A Decent Life Page 6

  This does not mean, however, that the giving we do, through what the faces of others or common decency moves us to do (or in other ways that we will see in later chapters), cannot be done with a positive feeling, a sense that comes out of our bonds with others rather than our desire to be quits with morality.

  But why is this important? Why the emphasis on bonds with others rather than a more legalistic relation to morality? There are two reasons for this, one having to do with the giving and the other having to do with the giver. People whose morality emerges out of a positive sense of sharing the world with others are more likely to act morally than those who experience it as a burden or a debt that must be paid. The feeling of indebtedness often leads to bitterness, and bitterness is hardly to be commended as a source of ongoing commitment to morality. I am much more likely to offer my seat to an elderly person on the bus or put extra money in my daughter’s bank account for her gym registration if I am acting out of sense of solidarity or connection with them rather than out of a sense that there is a moral rule hanging over me dictating that I do so.

  The other reason for focusing on the positive is that it makes my life, the life of the giver, go better. Not only will the beneficiary of my moral acts gain from my having a positive relation to morality; so will I. And, to be quite frank, I would much prefer my life to go better than worse. I would rather feel connected to those around me than obliged to them, and to the extent that I can weave that connection into my moral activities, I would really rather do that.

  None of this means that we should never act out of a sense of debt or guilt or shame. We will all be faced with moral requirements that will be experienced as burdensome or that arise because we’ve done something we shouldn’t have and now have to make up for it. When my offspring were younger there were times when I was obliged to attend yet another of their athletic events when I would have preferred sitting back and reading a good novel or having a drink with a friend. (Since they were all considerate enough to grow older, I now have greater access to good novels and bourbon.) I have also—haven’t we all?—found myself in a position where I have had to apologize to someone I don’t like because I realized I acted toward him in ways he did not deserve. Morality can be onerous or taxing at times. Nevertheless, inasmuch as we can act out of a sense of sharing with others, whether through the experience of their face or through the pleasure of common decency or through a myriad of other connections, our moral involvements will be richer for us and for those around us.

  An Ethics of Care

  There is a philosophical moral view that has arisen in recent years that focuses on our connection with others rather than our duties or obligations to them. It is called “care ethics” or “ethics of care.” It is worth pausing over because it can assist us in coming to a better understanding of the approach we’re considering here and also to some difficulties that will lead us to the considerations of the following chapter.

  The ethics of care finds its roots in the writings of feminist philosophers, but its most important early expression is by the psychologist Carol Gilligan in her 1982 book In a Different Voice.14 Gilligan had worked with the famous psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, who created a theory of moral development that became the standard in psychology. His six-stage theory held that people move from self-centered motives through interpersonal connection to action grounded in principles.15 For Kohlberg, most people did not reach the highest stages of moral development; rather they got stuck at the fourth stage, which he called “law and order.” To see this, we can look at his most classic example, the Heinz dilemma, which was taken up by Gilligan to very different ends.

  In the example, Heinz has a wife who is suffering from a dread disease. She needs medication that Heinz cannot afford and the druggist will not sell it to him for a lower price, even though he would still make a profit on what Heinz can offer. So Heinz breaks into the pharmacy and steals the medicine. Did Heinz do the right thing? For Kohlberg, the answer here is less important than the reasoning behind the answer. It is a question of how people think rather than simply the answer they arrive at.

  Many people Kohlberg tested offered an answer that went something like this: Heinz should not steal the drug because stealing is wrong. That would put one in the “law and order” stage. To be clear here, the problem, according to people who find Heinz wrong for this reason, is not a legal one. It is not that Heinz broke the law, although that might play into people’s reasoning. Rather, their reasoning is something like this: it is morally wrong to steal; Heinz stole; therefore, Heinz is morally wrong. There is a use of principles in coming to this conclusion, but the principles are without the kind of nuance that characterizes the highest two stages of moral development.

  We can see reasoning like this in the current debate about undocumented immigrants. If someone responds to the issue of whether those without proper papers should be allowed to stay simply by saying, “They’re illegal, so they shouldn’t be here,” They would be at Kohlberg’s fourth stage. In this case moral and legal “law and order” would coincide.

  However, when Carol Gilligan presented the Heinz dilemma to women, she noticed something unusual. Often women didn’t try to answer the question but instead they resisted the terms in which the example was presented. Rather than decide the case as presented, many women asked whether there could be another approach, one that got Heinz and the druggist together in order that each could understand the situation of the other and then work out a viable solution. Gilligan notes that, “The psychology of women that has consistently been described as distinctive in its greater orientation toward relationships and interdependence implies a more contextual mode of judgment and a different moral understanding. Given the differences in women’s conceptions of self and morality, women bring to the life cycle a different point of view and order human experience in terms of different priorities.”16

  This approach, according to Kohlberg’s stages, might land them in stage three, the interpersonal stage. Rather than being concerned with principles, people at the interpersonal stage see themselves as obliged to those around them, those whose approval they seek to maintain and disapproval they hope to avoid. The interpersonal stage is not concerned with principles so much as the relationships in the local area in which people find themselves. However, as Gilligan saw, pigeon-holing women this way didn’t really fit how they were approaching the problem. Women were not so much interested in conforming to the views of those around them as developing connections between the individuals in the situation. Rather than “rising” to the level of principle, as Kohlberg would have suggested, these women occupied a different moral space, one in which the fostering of relationships played a central moral role.

