Plato: WINNING!

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta is lifting the military’s official ban on women in combat, which will open up hundreds of thousands of additional front-line jobs to them, senior defense officials said Wednesday.

“You accept, then, as we have described it, this partnership of the women with our men in the matter of education and children and the guardianship of the other citizens, and you admit that both within the city and when they go forth to war they ought to keep guard together and hunt together as it were like hounds..." [Plato, The Republic 466c]

Gender Ethics

Those in support of the prohibition against women participating in direct combat often appeal to the fundamental (biological, physiological) differences between men and women. These differences, in turn, provide the bedrock for assumptions about the differences between gender (a social construct) that lead to policy.

One author questions some recently employed science that purports to mark out the biological differences:

No one disputes that the sexes differ physiologically, in hormones and anatomy, or that there are sex differences in the brain related to men’s and women’s different reproductive processes. The eternal question is, and has been, so what?

Here's an interesting point with regards to women in combat:

Over and over, if you watch what people do rather than what they say they would do, and vary the situations in which they do it, gender differences fade to the vanishing point. As Fine puts it, “Pick a gender difference, any difference. Now watch very closely as – poof! – it’s gone”.

Since broadswords and hand-to-hand combat are on the decline in favor of stand-off, button-operated lethality, do the physical differences between men and women matter anymore?

Plato didn't think so.

Read the Times of London review here.