Two Sources of Moral Esteem
What is it about any existent, anything that is, that evokes — or should evoke — my moral consideration and respect? Are there qualities that demand, or at least suggest, that one who has anything to do with some other becomes morally accountable for how he relates to that other because of those qualities? And not accountable if it lacks the qualities (with it including him or her, plant or animal)? Why a person should care about this once we pass out of the human realm might be asked but seems to me based on constricting assumptions that threaten to place the ones in question outside the wider moral realm, which I conceive as robust and inclusive. I write as one inside to others either inside or on the margins who generally intend the good, to do what’s right, toward others. Yet, they also recognize that common practice assigns different levels of moral concern toward other beings based on certain of their select qualities and are sometimes made uncomfortable by this even if not sure why.
Over the ages most people who have thought about this discovered that — such a coincidence! — only humans are morally worthy owing to their possession of high-level intelligence and reason (however poorly employed) and moral agency (disregarding the moral responsibility implicit in agency). Other qualities have been added to the list, such as an orientation toward the future, subjective consciousness, range of capacities and experiences (and being the apple of God’s eye?), but the effort aims to enwrap humans and exclude nonhumans and on its own terms it has carried the day. As experience and research have found more “humanlike” qualities in some species of animals the boundaries have inched outwards, but typically it seems grudgingly and with exceptions. Think of chimpanzees in zoo cages or research labs, octopuses on exhibit in aquaria, and cetaceans doing tricks at aquatic amusement parks.
One objection to the approach just described might be to posit that existence per se is sufficient grounds for moral respect, which is a view I am comfortable with but realize will need justification.
A second approach to the question of when moral esteem is called for starts at the other end, the closer end. It starts with wondering if the more relevant variables may relate to the attitude of the person asking the question. Is there a morally imbued attitude (mindset or posture) that guides the one who has it and that would include all that she beholds in its vision? She doesn’t ask what characteristics possessed by the other create moral accountability but what does her moral sensitivity and vision tell her the other deserves from her? Or to put it in other terms, what does her open-hearted encounter with the other arouse in the relation between them? That her actions will be morally infused or informed goes without saying; she only aims to offer the other what it is due or what it needs that she can give. Would this be a morally self-righteous person, priggish, moralistic in the tight-lipped, hyper-judgmental sense? Not likely. As she sees different colors without effort, so she sees different beings with different needs and vulnerabilities through eyes of respect and acts accordingly and without effort. Most of the time she goes her way guided by a mandate of simple non-harm and noninterference. Or she is merely present to the other: mindful, engaged, affirming. Other times she sees needs a caring response to which is within her purview and she gives it. She feeds the hungry and clothes the naked, so to speak. And since there are many needs encountered in our world, she supports the formation of agents — nonprofit organizations or government departments, for example — whose responsibility is to meet such needs even when she is unaware or unable. She does not ask if they deserve her care; she asks what is needed and who can respond to it best, which implies the kind of society she wants to live in and the kind of person she wants to be.
It should be apparent, as already suggested, that the second approach implies there is nothing that exists which is excluded. One offers either passive noninterference toward the being and course of the other, any other, or actively seek to protect it or provide for its need. The premise is simple: one cares. One cares in the manner that one breathes — in silent automatic rhythm mostly, but sometimes heavily and rapidly when one exerts herself with unspoken moral intent.
I consider the second approach the more vital one, the one that fits the insights and feelings we have in deepest reflection and mindful encounter, but the first is helpful as well: in making necessary discriminations as in triage type situations, for example, or in distinguishing between proximate obligations and those more remote. And in deciding, as we do several times every day, what to eat. Even so, the making of discriminations occurs in a very different atmosphere when done under the auspices of a caring gaze rather than the gimlet eyes of hard, egoistic reason.
It is also true that the more we increase knowledge and open our perception to the often quite remarkable qualities of creatures whom we thought we knew, such as animals (usually in ways that promoted their discounting), and whose lives will always remain somewhat mysterious, the more we will encounter qualities that reveal more is going on in and out there than we knew. Processes and experiences revelatory of lives with their own distinctive goods and therefore their own distinctive harms that can be done to them. A little learning, taken seriously, can lead to wondrous results.
