by Todd May
So here we might ask, both within and outside the context of caring relationships, what is the relation between empathy and principle? Or, to put it in terms of current discussion, what is the balance between empathy and reason? It is a long-standing debate, one that, as we have seen, spawned the ethics of care. It has returned in contemporary discussion. Recently (at the time of writing this), the New York Times ran a viewpoint column on whether to trust reason or empathy in moral relationships.20 An ethicist of care cannot avoid confronting this issue. To her credit Held does not do so. She discusses what she calls “justice” alongside care, writing, “It seems to me that justice and care as values each invoke associated clusters of moral considerations, and these considerations are different. Actual practices should usually incorporate both care and justice but with appropriately different priorities.”21 By “justice” Held means something close to the idea of a principle that conflicts with empathy. Both in and beyond caring relationships, we are sometimes called to act out of a sense of duty rather than empathy or even caring. How might we balance the two?
There are philosophical issues to be wrestled with here, and Held among others seeks to wrestle with them. That, however, is not our task. We need to ask the more pedestrian question of how to live decently among others when empathy is not enough. We have seen, in this chapter, the caring that attends to face-to-face relationships and within common decency, and we have tried to situate that caring as much as possible within a moral outlook that is grounded in positive relations with others rather than obligation and guilt. But we need to recognize that there are times when we are called to act against either our caring or at least the empathy associated with it in favor of some more pressing moral reason. Is there a way to think about how we might navigate this conflict?
Using Imagination
There can be no general recipe for navigating this conflict, any more than there can be for how to go about a particular caring relationship. However, perhaps we can offer a general schema for viewing this navigation. To do so let me introduce a familiar word: imagination. We use the word imagination in many different ways. Imagining can be calling up an image. It can be thinking something is the case when it isn’t. It can be positing a situation in thought that might or might not actually happen, in order to think about what it involves or what one should do. Or it can be putting oneself in the place of someone else to see what they’re experiencing. As I’m using the term here, it might involve several of these uses but isn’t reducible to any of them. Imagination in the sense I’m after is a reflective exercise where one is thinking about three things: what caring would involve, what principles might be relevant, and what might be more important. It is an exercise that involves both empathy and thought, recognizing what another person (or other people) need or want and whether their needs or wants should prevail in a particular situation.
For a more traditional theorist, this kind of imagination is either unnecessary or irrelevant. It isn’t that there is no type of imagination involved. The utilitarian, for instance, has to imagine possible outcomes of an act in order to weigh their relative goodness. The Kantian has to consider which aspects of a situation are the salient ones in order to form a maxim to universalize.22 The virtue ethicist, if the situation is not an obvious one (which is the kind of situation we’re considering here) is going to have to use their imagination in order to discover which virtue is the proper one to be expressed in the situation.
The imagination in play here is different. It arises in face-to-face situations where it is unclear to me how I should act, where the face of the other person or people and my relationship to them is not guide enough. It is not that their face is no guide at all—that is a key difference from traditional moral theories. Rather, it is that there seems to be more to be considered than the care that face or those faces elicit in me, and more than common decency would dictate. I bring this particular form of imagination to bear in order to help me steer through the shoals of the situation in a more morally adequate manner. In imagining things this way, I take my empathy for these others seriously, but also ask myself whether there are other principles in play that might override where my empathy would otherwise lead me.
It is possible, as we have seen, that when I consider other principles I would in certain situations act against my empathy. But it is also possible that I would not. And this is not only because my weighing would lead me back to empathy. It might also be that my weighing leads me against empathy, but that the empathy is too strong and overrides any other considerations I might bring to bear on the situation. The philosopher Susan Wolf offers a helpful example of this. “Consider,” she asks of us, “the case of a woman whose son has committed a crime and who must decide whether to hide him from the police. He will suffer gravely should he be caught, but unless he is caught, another innocent man will be wrongly convicted for the crime and imprisoned.”23 There are times when we reflect, when we imagine, and yet our bonds are too strong to lead us where we think we should go.
Traditional moral theorists would object to all this, and not only the case Wolf asks us to imagine. Of course, they would reject Wolf’s conclusion in that case, that the mother “had reached a point where the issue of moral approval had ceased to be decisive.”24 But even in other cases, they believe it should be the principle (or the virtue) that decides what should be done, rather than any considerations of empathy. It might be that empathy would play a role in determining the principle in the first place, but it is always the principle in the end that should predominate. Reason must decide.
