Is care the beginning of ethics? Has traditional western ethical thinking been wrong to insist that in order to reason ethically, we must divorce reason from emotion, passion, and feeling?
In Ecofeminist Philosophy, Karen Warren criticizes traditional ethical thinking–advocating a “care-sensitive” approach to ethics. Traditional ethics, as Warren says, are based on the notion of the individual rights of rational moral subjects. Like so much else in western philosophy traditional ethics are rooted in the classical dualisms that separate mind from body, reason from emotion and passion, and male from female. In addition to being based in dualism, western philosophy focuses on the rational individual, imagining “him” to be separable from relationships with others. Western ethics concerns itself with the “rights” of “rational” “individuals” as they come into relationship or conflict with the “rights” of other “rational” “indiviudals.”
Those who would think ethically are advised to “rise above” the “emotions” and “passions” or “feelings” of the body, in order to reason dispassionately about the rights and responsibilities of rational individuals. According to this theory, emotions and passions “get in the way” of rational thinking. For example, those who feel positively about other white people but negatively about black people are unlikely to apply the law fairly. Or, someone whose brother has committed a murder will have difficulty applying the law fairly if she lets her personal feelings sway her mind. The solution, according to traditional ethics, is to divorce reason from emotion as much as possible.
Despite its intentions, the ethical tradition based in reason and on the “rights” of “rational individuals” has often failed to live up to its goal of dispassionate and fair thinking. Over the years “rational men” have declared that women, slaves, colonized people, and others do not have “rights” because they lack the “rational capacity” of (educated, white, European) men. Working within this tradition, the “civil rights” movement insists that people of color are rational individuals, and that the law must treat them equally. “Women’s rights” and “gay rights” movements argue that women and homosexuals are also rational individuals deserving the full protection of the law. As I write, a case is going forward in New York arguing that the rights of human beings should be extended to chimpanzees because of their ability to think and feel in a way that is analogous to human thinking and feeling.
Though it is possible to manipulate the traditional model of ethical thinking to squeeze rights for more and more individuals out of it, as women and others have come into contact with this way of thinking, we have also challenged it. Many women “feel” that there is something wrong with an ethical system that attempts to divorce ethics from feeling. Blacks resist becoming “white” in order to be declared human. Queers insist that they don’t have to act according to someone else’s standards of rational behavior in order to gain the right to equal protection of the law.
In In a Different Voice, Carol Gilligan argued that the women and girls she studied had a mode of ethical thinking that differed from the way ethics had been understood. For women and girls, she argued, ethics begins with “care” or “caring about” others. Rather than trying to rid themselves of the “feeling of caring” in order to think rationally about ethical problems, women and girls build ethics on caring and try to find solutions that offer the best outcomes for everyone involved.
Karen Warren argues that feminist ethicists overstate the point if they argue that ethics should be based in care, not rights or if they assert that caring is only for women. For her “care sensitive ethics” begin with the insight that “care” about self and others is the motivating principle of all ethics. We would not be interested in the rights of any individual or group, she argues, if we did not first care about those individuals or groups. Ethical thinking for both women and men begins with the emotion, feeling, or passion of care.
Warren is well aware that women often have been taught to “care” about others at the expense of themselves. For this reason she always writes about care for “self and others.” Care sensitive ethics need not be self-effacing ethics, for the self and the other are both appropriate objects of care. As my mentor Charles Hartshorne was fond of saying: to love your neighbor as yourself implies that you love yourself too.
Warren argues that care sensitive ethics need not jettison the individual rights traditions. Care sensitive ethics always begin with caring about self and others, but they need not end there. Rather, beginning from caring about self or others, ethical thinkers can then use the tools of traditional ethical reasoning and others systems of ethical thinking as appropriate.
While explaining Warren’s care sensitive ethics to my students recently, I realized that the current debate about gay marriage is a good illustration of Warren’s insights. Because the US legal system is based in the individual rights tradition, the gay marriage argument has been framed in terms of the rights of individuals to marry whomever they choose. The Supreme Court and other courts have situated their decisions within the individual rights traditions, and the judges have alleged that their decisions have been made dispassionately, without regard to emotions of any kind.
At the same time, the polls consistently show that the sea change that has come about in American public opinion over the past decade concerning gay marriage, is not based in rational consideration of principles of individual rights. To the contrary, people report that their minds changed on the question because they now “know” gay or lesbian individuals as family members, friends, and co-workers—and they “care about” them. The reason most Americans now believe that the right to marry should be extended to gay couples was not formed in dispassion, but in passion, in love and in friendship–leading to the conviction that “people I care about” should not be discriminated against simply because they are gay or lesbian.
