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PHENOMENOLOGY AND ECOFEMINISM 199

management of a household. *Home economics' is really redundant Is it
not an anomaly that economics has lost sight of that part of itself to
which women have traditionally contributed more than their share? Now
economics thinks of the household in terms of the grocery store shelves.
It has not yet accepted its role in regard to the household which is the
biosphere.
Hierarchical thinking led to the "logic of domination." It was taken for
granted that the higher had a right, or even a duty, to dominate the
lower. So males, who were assumed to be more rational and were
engaged in important matters of culture, dominated females, who were
engaged in matters of nature such a childbirth and nurturing activities,
activities which required little use of reason. This "logic'' was based on
faulty assessments of value and on a questionable ethical principle, but
this did not prevent it from having powerful effects upon human
relationships and upon the way nonhuman animals and natural things
were treated. Until very recently very few people thought that humans
had any direct moral responsibility to nonhuman lives or to the system
of nature. Only human interests determined the right uses of nonhuman
entities, and atomistic thinking greatly limited understanding of human
interest. Only a few people of remarkable insight realized that destruction
of natural things diminished human life. Few were the people who
realized that the domination of women diminished human life.
Before we leave this matter let me make an important point. The
objection to hierarchical thinking on the part of ecological feminists is
not the insupportable rejection of all judgment of relative worth which
some superficial thinkers might support Warren makes it very clear that
she is not rejecting all judgment of worth. It is within the context of the
"logic of domination'' that judgment becomes vicious. What happened in
specific cases of injustice was that biased judgment was based on
inadequate knowledge. In general the fault in hierarchical thinking is
limiting thought to the relationships of superior to inferior, which
obscures other important relationships. For example, in the context of the
working of natural systems, the decomposers, which are the small and
usually not very attractive insects, worms, and bacteria which break down
dead organisms into their constituent materials, are at least as necessary
to the system of nature as the larger members of the system. Even
though we place more value on our fellow humans, there is a sense in
which a decomposer is no less important than a human. The significant
point is that a judgment of relative value is useless in this context