"The being cannot be termed rational or virtuous, who obeys any authority, but that of reason"
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The line declares that rationality and virtue depend on autonomous judgment. To be ruled by anything other than reason is to surrender the very faculties that make moral life possible. Obedience that rests on fear, habit, custom, or deference may produce conformity, but it cannot produce virtue, because virtue for Mary Wollstonecraft is a discipline of the mind guided by clear principles rather than by external command.
That claim grows from the Enlightenment conviction that all persons share a capacity for reason. Writing amid the debates stirred by the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft challenged the old alignments of church, crown, and patriarchal tradition that asked people to obey because things had always been so. Her political arguments in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) extend this logic into the private sphere. If virtue requires the exercise of reason, then women, no less than men, must be educated to think for themselves. Teaching them to yield to husbands, fashion, or sentiment is not moral training; it is the cultivation of dependence, which stunts both intellect and character.
The choice of the word being is deliberate. She universalizes the claim, refusing to confine moral agency to male citizens. A dependent creature may imitate goodness, but imitation is not the same as judgment. Without the capacity to test commands against principles, obedience risks becoming complicity in injustice. Rational assent, by contrast, allows both political and personal life to be governed by standards that can be justified, debated, and revised.
Wollstonecraft does not deny the need for authority in law or education; she insists that their legitimacy be grounded in reasons accessible to all. Virtue is not docility but self-command, and rational independence is its precondition. The sentence thus cuts against every form of arbitrary power, from despotic government to domestic tyranny, and makes moral adulthood the right and duty of every human being.
That claim grows from the Enlightenment conviction that all persons share a capacity for reason. Writing amid the debates stirred by the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft challenged the old alignments of church, crown, and patriarchal tradition that asked people to obey because things had always been so. Her political arguments in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) extend this logic into the private sphere. If virtue requires the exercise of reason, then women, no less than men, must be educated to think for themselves. Teaching them to yield to husbands, fashion, or sentiment is not moral training; it is the cultivation of dependence, which stunts both intellect and character.
The choice of the word being is deliberate. She universalizes the claim, refusing to confine moral agency to male citizens. A dependent creature may imitate goodness, but imitation is not the same as judgment. Without the capacity to test commands against principles, obedience risks becoming complicity in injustice. Rational assent, by contrast, allows both political and personal life to be governed by standards that can be justified, debated, and revised.
Wollstonecraft does not deny the need for authority in law or education; she insists that their legitimacy be grounded in reasons accessible to all. Virtue is not docility but self-command, and rational independence is its precondition. The sentence thus cuts against every form of arbitrary power, from despotic government to domestic tyranny, and makes moral adulthood the right and duty of every human being.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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