Two things about the nature of individual free choice make life difficult for those who want to promote both autonomy and gender equality. The first is that individuals sometimes freely choose to pursue harmful activities as a way of securing basic human goods. The second is that neither these choices nor their consequences are shared equally across community members. Indeed, both fall disproportionately on the shoulders of those who have the least amount of power in the community.

Not surprisingly, the particular harmful activities chosen, as well as their consequences, are determined partly by the kind of community in question. In communities where men dominate, women often choose to participate in degrading practices and even harm themselves physically in order to achieve their goals. Likewise, these choices—whether to pursue genital mutilation, breast implantation, or submission to male authority in the family, the workplace, or religion—reinforce their unequal status.

What are we to do about such choices? Since they have their source partly in the organization of individuals' communities, we might want to reorganize these communities so that the choices in question are no longer necessary. Likewise, since these choices reflect the unfair burdens placed on women in communities where men dominate, we might want to use the state to prohibit the activities associated with them and justify such prohibition in the name of justice.

While contemporary political theorists are quick to pick up on the remedy of state prohibition here, they do not generally associate it with justice or treat it as a tool for making sure that individuals do not have to make harmful choices. Instead, they associate it with the prevention of harm itself and treat it as a matter of denying individuals autonomy for their own good. In other words, they conceive of it as paternalism and ask: Is the state's prohibition of the activities in question justifiable paternalism?

Clare Chambers—to her great credit—does not associate the prohibition of harmful choices exclusively with the prevention of harm. Nor does she treat it primarily as a matter of denying individuals autonomy for their own good. Instead, she formulates it as a tool for restructuring the options available to individuals and argues that the state can justifiably prohibit harmful activities—and do so in the name of justice—if the choices to pursue these activities are grounded in “disadvantageous norms.”

In Sex, Culture, and Justice, Chambers advances three general claims. First of all, autonomy is a matter not of free will but of being able—as a socially constructed individual—to govern one's life on the basis of “respectful” choices:

“The sort of autonomy that is in question is not an individual's ability to derive her principles, preferences, or way of life from the ground up, with no social influence—for that would be impossible—but rather the extent to which an individual's social construction is compatible with her choosing from a varied set of ways of life” (p. 263).

Second, in cases where individuals find it necessary to pursue harmful activities that others with more power are able to avoid, an injustice has occurred: “When unequal outcomes result from different choices and not from clear discrimination, we can still identify injustice if the difference between the outcomes is significant and enduring, and if there are identifiable pressures on certain members of a group to make the disadvantageous choice” (p. 131).

Third, the state is justified in prohibiting harmful practices so as to “free individuals from unjust social construction” (p. 79) if the practices are “significantly harmful” (p. 195); if the options and influences are disadvantageous; and if the benefits of the activities depend on the acceptance of a social norm that is unequal and unjust. (Chambers uses the example of breast implants to illustrate the latter condition. Breast implants, she claims, are beneficial only to the extent that they increase the career options, self-esteem, or sexual status of women in a community in which men dominate.)

Two of the biggest challenges here are to show that prohibition neither undermines women's autonomy nor requires an all-powerful state. Chambers sets out to meet the first challenge by placing second-order autonomy—the freedom to formulate one's own life plans—at the center of our attention. She then argues that we can prohibit activities that an individual chooses in the pursuit of such second-order autonomy if the choice to pursue these activities—first-order autonomy—was necessitated by disadvantageous norms and is “disrespectful to the individuals in question” (p. 199).

The author sets out to meet the second challenge by arguing that the state does not have to prohibit all harmful practices that meet these conditions but only those that women complain about as unfair in particular spheres of life, including workplaces, medical facilities, and religious organizations. (In one of the most controversial parts of the book, she claims that sexist practices in religious organizations are no different from those in the workplace with respect to the legitimacy of state prohibition.)

Chambers backs up her claims with well-informed, sophisticated, and analytically rigorous arguments. Her reconceptualization of prohibition, as well as her use of the category “unjust social construction” to justify, as well as to limit, prohibition, provides us with a whole new and productive way of using the state to promote gender equality. So, too, does her articulation of the relationship between first and second order autonomy and her use of this relationship to show how we might prohibit harmful choices without violating at least one very important kind of autonomy.

Yet two gaps remain in the analysis. The first has to do with the level of harm in question. The second has to do with the limits of state power. Chambers makes clear that only “significant harm” (p. 95) justifies state prohibition. But she leaves the criteria of “significant” open. Hence, we do not know what to do when women—the source of judgment here—differ about how harmful particular activities are or about whether these activities disrespect women in general.

The question of state power involves both extensiveness of prohibition and state identity. While Chambers focuses at the outset on the prohibition of particular practices, she ultimately calls for something much more extensive, reorganization of the community: “State intervention could attempt to mitigate either the disadvantage factor, the influence factor, or both together” (p. 264). Hence, if she wants to avoid reintroducing state domination, she needs to tell us both who gets to identify these factors and what kind of state is required to mitigate them.

Chambers does not address either matter fully. She does go to some length to show that her notion of prohibition does not amount to state paternalism. But paternalism is not the only kind of concentrated state power that we need to worry about here. Nor does the nonpaternalistic nature of her notion of prohibition mean that she can ignore the kind of state that might be required to “eliminate unjust social construction” and who might run such a state.

Both gaps are considerable. But neither undermines the high quality of Chambers's work as a whole or diminishes the importance of her introduction of justice into questions of prohibition. Sex, Culture, and Justice stands as an original and important theory of the state's role in bringing about gender equality and—perhaps most important of all—makes clear why we do not have to choose between gender equality and autonomy in our efforts to prevent harm in the lives of women and all others.