To avoid confusion, I will refer to the first and second approaches as, respectively, externally and internally oriented, with the proviso that exteriors and interiors are never divided by impenetrable boundaries (boundaries, in fact, are often distinguished by the ways in which they are penetrated). Also, interiors invariably reach out to encompass exteriors; they can never remain isolated. My goal is to advocate for the approach that begins “internally” (accepting the caveats) and to explore what it means, how it comes to be, its ramifications, how it relates to what we know or assume about “human nature,” what it has in common with some spiritual practices and the tradition of virtue ethics. Also, how it necessarily eventuates in the premise I mentioned above about one’s becoming one who cares. I make no pretense of tying up an air-tight philosophical case or of trying to. Rather, I aim to present an alternative way of knowing and being and to portray what makes it appealing and even reasonable.
The conscious, albeit inchoate, beginning of the ethical trip that brought me here was my discovery many years ago of Martin Buber’s mysterious little book, I and Thou. (I do not know what it suggests about the zeitgeist or cultural change but I’m informed by spellcheck that it would prefer I change “I and Thou” to “me and you.” Is it through such baby steps that the downward slide is distinguished?) Not that I was bowled over with revelation or even had a good initial understanding of what he was saying, but something was there that spoke to me and I would spend parts of the next two decades and beyond figuring out what that was and what it meant for a way of life. The book describes what Buber considered the two fundamental ways a person may relate to the world, as Thou or as It. The first comes from a place of respect, inclusion, identification with the other, engagement and affirmation, the place where love is sometimes born. The second stance — It — relates to the other instrumentally; one has a purpose to accomplish and the other is useful. While I-It may sound debased in some manner, in reality it is a necessary posture for all of us much of the time as we make a way through life using and doing. Existence is lived out on a continuum between brazen, exploitive instrumentalism on one end, and on the other are relations of mutuality, respect, and care. When It-orientation teeters on the outer edge it becomes definitively immoral, ego-centered. When Thou is fully manifested it builds forms of union or solidarity, trust, and at times spiritual realization. Pure Thou-ness is always transient but as an intentional attitude within daily living informs the conduct of all one’s relations and endeavors.
This is brief but I hope clear. The book is still in print for those who want to go to the source, which I recommend. (There were two translations; the first by Ronald Gregor Smith is my preferred version but is no longer available except in used copies; the second by Walter Kauffman remains in print as far as I know. He translates Thou as You, feeling that the former sounded too religious [well before spellcheck seems to have arrived at the same conclusion], but to my ears the latter sounds too mundane.) In any event, my present focus is on questions Buber addressed but did not resolve as completely as he might have, those having to do with how the relational Thou with its emphasis on mutuality could apply in relations that weren’t those of freely interacting, equal human individuals. For example, of doctor to patient, teacher to student, parent to child; more challengingly, what could it mean in relations with Nature, with trees and animals, or with a workplace or institution? Is Thou possible without full mutuality or could it be defined more broadly or perhaps be replaced by other postures or attitudes without losing its meaning?
A full response to these questions is beyond my present purpose, but I want to address what the responses to each have in common. Mutuality, or reciprocity, expresses itself in different ways and in a particular relation may give back in a currency different than the one offered. My special interest is the human relation with Nature, with landscapes, ecosystems, and individual plants and animals. It is no exaggeration to say that in our culture, and particularly in its domination by economic interests and values, the prevailing attitude toward the natural world is decisively instrumental, far out on the continuum of It-relations. Were it not we would not be faced with industrialized forms of cruel conversion of living animals into dead body parts for food, or clear-cut forests, or the alarming decline in wildlife numbers and in species of both plants and animals, or anthropogenic climate disruption. In these domains it feels almost laughably irrelevant to point out the absence of mutuality and esteem for the being of those killed or impaired. But for those who care enough to want to step outside of these practices, the question of esteem for others is central, and they will want to know how their need for, say, food or lumber can be morally met. Which takes me back to the internally modulated approach to building lives having what I will call moral tone. One comes to care about how he affects others around him, all others, and acts responsibly, that is, in response to his morally intoned spirit as it is addressed by the being of the other that is present before him.
