on in curbing the harm of pornography, and would offer to empower the feminist camp which is behind such an ordinance with a mechanism for social and political change if a sufficiently organized feminist "vanguard" took hold of the opportunity to empower women. Adrian Howe argues that the concept of social injury which may be suggested by the ordinance recognizes the differential harm felt by women from pornography. Howe suggests this social notion of harm may be a necessary feature of any successful law reform which is to address the huge social problem of male domination and female oppression. The liberal notion of an individuated human right fails to capture, for MacKinnon and Howe, "the specificity of the harm to women." Thus, an ordinance which did not create a cause of action "for women as women" would fail to address the root of the social problem of which pornography is a manifestation. This conception of social harm, and thus subsection 3.2(iii), may offend liberals or legal conservatives in two ways. First, the notion of non-individuated harm is antithetical to the liberal conception of a rights holder claiming a cause of action. Fundamental to a liberal conception of harm is the notion of the individual who is autonomous, separate and fundamentally worthy of respect. Rawls and Kant exemplify this view in their analyses when they posit the undifferentiated self, free of any particular qualities save that of being an agent worthy of a fundamental, inviolable respect. This notion of the individual worthy of equal concern and respect in the eyes of the state permeates liberal conceptions of rights. It is also a fundamental, if not exclusive, tenet of the common law of torts: In tort litigation, the courts must decide whether to shift the loss suffered by one person, the plaintiff, to the shoulders of another person [emphasis added]. Clearly, on its face this conception of ...