In imagination as we’re thinking of it here, the decisive aspect of the situation, whether empathy with the face of the other, caring as Held has conceived it, or one or another moral principle should prevail cannot be decided in advance. And this is because, in the decent life we’re trying to frame in this book, principles can be guiding but need not be determinative. When we are forced into moral reflection, we consider the situation and what calls to us from it without reducing it to an exercise in intellectual moral philosophy. After all, we are part of that situation. Our empathy, our relationships, our way of being are engaged with the situation like gears in a machine. And so we reflect, consider what might be relevant, and act as best we can. It is not a matter of measuring up or not measuring up to a moral theory, but of stepping back from the immediacy of the situation, seeing what might be salient to consider, turning those saliencies over in our minds, and then acting as best we can.
If we turn from actual face-to-face encounters to virtual ones, like email, we can see the use of this kind of imagination in practice. When we email (or message, or text), we cannot see the face of the recipient. We cannot read their gestures or directly feel their humanity. And yet, traces of it are left in their words. There is clearly someone else there who has communicated with us. If we are not moved by their face, we can imagine a face there to be moved by. That imagined face can provoke our concern. This is not yet the imagination we’ve been discussing, but it is a step in that direction. From the imagined face there can arise a certain empathy, a caring that may have a grip, however loose, upon us.
But with email we are not in front of the person. The immediacy of our response is not necessary. We can step back and ask ourselves how to respond without being called at that moment to action. This opens the door to a reflection on principles. Of course, most of the time email doesn’t require such reflection. When we’re setting a time and place to meet or distributing office documents or reading about new company policies we need not worry about how to respond. But sometimes it is different. A colleague asks for assistance with a project that is not part of my job. A distant relative asks whether they can come visit for a few days. In philosophy I periodically receive email from students who are not at my university, whom I don’t know, with a request to read their papers and comment on them. It is easy to blow them off; the excuses are all at hand. The distance that email—and the virtual world generally—creates
offers numerous opportunities for excuse. (It also seems to offer opportunity for abuse. Think of how much easier it is to go off on somebody over email than when you’re in their physical presence.)
However, if we step back from the temptations offered by distance and recognize that there is somebody on the other end of the email we’ve received, we can imaginatively reflect on what we ought to do, how we ought to respond. This often involves not only empathy but also principle. After all, if we acted out of empathy for every stranger, acquaintance, or distant relative that asked a favor most of us would find it difficult to get on with our lives. It might make us more nearly saintly, but this is a book about decency, not saintliness. So when we recognize that there is someone on the other end of an email we’ve received, we might want to reflect on what we owe and don’t owe to that person. We have recourse to principle, to reason. And as we balance empathy and reason imaginatively, we’ll probably find that certain requests are worth honoring and others not. That undergraduate student who read my book and sent me a short paper on it for my thoughts probably deserves a response. That relative from whom I’ve kept distance for good reason over all these years should probably hear that, unfortunately, I’ll be out of town on the days he’ll be passing through. We use imagination to orient us toward decency in these situations, situations that are not exactly face-to-face encounters but are akin to them in relevant ways.
But suppose we take a further step away from face-to-face encounters. After all, there are people with whom I have no interactions, actual or virtual. There are people who live in distant lands, people I will never meet or might never meet unless I make a particular effort. And there are people who are not yet born but who will be, and what I do has effects on how their lives go (and even, as we will see, who they are). That is to say that there are people who are distant from me in space (in fact, the overwhelming majority of them are) and others who are distant from me in time (perhaps, climate change notwithstanding, even more of them than of those in the first group). What might my moral relationship with them be? How might I act decently toward them? If I am not going to trade in my own goals, relationships, and the central projects of my life for the sake of an extreme altruism for people I have not met and might never meet, how might I orient myself morally toward them? To consider these questions is to step away from what the faces of others call me to do, from common decency toward those we share our surrounding space with, and from our virtual contacts. It opens a new set of considerations that, while not entirely divorced from what we have discussed (after all, I can call up images of the faces of those I don’t know), cannot be considered in entirely the same terms.
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Widening the Circle: More Distant Others
There are billions of people on the planet and, climate change permitting, many more billions to come. I will never meet very many of them, nor will you. They will remain forever anonymous to us. At most, a few of them will appear as news items or as names in an email or on social media, perhaps with a picture attached. We will recognize them as persons, perhaps as fellows in one way or another. But we will never come face-to-face with them or even have direct contact. The framework we traced in the previous chapter has little to do with the moral relations we might have with them. We will not have the opportunity to comfort them in their sorrow, to invite them for dinner, or even to cover their cup of coffee with a napkin when they leave the room. With those distant from us in time, we will not even be on the planet when they are.
And yet we do have a moral relationship to those distant from us in space and in time. As we go about our lives, we need to take them into account. Most of us do not feel they require the same consideration as those with whom we have daily contact—although we will return to this issue shortly—but we believe they deserve something from us, some measure of attention, however passing. They are, after all, human beings just like us—or, if they aren’t yet, they will be. This seems to place some kind of claim upon us as we navigate through our own lives. It seems that we ought to take them into account as companion members of some kind of “us,” even if we don’t know exactly how to think of this club of ours. This is why Virginia Held insists that alongside care there is also justice to be had, justice that concerns those with whom we will not or even cannot have direct relationships.
