by Todd May
As I have said, this distinction is a bit arbitrary. I am sure that there are readers who have immediately thought of examples of interventions that seem to partake of both benevolence and political involvement. If I donate money to an organization that is resisting political oppression, is that benevolence or politics? On the one hand, it is helpful to particular individuals who, through their struggle, are making their lives better. It seems in that way like benevolence. However, on the other hand it is money dedicated to changing the institutional structure and so seems like political involvement. Or alternatively, if I donate money to make individual lives better in a way that might be called benevolent, might their increased standard of living allow them to engage in political resistance to the oppressing structure they find themselves under—and might that in fact be my goal in donating?
For our purposes, we will designate the first example as political involvement, since the donation is directly targeted toward institutional change, and the second as benevolence, since it is directed toward individuals and only indirectly toward the creation of political resistance. However, there may well be examples that defy this distinction more doggedly. My suggestion would be to read such instances as “politically benevolent” or “benevolently political,” and draw whatever conclusions might be available from both chapters.
If we turn toward benevolence, we face an immediate problem. It is a problem that we glimpsed in the first chapter, one that returns here in full force. Doesn’t morality—any morality—presuppose that everyone is to be counted equally? Or, to be more precise, that everyone’s interests are to be counted equally? Why is it more important that someone’s headache should place more of a claim on my concern only because they’re in an office down the hall from me rather than on another continent? To be sure, if I have a couple of aspirin lying around it might be more efficient to walk them down the hall rather than put them on a plane to someone, but that isn’t a matter of morality. It’s only a matter of convenience. If I were magically able to cure headaches from a distance, wouldn’t I be equally obliged to treat the person on the other continent as I would the person down the hall?
And now compare the person down the hall with a headache to someone far away who is starving. And suppose that my choice is to spend money on aspirin for my colleague or on food for the person who’s starving. Doesn’t the greater interest of the starving person override my obligation to give the person down the hall aspirin or buy myself a cappuccino? There might be exceptions to this. I might be more obliged, as we have seen, to my family, since I have made commitments to them, implicit or explicit promises that must be kept. But aside from those, don’t I owe everyone, whether near or far, the same moral consideration? Isn’t everyone equally worthy of that?
This, of course, is the argument Peter Singer makes in his article “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.” It is an argument that is sustained and deepened by Shelly Kagan. In his book The Limits of Morality, Kagan argues that there are essentially no limits to what morality can ask of us. In particular, we are to treat everyone as equally worthy of our attention, regardless of our personal relationship to them. That is, we need to act in accordance with a morality of strict impartiality. Kagan starts from the idea that all of us have at least some reason to act impartially, and so the question is whether there can be any exceptions to this, allowances to act more partially to those we care for or those closer to us in space. He considers a variety of different arguments in favor of such allowances and finds them all wanting. For example, if we argue that someone should have the option not to act in accordance with an impartial morality, that is, if one can act periodically in one’s own interests, then that would seem to invite all sorts of moral abuses. But, he asks, “suppose that by murdering dear old Uncle Albert I stand to inherit one million dollars,” does the cost to me of not murdering him, particularly if I really need the money, justify the murder?2 For Kagan, such options are not defensible by themselves. They need to be nuanced in various ways, and he spends much of the rest of the book in extended arguments against any nuance that might be offered, concluding that there is no adequate defense of anything less than a strictly impartial morality.3
One way of confronting this view is offered by the philosopher Susan Wolf, whose work we touched on briefly in the previous chapter. In one way she agrees with Singer and Kagan: morality should be impartial, treating everyone the same way. However, in another way she departs from them. While for Singer and Kagan morality should be overriding—that is, morality should ultimately determine how we act—for Wolf this is not so. Other considerations can come into play. Violating morality, in short, is not always a bad thing. To be sure, it is always a bad thing morally. But perhaps it is not always a bad thing overall. Recall her example from the second chapter of the mother who hides her guilty child, having “reached a point where the issue of moral approval had ceased to be decisive.” Wolf does not want to deny in a case like this that the woman acted immorally. Rather, she thinks we should “characterize it as a conflict between morality and the demands of love,” adding that, “while I agree with other impartialists that it would be immoral for the woman to hide her son from the police, it seems to me that a willingness, in such special circumstances as these, to consider acting immorally, and even to act immorally, is compatible with the possession of a character worthy of respect and admiration.”4
Wolf argues that alongside morality there are other values to human existence that are worth promoting, values that do not find their way into an impartial morality but which lend meaning to our existence and should be recognized as worthy to stand alongside moral values. This is an idea we saw in the first chapter.
