Subjection of Women

proach to understanding the properties of persons (their traits, desires, abilities, interests) which is not only very popular and historically important, but also intuitively plausible. It begins with a division of human properties into three categories. Natural properties are those persons have in virtue of being members of a natural kind, and they originate in the structures definitive of the species. Other properties are unnatural, in that they result from abnormal structures. And some properties are nonnatural (or social) in that they represent replacements, modifications, or extensions brought about by the social environment operating on the basic structures.1 Such is the ontology. It suggests immediately the epistemology for assigning observed properties to the three categories, in particular to the natural and the nonnatural. The central epistemological thesis is a counterfactual: natural properties are those that persons would exhibit were they never influenced by a social environment. John Stuart Mill, in his The Subjection of Women, asserts this view: "the artificial state superinduced by society disguises the natural tendencies of the thing which is the subject of observation. . . ." Suppose "all artificial causes of difference to be withdrawn," the "natural character would be revealed."2
The central epistemological thesis implies two methodological rules and a corollary for discovering which properties are natural and which are nonnatural. First, the natural properties are those which are common among persons who live in different social environments. Properties which are observed in all types of social environment are just those properties which are most resistant to social influences and which would be observed regardless of social influences. Similarly, if observed properties vary as social environments vary, this is evidence for their being nonnatural. (Mill does, I think, assert the first rule in the Logic.)3 Second, the properties of persons