Who Cares? Part I
David P. Levine is a contributor to the On Caring Blog
Abstract to Part I and Part II
It is our experience of inner freedom that makes external freedom matter to us. It is, therefore, our experience of inner freedom that makes the inner freedom of others matter to us. If what we mean by “welfare” is the presence in the individual of the capacity I refer to as inner freedom, then it is inner freedom that leads us to care about the welfare of others and about the institutions within which welfare is secure so far as it can be. If there is little or no inner freedom for the individual, there will be little in the interpersonal world, which means that our welfare does not matter to others. In such a world, being “alive” in Donald Winnicott’s sense of the term (emotionally alive) does not matter, so that neither the individual nor, by extension, the interpersonal world is marked by caring. If being alive does not matter to us, securing that state for others will not matter to us either. On the contrary, we are more likely to be dominated in our thoughts and actions by the desire to assure that it does not.
Part I: How can we Live with and Depend on Strangers?
Since writing my book on ethical conduct, I have continued to think and write on issues related to the matter of care for others. I currently have a book in press that started out, though it did not end up, under the title “Who Cares.” In this book, I explore the question: How can we live with and depend on strangers? More specifically, my interest is in the emotional demands placed on us by living with strangers and how we cope with them. Psychologically, the stranger is the external manifestation of the unknown self within. This means that the challenge posed by the necessity of relating to strangers is the challenge posed by our engagement with our unknown self.
An especially important part of the challenge posed by the necessity of living in a world of strangers is that, in small and large ways, we find ourselves in the care of strangers; we depend on people we do not know to assure our wellbeing. We are in the care of strangers when we visit the grocery store to acquire the food we need; we are in the care of strangers when we are ill and seek medical attention; and we are in the care of strangers when we cannot manage for ourselves yet have no family members available to look after us. One question with which I have been particularly concerned is whether being in the care of strangers necessitates that they care about us. I have been particularly interested in how we might answer the following question: Is it important that the wellbeing of others matter to us and ours to them? This led me to my original title for the book.
The book relates in some ways to a preoccupation of mine during an earlier stage in my career. Then, I spent some time exploring the idea that people have a right to a significant measure of wellbeing. I wanted to find out if it is helpful to talk about wellbeing in the language of rights and try to think about answers to questions such as: Do people have a right to a level of wellbeing somehow defined? Do they have a right to income? A right to a job? A right to health care? Does using the language of rights help us resolve important problems our society faces regarding welfare? This last question connects to the issue just raised about whether it is important that the welfare of others matter to us.
Movements centering on the idea of rights are organized around a kind of hope, which is the hope that reason can be used to convince people to support policy aimed at assuring wellbeing. Thus, the argument made to gain support for appropriate policy is that people have a right to it. It doesn’t matter whether you care about those people or not. Right takes the place of caring. It may be that this movement toward rights-based argument expresses the conviction that people do not care and is meant to defend against the reality of the absence of caring. Or, it may be the expression of the insistence that securing wellbeing cannot, and perhaps should not, require entering into a caring relationship in a world organized around norms of individual autonomy and the separation of persons.
Yet, in thinking about all of this, and attempting to make the rights-based way of thinking work, I found myself unable to fully avoid the matter of caring. This was because simply invoking the language or right and aggressively insisting on it, or simply telling people they ought to support measures because they instantiate in law a fundamental human right, is unlikely to be enough. Beyond reasoning with others, there must be in them an emotional capacity and an emotional inclination to care about what happens to others. The moral strategy to assure care for others resting on insistence that people ought to care depends on an appeal to reason and focuses our thinking on finding a way to instill a judgment about what people ought to feel into their decision-making processes. This assumes that it is possible for the individual to decide what he or she cares about and to do so on the basis of moral considerations.
One example that I consider in my forthcoming book is the argument for reparations for slavery. Ta-Nehisi Coates has made a thoughtful argument in support of this idea. His argument rests heavily on an idea about why white people might support reparations even though they get nothing for themselves out of doing so yet find themselves paying the costs. If I get him right, Coates believes that white people will support reparations out of guilt. In a sense, this means that they do get something out of paying reparations: alleviation of their guilt. They only get something out of reparations, then, if they feel guilty or can be made to feel guilty. But, while Coates has an argument about why white people ought to feel guilty, he offers no reason beyond this ought to conclude that they will. And it is far from clear that the idea of ought applies very well to the sphere of emotional states such as guilt, that we feel guilty because other people think we ought to. It is not enough to say that people ought to care about the welfare of others, we need also to consider the factors in personality that can lead them to do so.
Guilt is arguably a problematic basis for concern about the welfare of others, especially when it requires that people be made to feel guilty by being told that they are. Also, guilt, especially the effort to impose guilt, can have some adverse consequences. These adverse consequences operate below the surface yet can express themselves in destructive ways. This is because of the considerable aggression associated with guilt, aggression that can be expressed both internally and turned toward others. The feeling of guilt is by definition an attack originating internally on the goodness of the self. The attempt to impost guilty feelings on others lines up with and intensifies the internally originating aggression against the self. Because of this, calling on guilt can intensify rather than moderate destructive forms of conflict.
There are, of course, emotional connections other than guilt that might achieve the desired result without the adverse consequences associated with guilt, connections of the sort Salman Akhtar refers to as the “good stuff,” specifically: courage, resilience, gratitude, generosity, forgiveness, and sacrifice. Caring about others could depend on the presence in the psyche of a sufficient measure of the good stuff, especially gratitude and generosity. But, even if the good stuff can do this work for us, it is difficult to see in it a foundation for rights, which by their nature are not about the contingency of emotional states and the personal connection to an individual toward whom we might feel gratitude or an upsurge of generosity. The good stuff might work well enough to stimulate concern for others whom we know personally. It might even work well enough to stimulate concern for others who are part of a larger identity group to which we belong. But how can it stimulate concern for people we do not know or with whom we do not share an identity, in other words with strangers? [continue with Part II]
References
Akhtar, S. (2013) Good Stuff: Courage, Resilience, Gratitude, Generosity, Forgiveness, and Sacrifice (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers: Lanham, MD).
Coates, T. (2015). The case for reparations. The Atlantic, June, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/ retrieved June 14, 2019.
Levine, D. (2021) Depending on Strangers: Inner Freedom, Memory, and the Unknown Self (Bicester, Oxfordshire: Phoenix Publishing House).