Respecting Preferences

Theorists of justice have to steer between two rocks. On the one hand, there is the intuition that an individual’s morally permitted preferences should be respected: it is not justifiable to intervene with them. On the other hand, such preferences are the result of formation processes, which are notoriously vulnerable to manipulation. Does justice demand respect for preferences that produce or perpetuate injustices, suffered either by the individual herself or by others? In this paper, I will investigate this problem in the context of the ambiguous tenet of neutrality. The field of gender justice has extended Rawlsian theories of justice in order to account for structural factors, such as socialisation. Some theorists have argued that the justice-inhibiting character of some preferences implies that the first intuition should be rejected in favour of the second in some cases, which leads to the conclusion that some preferences are like obstacles standing in the way of justice and should thus be reformed. I will call this the ‘Normative Hierarchy View’ and argue that it is problematic. It presupposes a certain attitude with respect to those who hold the preferences, which forecloses a politically salient kind of respect. Furthermore, at the more general level, there are at least two major problems with the kind of objectification that is at stake in those accounts: it requires a reduction of practical reason to theoretical reason and is incompatible with the criterion of publicity.