At any given point in time, true. However, ideological movements (whose members may have arrived at their conclusions through whatever non-mainstream channels imaginable) can influence the constituent members to enact social change later on.
But this isn’t really the outcome of a reasoned process anymore, much less one associated with fairness. It’s merely the outcome of whatever random wishes fire off in the heads of the persons advocating the changes. So on what grounds should these movements garner support? This is just historical determnism in another shape. There’s basically no reason to support feminism in this context. Not that one could do so, anyway. It just happens. Stripped of its moral character, feminism is basically just a snowballing of human preferences and predilections over time.
Being determined by outside factors does not render your thinking capacity moot, though. Your rational processing may well work outside the social sphere, but the ideas at the end of the process are very much influenced by the input your receive from the outside world. A lack of exposure to proper evidence, for example, may have prevented me from arriving at that conclusion earlier.
I must admit that makes very little sense. You receive inputs, then there is a black box of processing and out come the outputs. This only works with computers because we pretty much define the processes and how the inputs are to be hanled so it doesn’t really map over to humans or other animals. I know that a typical explanation of this is that if we were not appropriately cognitively adapted to the world, that we’d go extinct, but this is circular in that it basically assumes that our understanding of evolutionary biology is itself correct when the very thing in question is how we acquire knowledge to begin with.
My point being that determinism is on rather shaky foundations itself, because even if you assume that the brain is still capable of filtering facts from falsehoods, there’s the question of on what grounds do you believe that, so it is pretty much on the same basis as saying that you chose to believe it because it’s true. It’s a rather basic epistemological problem but it’s compounded several times over for determinism because the concept of knowledge implies justification, and without choice, how does one justify their their belief? On the grounds that if the belief were false they wouldn’t believe it because on net a system of false beliefs would render them evolutionarily unfit? I’ll freely grant that you may not be able to even justify your beliefs even if you had free will, but how are you meant to do so when you cannot even in principle arrive at justification? Now I know some formulations of knowledge exclude the justification aspect but I think that’s just sweeping the problem under the rug.
In essence no ground has been moved. If arguments based on instrumentality are evoked (and they have to of necessity), to the effect that we simply have to accept the fact that some given class of things holds true (e.g. our senses accurately capture information from the world, the principle of induction holds etc.) one could say it is far easier to make headway in social interactions by assuming that one is dealing with volitional entities capable of choice because this is the subjective sensation the individual themselves experiences, and also makes sense of how humans deal with each other morally and in other respects. Which would be Mises’s approach.
And yes, inherent biases may prevent me (or you) from rationally weighing the evidence. That’s human nature.
It’s more a matter of whether you are even in principle capable of assessing the veracity of anything. Can a computer do so? Not really. It can process inputs based on pre-defined parametres. What would it mean for a human being to do so? A much harder question. When you say “rationally weighing up the evidence”, you are referring to an automated process whereby the brain basically builds up conceptual associations and tries to see how a sensory input would cohere with accepted sensory inputs (“Facts”, whatever.) The question then is what guarantees that this process is itself functional? Of course, nothing. It is an assumption made for instrumental purposes.
If the “competitive advantage” of one sex’s biology effectively renders it to be the handmaiden class of the other sex, that may be cause for discontent.
I don’t see them as being a “handmaiden class” simply by virtue of their biological competitive advantages. Women can try and compete with men, and some do. But to expect them as an entire gender to be on equal footing, rather than individual cases, is ridiculous. They may feel disgruntled about it if they define success in the terms of what males tend to be better at, but what is that discontent meant to result in, precisely? Righteous indignation? Advocacy for a “fairer” world? Resignation to the fact that they’re simply better at different things to men on average? It’s “understandable”, but so what? This isn’t about understanding.
