by Todd May
Of course, in a large urban center it is difficult to look every homeless person in the face. Imagine doing this in Kolkata, or even New York. However, the exercise of looking here and there into the face of another, particularly another whom one is tempted to treat indifferently, can bring the humanity of that person into view, the fact that they too have a life they are struggling to live. I suspect such an exercise not only brings their humanity into view more clearly but also elevates our own just a bit.
You will immediately recognize what I mentioned above: the practice of those who solicit money for charity using advertisements with faces on them, usually the faces of children. Although I have no empirical evidence for this, I’m quite sure those ads are more effective than would be ads that merely told us how many people were suffering from a particular disease or impoverishment.
The faces of people around us, when we let ourselves look at them, can reveal on a visceral level the fact that they have lives to live, which is the motivating idea of the framework I am seeking to construct here. It can move us to treat others in more humane ways than we might otherwise be tempted to. This “otherwise” isn’t necessarily a matter of competing with our self-interest. Rather it is because we simply don’t see (literally do not see) their lives in front of us. Caught up in our own projects, we are not gripped by the fact of another person’s existence. To be gripped by the existence of other people’s lives, however, does not imply that we need to treat those lives with the same solicitude as we treat our own or those we care deeply about. The goal rather would be to develop as best we can a certain sensitivity, one that is based on a phenomenon we can recognize: the role of the face of others in revealing the fact of their living to us.
Seeing the face of another person, being confronted with it or gripped by it, places the life of another person before us. In different situations it might lead us to different courses of action. My anger at someone who has kept me waiting softens when I look into the face of the person arriving and see pensiveness that might indicate a troubled mind, or joy to see me, or just the face of someone I have come to care about. My indifference toward the person crowded next to me on a train during rush hour might, if I see their face, move me to offer them another few inches of space or help clear the way for them if they’ve reached their stop. Looking into the face of the cashier at the supermarket might lead me to smile at them in a more sincere way than I would have if I had, as I usually do, just looked through them, seeing only my own life.
Common Decency
In engaging with those around us we need not always be cognizant of their lives. We can have more informal contact with others, contact that often goes by the name of “common decency.” Here are a few situations of common decency: helping an older person across the street, lighting a cigarette for a stranger, holding the door for someone you don’t know, or motioning to someone looking for a parking space that you’re about to get into your car to leave, or placing a napkin over someone’s cup of coffee to keep it warm when they get up to go to the bathroom during a meeting.6 These are things we do for people, or might do for them, even if we don’t know them, even if we will never see them again. These are forms of politeness that are specific to particular societies. Other societies have other forms, for instance Japanese culture encourages the giving of gifts, and often nicer gifts, in a wider set of social circumstances than usually occurs among Americans. There are, in different cultures, different patterns of common decency, and often these are ritualized so as to be recognized by their recipients. As the ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius recognized, there is a deep bond between rituals like these and the preservation of social peace. In the Analects he insists, “In the uses of ritual it is harmony that is prized. . . . If harmony itself is not modulated by ritual, things will still go amiss.”7 These rituals are all ways of being with others that create minimal bonds among strangers.8 To act with common decency is to do something for a stranger or someone one does not know well that makes their following moments a little bit more pleasant.
Acts of common decency like these assume that we recognize the existence of the other people, and not merely their existence. It is to recognize that another person is carrying on a life and that we can do something to make that carrying on just a wee bit less complicated. It is a way of brightening a life. It can also be contagious, and in a couple of ways. First, a person who has been the recipient of an act of common decency is often motivated to pay it forward. It’s as though common decency presents a model for the recipient to follow in the next stages of their unfolding day. That model may not last long. It may last only until the next person they encounter acts like a jerk. Nevertheless, it has the potential to be passed from one person to another.
Common decency can also be contagious in another way. It can stand as a model not just for the recipient of the act of decency but also for those who witness it. I am sure I am not the only person who has noticed that when someone drops a coin into a charity box or leaves a tip at a coffee counter or holds the door for someone, those who see it are more likely to do it in their turn. Once, when I was waiting for a meeting on a college campus, I looked out the window at two students who were leafletting. It was striking to me that when one person took an offered leaflet the others who immediately followed her were more likely to do so, and when someone walked by without taking the leaflet others were more likely to follow suit. Of course, this wasn’t universally true, or else either everyone or no one would have taken the leaflets. Rather, each person either taking or refusing seemed to raise the probability that the next person would do the same. In our public actions we often model, give permission, encourage or discourage others to follow suit.