  For Gilligan, this ethics of care is not an inferior form of moral development, one that must be transcended in order to achieve a morality of principles. It isn’t a matter of women learning how to grow up so they can be more like men. Rather, it is an alternative but not less worthy way to take up morality. An ethics of care is not a precursor to an ethics of principles. It is another way to navigate morality, one that can stand alongside a morality of principles, sometimes as a competitor and sometimes in a complementary fashion. In developing her ethics of care, Gilligan does not claim that only women can inhabit it. Rather, she thinks that both men and women can live such an ethics. The reason that it has been characteristic of women is that women have been encouraged to focus on connection with others whereas men have been reinforced for an individualism that withdraws from connection and therefore seeks principles to undergird action.

  One philosopher who articulates and ethics of care, Virginia Held, notes that we are always in relationship to one another. This is a fact that is often lost on an ethics of principles. It is as though an ethics of principles is in danger of treating each of us as an individual on their own, without relation, who then comes to others equipped with a set of moral principles which are subsequently applied to those others in our behavior
(at least when we reach Kohlberg’s higher stages of development). But we aren’t like that. We are always already involved with many other people, navigating the world alongside and with them. According to Held, any adequate moral view needs to reflect this fact. As Held insists, “our embeddedness in familial, social, and historical contexts is basic.”17

  To see ourselves as individuals divorced from our social contexts, forming principles that are then applied to those contexts through our behavior, is, for philosophers like Held, to take things the wrong way around. This is not to say that there is no place for principles—a point to which we will return in a bit. Rather, it is to say that our morality ought to arise first and foremost out of a recognition that those our behavior affects are not only other people surrounding us but more deeply people with whom we are already in some kind of relationship or another, and moreover that those relationships already help constitute who we are.

  I am a father of three kids. (Okay, they aren’t kids any more, but what exactly do you call your adult offspring? Progeny? That just seems strange.) My relationship with them is not simply one of having certain obligations. It is not as though these are separate individuals that I happen to find myself surrounded by and so have to figure out what I owe to each. I am bound to my kids, caught up with them in ways that I am not caught up with other people’s kids. But it’s more than that. My kids help mold me into the person I am. To be a father, and more to the point to be a father to these particular kids, creates me in certain ways that being a friend to them or a father of others would not.

  For instance, my oldest son is an economist. I do a lot of political organizing from the left of the political spectrum. It is easy in our day and age to become caught up in echo chambers in which we have our own views reflected back to us by our colleagues, the internet, and our particular television programs, so that we look at others who do not share our views with blank incomprehension. I myself have been seduced by this, to the point where I found unimaginable the possibility that enough people would have voted for Donald Trump to make him president. I suspect I am not alone in this. My oldest son—who did not support Trump, by the way—and I have had long conversations about economics and politics, where our views often differ. However, these conversations have made me aware of alternative ways of looking at our world, both economically and politically. They have introduced a sensitivity into my thinking about certain aspects of the world that I would not otherwise have had. This in turn has introduced certain nuances into my own thinking and acting in an important aspect of my life. Not only am I grateful for this, I am also partially constituted by it—it has taken its part in making me who I am. My other two kids have also had important effects on my life (my daughter, at once adventurous and kind; and my younger son, with more perspective than I’ve got), and I’m sure that readers of this book who have kids will be able to think of their own examples.

  According to Held and others like her, we are constituted in good part by these relations and our moral theories ought to take this into account. How so? By offering the proper care toward the people with whom we are in relation. But immediately the question arises of how to think about such care. What is this care we are to offer those around us? Here, I think, is where an ethics of care really diverges from a more individualist morality of the kind envisioned by someone like Lawrence Kohlberg. If we are in part constituted by specific relationships, and if our moral task is to care for those with whom we are in relation, then it is impossible to say how that care should show itself outside the specificity of the relationships themselves. There is no general formula, no set of rules to guide us. We must attend to what is in front of us in its particularity.

