relative and more a matter of etiquette than morality. Arepeoples' positions about toplessness akin to those non-moral questionsof etiquette? If so, maybe it is wrong to seek a specifically ethicalassessment of the norms and conventions you wish to understand.

Another important ethical issue arises no matter how you address theissue I just described: The ethical significance of the norms andconventions surrounding nudity, regardless of whether those norms havean ethical basis or are non-ethical along the lines of merelyconventional judgments about etiquette. What are the significance ofthose norms and conventions on individuals' lives? How do they relateto significant issues of gender and equality? Do they reinforce or arethey reinforced by an unethical cultural system of patriarchy ormisogyny? I suspect that your question engages many significant issuesrelated to feminist philosophy and so could be used to explore thoseissues.

So, those are two wider sets of issues that your question raises in mymind. With respect to narrow answers, different ethical traditions willtry to answer your question in different ways. For example, today I wasreading a wonderful book on ethics, Jesse Prinz's The EmotionalConstruction of Morals (Oxford, 2007). Prinz argues that, on the onehand, morality is subjective, not objective, but, on the other, moralfacts are real. He writes, "Moral facts are like money. They are socialfacts that obtain in virtue of our current dispositions and practices.They are as real as monetary values and even more important, perhaps,in guiding our lives" (p. 167). So, Prinz would answer your question bysaying that the moral fact of the matter about toplessness is to beinterpreted and assessed by looking at "dispositions and practices"embedded in our culture and might say that widespread dispositionsopposing public toplessness by women is a moral fact about our culture.Prinz wouldn't say that moral judgments are objective in the sense ofuniversally valid, but he would say that they nonetheless really existin our culture -- just like money. Other ethical traditions willprovide different answers, and adjudicating between those competinganswers raises another huge question: the comparative strengths andweaknesses of the various approaches to understanding morality andtheorizing about ethics.