One of the most infamous examples of this is in the Milgram experiments.9 Stanley Milgram, under the pretense of seeking to understand the role of negative reinforcement on learning behavior, conducted experiments which seemed to show that people were willing to engage in egregious acts of shocking others to encourage them to learn if an authority figure were there encouraging to administer the shock. However, in one of the variations on the experiment, there was also another person in the room with the subject who refused to “shock” the “learner.” Milgram found that his subjects were more likely to refuse to follow orders when another person also did so.
What often goes under the heading of common decency works like that, except in a positive direction. It can encourage such decency among those who receive it and those who witness it. And, although it can emerge from or be accompanied by an encounter with the face of someone else, it need not. I can put my napkin over someone’s cup of coffee even if I have wandered into a meeting with strangers thinking about something else and not really noticing who is around me.
It would be going too far to say that common decency is always contagious. It isn’t even always acknowledged by its recipients. We all know of situations like this. You hold the door for someone who then walks through it as though you don’t exist. You smile and thank a cashier who looks like they could use a smile, but they don’t look at you and instead just call out, “Next.” You offer to help someone carry a large package down a flight of steps; they snap back, “I can carry it myself!” What is happening in all these cases? You are being disrespected as a person. It is as though, for these people whom you are offering to assist briefly in their lives, you are simply an object. You are not being recognized as another person. It isn’t always that you want to be thanked or treated as some kind of hero of common decency. (Okay, there might be a tinge of that. But most of the time it probably isn’t the dominant desire.) Rather, you simply want your gesture to be acknowledged as coming from someone. Often, a perfunctory smile in return for your offer will do. Sometimes, though, your existence is entirely ignored, or even affronted.
When this happens, it stings. The immediate response can be a sense of rejection or anger. It’s as though we want to re-establish ourselves as mattering in the wake of being dismissed. And re-est
ablishing ourselves (particularly if we are male) often takes the form of wanting to place the other person beneath us, denying them as a person with a life, making them feel smaller. It is often difficult at these moments to say to ourselves that the person walking through the door may just be distracted or taken up with a personal concern, that being a cashier and having to smile at a zillion customers is a daily burden, that the person who snaps at the offer of help may be trying to prove to themselves that they’re not getting too old to carry large packages, or perhaps their back, sore from lugging packages around, is making them cranky. The failure to acknowledge common decency may not have its source in disrespect but instead in the strains or even mundane self-involvement of those we offer it to.
This isn’t always the case. As we all know from unpleasant experience, sometimes people can be, well, as the philosopher Aaron James has put it in technical terms, assholes. In his book of the same name, he tells us that “a person counts as an asshole when, and only when, he systematically allows himself to enjoy special advantages in interpersonal relations out of an entrenched sense of entitlement that immunizes him against the complaints of other people.”10 (He notes that the use of the male pronoun is deliberate.) Such a person not only rarely offers common decency to others, but rarely acknowledges the common decency offered to them. They take it as their due. For James, the difference between an asshole and a psychopath is that morality plays no role for the psychopath whereas the asshole possesses a keen sense of moral entitlement. Moreover, and this is where James’s view intersects with our concerns, what drives people crazy about an asshole is that “he fails to recognize others in a fundamental, morally important way.”11 For the asshole, other people’s existence, their lives and their plans, do not matter because the only thing that matters is his life. Therefore, there is no need to offer or even notice common decency, since he is the center of the universe.
It takes a good degree of self-acceptance to maintain a recognition of the person whose behavior in the face of common decency is disrespectful. However, perhaps that self-acceptance can be a worthy goal. Or perhaps things can go the other way around: by maintaining a recognition of the other person as having a life to live, one that may preoccupy them in ways that we are not privy to, we come to accept ourselves a little more than we had previously. We achieve a little more balance.
On the other end of things, common decency can extend itself beyond the small acts of kindness we do for others. Where one draws the line between decency and a more extreme altruism is a difficult question. Was Matthew Stevenson’s Shabbat invitation to Derek Black an example of decency or of altruism? It certainly wasn’t a profound act of self-denial. On the other hand, it wasn’t simply a matter of covering a cup of coffee with a napkin or, Japanese-style, bringing a nice gift to the home of someone you don’t know well. Stevenson risked alienating his traditional Shabbat partners, and in fact did alienate them for a little while. For our purposes there is no need to draw a bright line between common decency and altruism. What we are after instead is an understanding of our general moral relations with those around us, an understanding that can both tell us what we are about morally and can offer reasonable paths to extend what we are about.