The crux of I-Thou relations and of the internally generated approach to expressing moral esteem is just this: with its focus on the character of the relation, it is not what or who is “other” to “I” that relation is morally contingent upon, but what I offer, how I respond to the other. The relation between us arises as It or Thou through one’s attitude, sometimes through what we take or refuse to take and crucially how we would take it. I am free to offer inclusion and care whether with a person or a pinyon pine or the raven on its branch. I may or may not speak words and the pine and raven may simply be silently present in the beauty of their existence — relational intonation arises with the measure of Thou we intend or spontaneously experience, and comes to expression in whatever distinctive fashion one choses. Bare existence, I believe, is enough to evoke morally infused attentiveness.
I vaguely remember a story about a spiritual devotee long ago traveling on foot for a day and discovering when he stopped that ants from his prior stayover had climbed aboard his baggage, whereupon he turned to take them home. An exaggerated demonstration of moral concern even for me, but the intention expressed, the care for the others’ well-being, is of the type I advocate.
Many spiritual traditions and practices reflect this sensibility. Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths recognize that suffering is endemic to human life owing to ignorance and desire but can be surmounted through following the Eightfold Path that can relieve the suffering of self and others through mindful, ethical, and wise living. Nonharm is a key aspect of the Path. Ancient Hinduism reflected in the Upanishads upon the unified experience of being: That art Thou, Brahma is present in all. And mystics from every tradition I am aware of encounter with certainty the unity of self with other and with God. There are also versions of the Golden Rule in most traditions and for some adherents “treating others as they want to be treated” receives a widely inclusive interpretation. I can even find in Immanuel Kant, the sober-sided eighteenth-century philosopher, support for these ideas if I take liberties with one version of his Categorical Imperative, according to which others (only humans in his formulation) are to be treated “never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.” In other words, instrumentalism is a necessary component of human action but never without allowing for the dignity of the thing or the one whose benefits are sought.
There is considerable research being done that demonstrates many facets of plant sentience, that reveals their ways of registering what’s going on in their environment, how they communicate with and assist each other, how they learn and remember, how they resist predation and signal cohorts of threats, and so on. Similarly with fish, those morally forgotten creatures of the water realm: “…each has a one-of-a-kind life on the inside, too. And therein lies the locus of change in human-fish relations” (J. Balcombe, What a Fish Knows; a blurb on the book’s back was provided by the Dalai Lama: “Jonathan Balcombe vividly shows that fish have feelings and deserve consideration and protection like other sentient beings.”). Well, yes, it makes a difference to discover that plants and fish have lives with trajectories that may flourish or wither and that it matters to them. Knowledge lessens some mysteries, enriches others, adds interest, sometimes fosters awe, and may make disregarding moral respect harder. But a claim is made by plants and fishes, and by mountaintops in W. Virginia and undammed rivers everywhere — by dent of their very existence — to be left alone, and if necessity rightly overrides that claim another is made to intrude nonviolently, thoughtfully, with care about the effects.
I mentioned human nature earlier. Attempts to attribute this or that human quality to nature rather than nurture, or to sheer contingency rather than resolute choice, are usually controversial, but in broad terms I assume we all recognize that humans are by nature and desire social creatures. Individuation is above all something that happens within community, without whose caring support it becomes stunted or deformed. (Individuation does not represent a separation from relatedness; rather, a distinguishing of self from others, a self-awareness within a social ecosystem in which one remains embedded: oneself-in-relation.) And community welfare precedes individual needs in the few cases where the needs of both do not coincide or comfortably reside alongside each other. Thus, unstunted humans move about the world looking out for each other because born with that predisposition as central to their nature and having learned solidarity with and within caring communities. Stunted, they may live with mostly egoistic intent. I propose that an emotionally and spiritually healthy person cares not to harm the other, whatever sort of being the other is, and tends to respond with concern when the other’s welfare is at stake. It seems reasonable to imagine that most of us are predisposed to interrelate with a tendency to care and a readiness to feel morally responsible for doing so. Marcus Aurelius, that unique second century Roman emperor and Stoic, said in his Meditations repeatedly and in various ways that “We are made for each other.” If this is so, and I believe it is, it suggests that modern American society has been designed as, or been allowed to become, an environment inimical to fundamental human needs and even to human nature, that it diverts basic aspirations for happiness and meaning into channels that serve other ends. Which may help explain a lot of what so many of us find unacceptable, sometimes even abhorrent, about its society as presently oriented. Which is a subject too big for now.
