Legacy of Carol P. Christ: ETHICS OF INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS AND CARE SENSITIVE ETHICS IN THE CONTEXT OF THE GAY MARRIAGE DEBATE

This was originally posted on December 9, 2013

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.

Author: Legacy of Carol P. Christ

We at FAR were fortunate to work along side Carol Christ for many years. She died from cancer in July, 2021. Her work continues through her non-profit foundation, the Ariadne Institute for the Study of Myth and Ritual and the Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete. To honor her legacy and to allow as many people as possible to read her thought-provoking and important blogs, we are pleased to offer this new column to highlight her work. We will be picking out special blogs for reposting, making note of their original publication date. View all posts by Legacy of Carol P. Christ