  We can think of it this way. For Kant, we must act in accordance with the categorical imperative. It does not matter who is around us, with whom we are sharing our lives. Our duties are divorced from the peculiar world we inhabit. The situation we find ourselves in may give us the raw material from which we form the categorical imperative: for instance, if I am thinking of misleading a potential buyer of my used car about how worn my brakes are, I use that to ask the question of whether such misleading could be a universal law of nature. But the character of my relationship with this person is irrelevant. It is of no concern to the Kantian whether this person is my friend, my cousin, someone who is going to use the car to rob a bank, or my uncle who is too old to be driving anyway. (Actually, this is a little oversimplified. The Kantian might argue that I can fold these things into the categorical imperative. However, the more sensitive the Kantian becomes to the specific relationship the more they begin to sound like an ethicist of care.)

  For the ethics of care, it is precisely the character of the relationship that dictates how it should be attended to. This does not mean, in Held’s view, that nothing general can be said about an ethics of care. She lists caring for particular others, valuing emotion rather than rejecting it, moving away from the view that the more abstract the moral reasoning the better, seeing what is often considered private as a political matter, and viewing people as relational rather than autonomous as central aspects of a framework of care.18 But we can see that these characteristics point us toward the relationships themselves. While they hold together in forming a perspective for ethics, there is no escaping the fact that my particular relationships to others form the ground from which my sense of moral action should spring. My moral relationships to others arise from the relationships themselves.

  These relationships need not be considered in terms solely of obligation. In asking how I relate to those specific others in my life, I need not always ask, “What do I owe them?” In fact, as we have seen, if I move from a more legalistic view of morality to a more positive one, I might be more inclined to ask a question like, “How might I foster this relationship?” This keeps the relationship in view, not seeing it as something over there that requires me to act in a certain way, but instead as part of me that I have the opportunity to develop in a certain direction. Of course, there are times when obligation must take over. Who has not had to drag themselves to the grocery store because their partner is overwhelmed with a project on deadline, or had to pick up the kid once again from practice, or, just when they are settling in for the night, had a friend call for a ride from a broken-down car by the side of the road? The ethics of care allows for debt and obligation, but debt and obligation need not form the dominant framework for thinking about such ethics as it does for some traditional moral theories.

  We can see this in the case of Matthew Stevenson and Derek Black. Stevenson saw an opportunity to develop a relationship, one whose direction he could not know in advance but which might offer the opportunity for something deeper than might be expected between a Jew and an anti-Semite. It wasn’t that there was no relationship. The two were fellow students and knew of each other. But Stevenson offered, in a caring manner, to base the relationship on something other than the antagonism characteristic of Black’s public position, an offer that was taken up by Black in his own developing ambivalence about white supremacy.

  In all this, however, there is a complication that you may already have noticed. Although caring relationships and the moral tending they elicit are individual—that is, they cannot be reduced to a set of general principles—neither can they be rooted solely in the empathy one has for one’s fellows. We have already seen this briefly a moment ago, when we recognized that sometimes one has to act out of duty even toward those one loves. There is more we might say about this. Sometimes acting out of care for another goes beyond empathy in the opposite direction. Not only do we sometimes have to act out of duty toward another rather than empathy; there are times we must act against empathy. When a parent insists that his child must brush her teeth or take a bath against all evidence of a desire to do so on the part of the child, or when a parent needs to discipline a child, this goes against the empathy one has for her. (Well, if the child complains enough, perhaps the empathy can more easily be overcome.) If
a friend asks to borrow money that you know will not be paid back, making the friend guilty and straining the friendship, it may be better, if uncomfortable, to refuse the loan. Some of the most difficult moments in a love relationship can occur when one has to confront a partner on their drinking or spending habits or aggressiveness or laziness.

  And there is more. There are times when one has to betray the empathy toward another for a greater social purpose. If a friend has committed a crime that goes against one’s deep moral commitments, it might be better to turn the friend in rather than to care for them. When friends betray their spouses or loved ones, there are times when that betrayal should be made public, even at the cost of the friendship itself. And it can happen that in less vexed circumstances the caring a friendship or love relationship involves might be put at risk for an important social purpose.

  Things can be more complicated still. One of the great social activists in Pittsburgh, where I spent ten years, is a woman you’ve never heard of named Molly Rush. She is a housewife who participated in the original Plowshares action, in which eight people broke into a nuclear weapons facility and banged on the warheads in a symbolic gesture reminiscent of the biblical injunction to beat one’s swords into plowshares. She was a fixture on Pittsburgh’s Catholic left, offering sage advice to those who wanted to involve themselves in progressive change. She always made herself available to those who needed political support or even just emotional sustenance. Both the risk of decades in prison that the Plowshares action represented and in her subsequent commitment to the progressive community, as she herself realized, diminished her ability to sustain the rich family life she would also have wanted to enjoy. And yet this sacrifice was also for her family, so that her children could enjoy a safer future.19 For her, the commitment to a particular expression of both caring and principle clashed with another, more typical expression of caring associated with familial relationships.