Along with sociality, human nature appears designed to seek meaning: one wants to live engaged with groups, purposes, and activities that are worthy of commitment because valuable in themselves and therefore add to his meaning. Many people find what has been called caring for creation an essential aspect of these commitments; implicitly intoned with thou-centeredness, they ethicize their being and endeavors, discovering along the way meaning entwined. The attitude of veneration does this. (I have participated in Buddhist retreats that taught me the Gassho: a bow with hands pressed together at my chest when meeting or departing from someone, when entering or leaving a room, and so forth, as a way to express grateful awareness to the things and beings I depend upon.)
What I want to suggest is that humans are necessarily formed internally to look outward and in ways that may be mostly instrumental or mostly imbued with care. The premise one cares builds upon the base of innate tendencies to look outward with non-harming instrumentalism and the solidarity of morally infused identification with others and their well-being. I can imagine an origin myth similar to Adam, Eve, and the Garden, and also to what happens anytime one is born. The first thing to notice is its gratuitousness; birth is no one’s right and was unearned but freely given, as great a gift as ever one receives. Whether born into a school of hard knocks or by good fortune to a more nurturing environment, whether physically well-formed or impaired, she looks around and can’t miss her dependence on others, for good or ill. There are crucial experiences and encounters that will form her “soul” and she can hope to find ways to thrive and remember the gifts and aim to pass them on in suitable ways. Unless hopelessly distorted by destructive experiences she will recognize her kinship with other beings and want to flourish within the flourishing of the inclusive community.
I recur to Kant again, this time without taking liberties. From his Critique of Practical Reason: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within….I see them before me and connect them directly with the consciousness of my existence.” From this he derived humble identification with the Universe along with duty, and less personally, the unity of beauty with ethics.
Do I imagine that people are basically good, is that how this story goes? Emphatically, no! Most are born with the equipment to go any direction based on circumstance and choice, but close observation makes clear that humans are weak reeds in the currents of time and experience; confronted by perceived threat they become anxious and unpredictable and in the face of temptation they yield to desire. Still, their social nature combined with a mostly salubrious life course and good decisions will often lead them to a minimal identification with the common good. Many will find Thou or learn reverence for being and the minimal will expand. As it does they remember that they did not earn their birth and the gift of it comes with duties of reciprocity: To care for their birthplace the Earth and for fellow sojourners of all tribal species.
I have found that what is called virtue ethics, the tradition of which goes back at least to Aristotle, fits comfortably with the source of moral esteem that I wish to speak for. Rather than moral rules, whether for contract, consequence, or something else (not that they aren’t helpful as we frame and elaborate our ethics), this tradition looks at a person’s character, his moral make-up, to understand his spirit and action. Is he courageous and wise, just and temperate, aimed at truth and truthfulness, or…not? I consider that two of the chief virtues get too little attention: humility and generosity, both of which underlie and infuse, it seems to me, a robust commitment to justice, perhaps the most potent virtue of all. Together, these qualities help to rein in the demon of ego and shape a path toward care for being. All together, they help to inscribe a cartography of the soul, something to illuminate what a life is for and where it might lead.
I can’t finish without recognizing that my earlier assertion about the sufficiency of mere existence as a source of moral esteem might still sound bizarre. It is difficult enough for some to imagine moving from human to nonhuman animals when they conceive rightful recipients of moral respect, but how, I hear them still asking, can it be that simply existing is enough? I return to that origin story — one becomes conscious and surveys the Earth with its landscape of other beings and finds, as creator God is reported to have said six times in the first chapter of Genesis, it is good. A presumption of gratitude and respect arises, as may wonder and reverence in receptive souls. I will have to turn some of what I behold to legitimate uses but with this attitude I can see there are better and worse ways to do that.
But still, the skeptic continues, doesn’t this go too far? Isn’t the notion too commodious? Must one become like, say, an extremist Jain and from fear of causing harm immobilize himself? There is no place of utter purity in this world, no above-it-all posture that relieves the necessity of conscientious choice as to what and how to use or affect. We eat, we build shelters, we move about. We are all in this together, mountains and rivers, plants and animals, including human ones. Life feeds on life. Harms are unavoidable. But so should be restraint and care for one’s effects on Earth and the common good.