This understanding, we can see, contrasts with the altruism characteristic of the moral theories we canvassed in the previous chapter. In being moved by the faces of those around us and in engaging in common decency we do not seek to maximize the consequences of our actions. Nor do we hope to act as a moral exemplar in accordance with the categorical imperative. Although we may, in displaying decency, mold ourselves into slightly better people, we need not be guided by a model of virtue. Decency (not just common decency but decency more broadly) in the sense that I am trying to develop it is not a matter of making the world as good a place as we can make it or of living the best life for human beings. But neither is it a matter of meeting some set of minimal moral obligations. Instead, it is a matter of recognizing others as having lives to live and seeking to incorporate that recognition into our lives in ways that are reasonably workable, or, to put it in a more positive light, to navigate through the world with a certain moral gracefulness.
I would like to linger over the idea of moral gracefulness for a moment, since it offers us a way of thinking about our moral lives that is more positive than some other ways we are encouraged to think about them. Often morality is characterized in terms of duties and obligations. It is thought to be a matter of what we owe to one another. This characterization, in turn, is grounded in the idea that there is a moral bottom line in our relations to one another that is important to recognize. Kant was keen on duties and obligations, and utilitarianism, although it uses different terms, is also committed to the idea that we are obliged to create the most good we can. More recently, many theories that are called social contract theories ask the question of what rules we would commit ourselves to follow if we could be assured that others would also follow the same rules.12
If we think in these terms we are likely to bring in ideas of debt and then guilt in their wake. Where there is obligation, there is debt; and where there is debt, a failure to pay the debt leads to guilt, perhaps even to shame. Guilt can be thought of in psychological terms, but we should also recognize the legal connotation of the word. An obligation is like a law someone must follow, a law that levies a debt on someone. If you don’t pay the debt levied by the obligation, then you are guilty of not meeting your obligations. Thinking of morality in these terms is very contractual.
It also sets up morality as a burden to be borne. No doubt there is something to this. If there weren’t, it wouldn’t have been the framework of moral thought for so many great philosophers over the past centuries. Morality can be a burden, as when I am asked to act in ways that I would prefer not to because there is a moral reason to do so. And in difficult situations I may be asked to do precisely that. However, there is another way to think about how we steer ourselves through the world morally in most of our daily interactions with others, one that focuses less on our duties and obligations and more on what we can offer. That way of thinking is more pull than push. When I see the face of another, really see it, I am driven to acknowledge that person not so much through a sense of burden but through what might better be called commonality or solidarity or kindness (if we keep in mind the connotation of being of like kind). This other person grips me not as a duty to be discharged but as a fellow person sharing the world with me, someone whom I am drawn to recognize and perhaps to assist. To say that this recognition is a joy rather than a burden would in most cases probably be claiming too much. It is probably more accurate to say that there is a felt bond with this person that moves me toward them, that draws my attention in their direction.
Although common decency need not have the same grip or emerge from the same bond—since it isn’t necessarily stirred by someone’s face—neither must we think of it in most cases as a burden. It seems rather to be an opportunity for solidarity with another person, often a stranger. Smiling at others, holding doors for them, assisting them in minor ways when they are in difficulty, or giving them small gifts is a way of sharing the world with someone, often someone you don’t know. We are not alone on the planet, and we need not act as though we were alone (well, except perhaps for assholes). And our way of not being alone need not be characterized in legalistic terms of obligations and debts, rather in more positive terms of sharing and recognition. Common decency seems to me better understood in those latter terms. And by this I mean not only that it can be understood that way but more strongly that it probably is understood that way by most people who exercise common decency.
Peter Singer, the promoter of altruism we met in the first chapter, believes that many altruists are motivated not by a sense of guilt or shame but instead by the positive feeling of offering themselves to others. In his book The Most Good You Can Do, he cites examples of people whose lives are enhanced by their dedication to charitable giving. He notes
studies that show that charitable giving and even donating organs can lead to more happiness and that giving enhances the important good of self-esteem. “The most solid basis for self-esteem,” he writes, “is to live an ethical life, that is, a life in which one contributes to the greatest possible extent to making the world a better place.”13
There is a core idea here that I would like to hold on to: acting morally can often arise out of a positive sense of contribution rather than a negative one of guilt or indebtedness. However, the examples he uses—of organ donations to strangers and of people calculating how much good their resources can do and living largely if not solely by those calculations—are difficult for most of us to follow. Of course, we might ask, as we did in the first chapter, whether the world would actually be a better place if everyone lived that way, if nobody followed their passions for artistic creation, rock climbing, spontaneity, or love. But even if we thought that it would be better if we all threw ourselves into what Singer calls “effective altruism,” the fact is that most of us are not going to do this. (I assume I am not alone here, am I?)