In this chapter we reflect on our moral relationships with those distant from us in space and in time, those we will not meet and those who are not yet. We will ask what decency implies regarding our considerations of them. In thinking about these matters, it would be best to divide them into two types: those distant in space and those distant in time. Those distant in space are the people with whom we currently share the planet but whom we will not meet. They are our fellow travelers on the roads of life, but we will never cross them on the paths they trod, and perhaps never even see those paths. Nevertheless they are there among us, or we are there among them. They exist, seeking to carve out lives that our current and potential actions either affect or might affect. We can choose to ignore them in favor of caring for those around us, but most of us think that course isn’t quite good enough, that it doesn’t rise to the level of decency. We must ask ourselves, then, what would rise to that level? How might we be decent if not entirely altruistic to those we will never meet?
Those distant in time comprise two groups: those who have preceded us and those who will proceed us. About the former group I will have less to say. It seems to me that our moral relationship with our ancestors is more a matter of personal and often religious consideration than of moral decency. How I treat those who have preceded me, the respect that I owe them and the actions flowing from that respect, have less to do with how my behavior might affect them and more to do with the personal or religious connection I feel toward them. In an important way there is nothing I can do to affect their lives, since they are no longer living. (However, the ways I act toward them after they have died can affect their reputations, which do live on after them.) In contrast, my behavior now will have effects, perhaps very significant ones, on the lives of those who come after me.
There are those, of course, who will say that there can be disrespect, even indecency, toward the dead. I believe that such treatment is more a matter of individual belief or cultural practice than of moral decency. It may be that one feels uneasy engaging in disrespectful behavior toward a person who is no longer there or feels required to participate in certain rituals regarding the deceased, but the decency I’m interested in here is concerned with those whose lives we can affect, whether they are close to us or distant from us in space or in time.
To treat those distant from me in space and those distant from me in time as distinct can seem a bit artificial. There are actions I might perform that will have effects both on those who exist now and those who will exist later. If I participate in activities that contribute to climate change, I am likely to cause deleterious effects on those who are the victims of a warming environment now as well as those who will have to deal with a warmer climate after they are born. If I buy a large, inefficient SUV for single-person use or keep the thermostat set to high temperatures in the winter or low ones in the summer, I will contribute—in small but undeniable ways—to the misery of those who must deal with a warming planet and to those, not yet born, who will have to deal with its longer-term effects. In cases like these, the same actions will have effects both on those distant in space and on those distant in time.
Nevertheless, the distinction is worth preserving. We will consider the reason more fully and discover its implications when we discuss those distant in time. To put it simply for now, my actions may help determine who will be born, but they can’t determine who is already here. If I contribute to global climate change, this will affect the behavior of those who currently exist; and in affecting their behavior, it affects who they will give birth to. So different people may arise depending on what I do, as we will see. In that way, my moral relationships with those to
come are different from my relationships with those already here.
Distance in Space
In thinking about our moral relations with those already here, there is a small complication to note at the outset. There are many things I might do for them (and, if I form actual relationships, changing my relationship with them from distant others to face-to-face, things I might do with them). I want to divide these things, a bit arbitrarily perhaps, into two types. I will call the first type benevolent, for lack of a better word. I’m not entirely comfortable with that word, since it implies that I am going above and beyond what I might owe others morally. In thinking of myself as acting benevolently, I might consider myself to be morally superior, even altruistic in the sense described in the first chapter. But that’s not how I want to use the word. Instead, let’s think of benevolence as what a decent person might think necessary to do for those with whom they will likely never come into personal contact.1 In widening the moral circle from those with whom we have direct contact, benevolence is what we would or should exhibit to others. One could think of it as a requisite form of charity, if that word weren’t even worse that benevolence.
We can contrast benevolence with what can be called political involvement, which would be an intervention not for the sake of a particular individual but instead to affect the social, political, or economic structure within which a number of individuals live. In political involvement I am not reaching out to individuals directly through my behavior in a way that enhances their lives within a particular institutional arrangement; rather I am intervening on that arrangement itself. Often such intervention is collective rather than individual, although it need not be. I can protest alone or with others, lobby or campaign by myself or in a collective. And it is usually collective action that has political effects. But the distinction I want to draw is between actions I take to help others directly and those I take that will help others indirectly, through intervention into their institutional situation. Political intervention at the institutional level raises a different set of issues from those of benevolence toward individuals, and so I will leave it until we reach the fifth chapter, where we will be more prepared to discuss it. The issues raised in the previous chapter, this one, and the next will deposit us at the doorstep of political involvement.