In I and Thou and other essays and books, Buber depicted three realms of human existence: the human world, the natural world, and the realm of forms of the spirit (wherein are found art and other ways of giving expression to deep mysteries and responses to them). Although he did not speak of it as such, he too was drawing a vast circle around occasions of human encounter with their worlds. A later commentator spoke of his seemingly seeking to ethicize existence. When I first read that phrase some thirty years ago, I found it alarmingly accurate for both his intent and desired reality. It took more years to see where it led. I have been speaking on behalf of an internal turning toward reverence for existence that does not discriminate, except when it has to, and that finds the Universe and Earth good, and worthy in themselves of deep engagement and care.
Afterward
I finish with a few reflections on what the ramifications of this view could be. Maybe I should start by naming it. I’ve spoken of it as reverence for existence and Thou-relatedness, which are fine except a bit clunkily abstract and redolent of religious language. They surely imply spiritual experience, as I intend them to, but not of the theistic or conventionally religious sort. It seems that religion has more or less captured all the most powerful words for ultimate realities so I try to borrow the power while wishing to cleanse them of their associations with pew and prayer. But there’s no controlling the associations they carry so I’m left frustrated by the effort. In response to which I’ve chosen a new way to portray the way of mind I describe; perhaps a better way than terms with religious freight and one that allows for the range of depth or commitment that people bring to their encounters with and conceptions of reality. What I’ve described in this essay is a way of affirmation, a way that begins with the goodness of sheer being and lets that shape what follows. It begins in mindfulness, attentiveness, or in contrast, simply being caught in a moment unaware by a starry sky, natural landscape, or love upsurged and struck by the sense of there being more here than meets the eye and remaining present to the images and feelings that pass-through mind/body in the moment. The experience appears to confirm that, yes, there really is more than meets the eye and it has something to tell me. It can be sparked by exchanging a look with another person, the beauty of Nature, offering or receiving compassionate support, realization of the value of a piece or body of work one does. It’s not predictable and, like happiness, cannot be deliberately sought, only facilitated by a way of living. And along with the sense that the experience and its provocation are intrinsically meaningful, it predisposes one to move about with humility and care for the others with which and with whom one shares or crosses paths.
In short, a way of affirmation sets ego aside, which frees one to fully engage with another unencumbered by cravings, desiring only a shared good. It becomes a way of life with all that that implies. One of the people living and writing and, as it happens, farming today whom I greatly respect is Wendell Berry. In dozens of books and essays he speaks of the importance of affection in relation to landscapes and your uses of them, of spinning out moral filaments that aim to leave or create more good than you take whenever you act. We envision the same goals. He is sometimes criticized, however, by people who don’t challenge his values but consider them insufficient to meet the moral calamities produced by modern capitalism, militarism, forms of oppression, and the atomization (called individualism) that subverts community and common purpose, common life, and the common good. I consider some of this critique legitimate and the way I’ve described as equally subject to it if I stop with individual perspectives and ways of being. As said above, there is intrinsic good in the ways Berry and I describe and those who subscribe to them will be that many fewer candidates for enabling or complacently passing by injustice. But at this point in what appears to be our growing societal debacle it seems to me hard to find hope and hard to imagine any conventional means of combatting the poisons of intolerance, misdirected fear, and greed. Corruption and concentrated wealth and power increasingly negate hopefulness. Living rightly is the necessary beginning and essential, I believe, to anyone’s cultivation of integrity regardless of its proximate effects on society. From there I am drawn to what I know about those who are seeking communities of shared value that will unavoidably turn inward for their shared good whether bound by geography or common commitments. At the same time, there continue to be people, particularly the young and those exposed to bigotry and other harms, and many others as well who simply reject injustice in all its forms, who struggle to make change, whether through political mobilization, civil disobedience, or through creation of alternatives to money-centered, exploitive commercial enterprise. Communities of shared value must support these endeavors in whatever ways they can, but for now I believe their priority will be sustaining communities in which moral esteem is normal.
It would be naïve to assume that good will necessarily prevail or that even if it did one could rest easy that it would survive. Corruption and self-centeredness have seriously damaged trust and for many a commitment to truth and goodness is weakened by the will to power and the fears, dishonesty, and rampant cynicism that are part of its fuel. Still, I believe that even in the present catastrophe people can shelter within their communities, remain faithful to their values, recognize the goodness of being even if it is unacknowledged by many beings, and find meaning. We can hope that these will be the seeds of better times.
Taken from chapter 13, “A Life Considered” by Craig Brestrup,
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