What conclusions should we draw from this? One important lesson might be that ethics begins in care—caring for and caring about the self and others. We cannot reform the legal systems based on the rights of rational individuals overnight. But perhaps we can begin to recognize and affirm that the emotions, feelings, and passions provoked by care are the beginning of ethics. We might also think about redefining the value of individuals in ways that do not privilege reason over emotion and rational thinking above all other ways of being in the world.
Carol P. Christ has recently returned from the fall Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete which she led through Ariadne Institute. It is not too early to sign up for the spring or fall pilgrimages for 2014. Carol can be heard on a WATER Teleconference. Carol’s books include She Who Changes and Rebirth of the Goddess and the widely-used anthologies Womanspirit Rising and Weaving the Visions. She loves to feel deeply and to think about the relation of thinking and feeling.
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I’ve never read a post, Carol, that so resonated in almost every detail with my own studies, life experience and opinions. I did not know about the case in NYC on chimpanzees, but basic compassion should extend to all creatures. That means the end of experimenting on animals, just so a scientist can see if they suffer and die from a certain drug they want to use for humans. In Carol Gilligan’s book, IN A DIFFERENT VOICE, I remember Gilligan gives an example of a fight breaking out among boys, vs. a dispute among girls. She said that if there is fighting, the boys continue their play even longer, whereas if a dispute occurs among a group of girls, they part and go home. These are children who are already socialized into various behavior patterns, although some of the difference is probably in the genes.
Also resonating with your post — last summer I was called to jury duty in NYC, and when we were asked if we could judge the case with detachment, I raised my hand and said as loud and clear as I could, “There is no justice without compassion.” Several women looked at me, seeming startled, and kept looking at me, because I think they agreed. In fact I had a sense every woman in that room agreed, but wouldn’t admit it. So who decided that justice must scuttle compassion in order to be justice? And why is there no outcry about it? That’s nuts.
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Bravo to you for stating that you would not separate reason and feeling. We have a long way to go …
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Thank you, Carol. Yes, we have a long way to go, and it’s good to re-read Gilligan’s work. I shared some of her ideas with a psychoanalysis class I took back in the 1990’s, and it fell on deaf ears. New ideas (especially those coming from women) take a while to kick in, but we must continue to put them out there. So important!
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Katharine, the difference between Gilligan’s and Warren’s views is that Warren proposes that the ethics of care is not just women’s way but should be everyone’s way of doing ethics.
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Thanks for pointing that out, Carol. We should do everything possible to spread the word!
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Carol, your insightful notes remind me of another conversation on “inclusion” and “exclusion” in law and emotions, and it is particularly appropriate for this season of the year. The “exclusionists” say that everything religious should be excluded from civic and public life, i.e., no Christmas tree, no Christmas pageant, no “merry Christmas”. A wise rabbi told me that that theory was garbage, that of course there should be Christmas trees and “merry Christmas” — everywhere. But, she said, there should also be hannukiahs and “Happy Hannukah”, and Yule logs for our Wiccan friends, AND representations of other religions too. Let everyone celebrate, she said. The more joyous celebration there is in the world, the more peace and justice there will be. Yes, says I, let our joyous emotions ring, and there will be more justice in the world for everyone. Since that conversation, I feel very comfortable wishing friends “merry Christmas” or whatever other holiday is near. Let’s all let our emotions run amok with joyful celebration.
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As usual, Carol, a magnificent post! Having read Gilligan, Chodorow, etc. in the 1970s, much of this perspective has been mine for a long time. But you always expand my understanding by demonstrating how whatever you’re describing is connected with the philosophic norm, which is of course patriarchal and long-standing. Thanks for the long view that you consistently provide!
Science is now proving that a) we can’t separate our emotions (feeling) and our thinking (intellect), and b) that it’s emotion that gives meaning to our lives. So, of course, Warren is right that all people use care as the starting point for their ethics. However, to be a man in this society is defined (patriarchally) by suppressing emotion, so we will have to struggle for a while until our philosophies catch up with our sciences.
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yes that is the problem, or one of them!
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No one doubts that animals can feel, however, many do doubt whether animals, insects and computers “think” the way humans do. Yes, animals can solve problems, but the the “care” you describe gets into theories of consciousness and mind, the ability to interpret intensionality, the ability to hold two diametrically opposed thoughts at the same time, the ability to lie, etc.