My sympathies lie largely with Wolf on this matter,5 but let’s suppose I’m wrong. Instead, let’s suppose that Singer and Kagan are correct, and so not only am I morally obliged to treat everyone equally but I am also obliged to recognize that moral considerations should be overriding in my life. In offering that aspirin instead of donating money to a hunger relief organization, I am doing the wrong thing. I should be sacrificing my own inclinations and interests—and, with a nod of the head toward care theorists—my own caring relationships in favor of the equality of everyone’s interests. Suppose that is what I should do. Would I do it?
No.
I count myself as someone who is not deeply morally suspect, but I don’t see myself acting in this extreme altruistic way. Now, true confession, I’m no moral saint either. I’m probably like most of the readers of this book, or perhaps most people generally. I try to do the right thing, more or less, much of the time. But I’m not going to sacrifice the entire run of my small pleasures for others who I recognize have more at stake than small pleasures. Some sacrifice, yes, but not saintly level sacrifice.
If this is true, however, then—again like most of us—I recognize that, whatever the moral claims others distant in space have on my benevolence, I am prepared to meet at least some of those claims. I should be prepared, and indeed I am prepared, to do something for people I do not know and will never meet. But if this is true, is there a way of thinking about, of framing, what I should do that can both capture what I find myself doing and guide me a little bit further in my actions?
In reflecting on this, we should probably start in a very basic place. It is a place that, given the conditions in which I am writing this, has more urgency than it might otherwise have had. However, it has never been entirely irrelevant either. This basic place is that of finding out what is going on in parts of the world distant from our own. By “distant” here I don’t mean anything exotic. Rather, the idea is to discover what life is like for people outside our immediate environment. If a person lives in rural Indiana, it might do just as well to learn about life in Chicago as in Kathmandu, Dakar, or Quito. Of course, it would be great to learn about people’s lives in all these places. But for the purposes of developing a moral relationship there need be only one place, a point we will return to below.
/> Why, though, is it more urgent now to learn about a part or parts of the world distant from our immediate environment? Those of us who live in the US, and I believe in much of the developed world, have become caught in what might be termed “niche culture,” or perhaps better “niche cultures.” Rather than occupying a common culture in which certain news programs, books, and movies are the more or less universal cultural currency, people now find themselves ensconced in smaller cultures of like-minded individuals. This, I should hasten to add, is not entirely a bad thing. Cultural items that would never have seen the light of day now find audiences that can engage with them. Foreign films, avant-garde novels, controversial studies of history, unclassifiable music: all these things and more are finding audiences that they would otherwise not have found because there are now outlets for them. Moreover, the existence of niche cultures make it difficult for those who control mainstream cultural outlets to stifle news or other cultural products they do not like.
There are downsides to having such niche cultures, however, and not least among them is the likelihood of people’s existing views to be continually reinforced. If everyone around you agrees with you, you’re less likely to reflect on your own views, confront uncomfortable facts, or engage with people who might challenge your beliefs. In such a situation, it becomes easy to start to believe things that are false, because there is no corrective. And because there is no real friction in your world, nothing challenges what you already believe. Seemingly contrary facts are easily accounted for when there is no commitment to truth—they are denied or explained by something else that is equally false.
Living in a niche culture presents an obvious challenge to living a decent life with respect to others with whom we are not in immediate contact. If we are to develop a moral relationship with them, to assist them in their lives in any way, we need to find out about those lives. That may require going outside our own bubble to learn what those lives are like.
One might argue that it would be better to learn about all kinds of lives, in that it is better to be educated about the world than not to be. Agreed. However, the issue here is not self-development but rather benevolence. Benevolence does not require general education about our entire world but rather an understanding of a part of it where our benevolence might prove helpful. However, it might be said in response that a person cannot know what would be most helpful, or perhaps even just more helpful, without knowing about more than one part of the world. Again, agreed. But the issue is not so much maximizing our benevolence as finding a way or some ways to be benevolent. Investigating the lives of others in several parts of the world might be helpful in finding that way, but it does not seem necessary to living a decent life.
Of course, someone might ask whether it is necessary to focus on a single part of the world as the object of one’s benevolence. It isn’t. Some people might want to learn about several other parts of the world, spreading their benevolence around. However, there are a couple of reasons to prefer narrowing the focus to one or two places. First, it offers a sense of a personal stake in the improvement of a particular group of people. There are farm workers in southern Florida—tomato pickers, to be exact—who have been struggling against profound exploitation, chemical poisoning, and even slavery for the past twenty years or so. When I learned about them, my wife and I decided to donate some money to the organization that they formed for their defense, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.6 Before doing that I learned more about their plight, and since the donation I have kept up with the organization’s activities, even writing a column in our college newspaper supporting a national boycott they organized. I feel a deeper sense of involvement with their struggle and a more engaged sense of concern for their prevailing than I do for some other struggles for justice with which I am only passingly familiar. Although this is an example of politics rather than benevolence, I am sure that a deeper sense of involvement occurs for others who engage knowledgably in benevolent projects seeking to reduce poverty or provide educational materials or eradicate disease in other parts of the world.
A second reason for focus is related to the first. We have seen that face-to-face interaction brings with it a more vivid sense of the personhood of others, of the fact that they too have lives they are trying to lead. Learning about specific people in a specific part of the world, while it doesn’t bring us face-to-face with others, at least brings us closer to them. Their lives take on a reality that might otherwise appear in too dim a light. As I found out more about the Immokalee workers, I learned names, saw pictures of people, read about their lives—both their struggles and their victories—and came to understand both individual and collective histories. This helped reinforce the idea I introduced in the first chapter: that everyone has a life to live. By focusing on a particular part of the world and those who inhabit it, that idea takes on a heightened lucidity.
The third reason for focus is in keeping with the attempt to make moral engagement, where possible, a matter of positive expression rather than guilt or mere obligation. If I have a sense of involvement with specific people in a particular place, if they become more alive for me, then whatever benevolence I express toward them is more likely to come from a feeling of solidarity with them rather than a more remote recognition or intellectual concession that I must do something to alleviate their plight. To use the term I raised in the previous chapter, I may come to care about those toward whom I plan to extend some benevolence. And as I come to care about them, my moral relationship with them will likely root itself more in a desire to help than in either a guilt about their plight or about how much of what I own I actually deserve or a more disinterested acknowledgment that, well, one should do something.
As before, positive moral expression will not replace all sense of necessity or obligation. We have already seen that it does not do so for even the closest of relationships. There are times when parents just do not feel like schlepping their offspring to yet another soccer practice or school presentation or friend’s birthday party. (Are there any times when they do feel like doing it?) It just has to be done. But such schlepping is not a matter purely of duty. It takes place in the context of an ongoing relationship that is meaningful for a parent, one that enlivens their life in important ways. While benevolence toward others who are distant in space will not contribute the same level of meaningfulness as someone’s commitment to those with whom they share their life in a more immediate way, there is no reason to think that it cannot offer a modicum of meaningfulness that renders it less a burden and more a blessing.
So far we have focused on learning about other parts of the world where a person might offer their benevolence. We have not discussed what that benevolence might consist in. Before turning to that, however, it might be worth lingering over an objection that could be raised to the whole idea of such benevolence. Why, one might ask, offer benevolence at all to those who are distant from us in space? Why is this something that I should do unless somehow I feel like doing it in the first place? Is there some moral requirement that I extend benevolence beyond my immediate surroundings? Why not just focus on those with whom I have some immediate, that is, face-to-face, relationship?
In addressing this objection, the first thing to note is that the objection easily extends itself farther than the person raising it might like. If I ask why it might be necessary to take others who are distant from me into account, I might also ask why it is necessary to take others who are in an immediate relationship with me into account. Why offer anything to them, unless somehow I feel moved to do so? Why act morally toward those I encounter face-to-face?
There is a deeper question here, one that, in traditional philosophy, falls under the category of “Why be moral?” I will not attempt to answer that question here, assuming (an assumption of which I am skeptical) that it is even an interesting question. Instead I will assume that you recognize the importance of being morally decent to those around us. We should treat those we encounter with respect, re
cognizing that they have lives to live and that we ought to take that fact into account as we navigate our own way through the world. In other words, you won’t have found the ideas I raised in the previous chapter to be very foreign or puzzling.
Given that recognition, the necessity of some benevolence toward others who are distant in space from us is rooted in the attempt to balance two ideas: on the one hand, others who are distant from us are just as human and have lives to live just as we do; on the other hand, we are unlikely to treat others who are distant from us with the same solicitude as those around us. The first idea is, as we have seen, a cornerstone of morality. It lies at the heart of all moral theories and is hard to imagine morality without. The second idea is one that has animated our reflections here and will continue to do so. It distinguishes what I have called decency from the extreme altruism characteristic of traditional moral theories. If we combine these two ideas we are likely to arrive at the necessity of benevolence not only toward those around us but also, to a certain extent, toward those distant from us.
There is, however, a way to flip the question around. Consider the homeless person I discussed in the previous chapter, the independent operator. Is it possible that, rather than give him money, I should take the same money and donate it to a homeless organization? Granted, I gave him only a dollar. But suppose I were to save my dollars and when I got to twenty-five or fifty of them I donated that. Wouldn’t that be better? After all, I don’t know whether the person I’m facing will spend the money wisely or whether the donation would help homeless people in a more efficient way. Might it not be better then to pass up the face-to-face generosity in favor of the kind of benevolence we’re discussing here?