It is the ‘quality’ of thinking/feeling that is what allegedly separates humans from non-humans. The latest, trendy evolution of mind theory says that because humans have lived in complex social settings for thousands of years- our sociability, caring for others, knowing who’s who in the pecking order, teaching and learning from one another- these interactions created our massive, calorie hungry brains. And yes, I am biased to believe that women were huge contributors in this respect due to our gynecological problems in having birth canals that are too small to fit hominid skulls (need experienced midwives to help out).
I doubt the New York case will make much progress in terms of chimpanzee rights unless they can demonstrate that the majority of monkeys have a Theory of Mind similar to adult human beings. From what I have seen, experiments which try to measure mind ‘quality’ are extremely problematic to design with non verbal organisms.
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NMR as you point out, there are several issues at stake in the attempt to extend (human) rights to “higher animals” or other individuals. One is that being “like humans” in thinking or feeling or other qualities becomes the criterion. The other is the way being human is being defined, for example more in terms of certain kinds of thinking than in terms of certain kinds of feeling.
An ethics of care could take a different approach, as it is not tied to the human rights or rights of rational individuals tradition. For example, it could be argued that we should care about all kinds of beings and their flourishing, whether they are “like” human beings or not.
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I’m not sure I entirely understand your Ethics of Care (probably a problem with definitions, as you point out). My feeling is that when push comes to shove, the flourishing of other beings will be sacrificed to the flourishing of humans, but this is just based on historical precedent and it is rather more exciting to imagine a world where this might not be the case.
If anyone is interested in this new evolution of mind theory, I am going to try and paste the link. In case it doesn’t work, the article is called “Families made us human” by Stephen Asma in the November issue of Aeon magazine (it’s long but very readable):
http://aeon.co/magazine/living-together/how-families-and-feelings-built-human-culture/
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When we look at what men do in the world, I don’t think they have a leg to stand on claiming to be rational people at all. Men falsely label anything that is good male, they claim title to “rationality” to “science” to whatever it is they want to believe about themselves. They then designate everything they despise in themselves as womanly. Their hatred of the female. I’m not so sure I as a woman want to have all that “caring” forced on me. I care about people I love, I have an open contempt for men who stand in my way. No I don’t really care about men at all. On I good day, I feel nothing for them at all. I don’t want to be forced into “caregiving” I have other things to do with my time.
We have to be very careful what we ascribe to women. I’ve never much been very impressed with heteronormative women’s “caring” either. It is pretty butch phobic and lesbian phobic a lot of the time. Women need to get angry, make the men do the “caring.” I’ve about had enough of that for a lifetime.
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And I don’t see gay marriage as a sea change based on the hetero-majority suddenly getting to know us. Hetero are often shocked that I don’t believe in marriage at all, and certainly do not support gay marriage on the sinking marriage ship to begin with. Gay marriage is just more patriarchy in a pretty white dress with two very hetero looking women sitting a top it. It is not real social change at all. Heteros have known me as a radical out lesbian for decades now, and they still act like entitled jackasses and oppressors. Too much back patting Carol.
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I wrote my own critique of the legal marriage privilege last summer.
https://feminismandreligion.com/2013/07/22/the-two-and-the-one-can-we-embrace-and-celebrate-singleness-as-much-as-marriage-by-carol-p-christ/
My feelings about gay marriage are radically mixed–joyful celebration for those who want to marry, combined with critique of marriage as it has been understood historically.
That said, my point was that the polls state that the American people as a whole now support gay marriage– and the reason they give is that they know and love gays and lesbians.
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I think the generalized concept of compassion as a basis for ethics is profound. Amina Wadud brought this up in her last post and the discussion brought some interesting issues out such as different modes of understanding compassion one of which was “withholding” because that is what is necessary to bring someone into an ethical practice (such as Turtle Woman withholding compassion from men many of whom need to step up to the plate, frankly).
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Not sure if care and compassion are the same thing. “I care about” x is a primal feeling. I have compassion for x may be a secondary “feeling” routed through thought. What do you think?
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Thinking this response over, I guess compassion can be defined in many ways too. Com-passion means to feel deeply-with. This is what care sensitive ethics is about.
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Maybe it depends on how we define “care.” I can have compassion for someone who is in pain, and I can care about them, but caring “for” them means I do something about their pain – try to help in an active way.
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Between and betwixt the above defining of terms, the “point” of a care sensitive is that feelings are the springboard to ethical action. Feeling is not action, but feelings should not be excised from ethics and ethical thinking. Ethics is about how we act on our feelings through reflection. Ethics is not dispassionate rational thought about universal principles, though it can include that too.
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