by Todd May
So the question we want to confront becomes a little more nuanced. Rather than asking how to confront racism and so on while still recognizing that the racist has a life to live, we must ask how to confront these attitudes and practices while not mirroring them in our own behavior. How do we step beyond mere civility in addressing the dehumanization of those who exist in our common space without violating the fundamental orientation that civility embraces?
The Role of Nonviolence
Fortunately for us, we do not need to craft this way of confronting dehumanization, since it already exists. It goes under the broad name of nonviolence, and it has a long and deep history. It is a history rooted in struggles of those who are marginalized or disenfranchised. The two most famous nonviolent movements of resistance—the Indian Independence Movement and the US Civil Rights Movement—arose among people who were oppressed, often by forces of extreme violence (the British army and American Southern racists). This legacy continued with the protests that brought down Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, challenged President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, sustained Occupy in New York and other cities, and appears in the present day with many of the activities of groups like Black Lives Matter. We don’t need to investigate the rich history of nonviolence,8 but getting a sense of what nonviolence is and can be will point us toward ways of resisting practices and structures that push people toward the margins without becoming like the people or structures we are resisting. This is not to say that nonviolence is the only acceptable means of political action; we need not be pacifists. But in seeking to understand political decency, it will play the central role.
It might be worth beginning a discussion of nonviolence by saying a little bit about what nonviolence is not. For starters, nonviolence is not remaining quiescent or docile in the face of power. Mohandas Gandhi, one of the two great twentieth-century theorists and practitioners of nonviolence (the other being Martin Luther King Jr.), explicitly rejected the term “passive resistance” as a synonym for nonviolence.9 Nonviolence is active and often very creative. It seeks to resist oppression, whether individual or institutional, through means that do not involve the violence often associated with such oppression. This requires real activity, not passivity.
The other view of nonviolence that we should be wary of is a more romantic one, that nonviolence is necessarily a matter of standing up courageously against the blows of an evil enemy and attracting the attention and admiration of the world. It is not that there is no truth to this romantic view. Many of the iconic images and stories associated with nonviolence are romantic ones, from Gandhi’s Salt March to the Freedom Riders and the lunch counter sit-ins of the US Civil Rights Movement. And indeed these are inspiring examples of nonviolence. However, if we think of nonviolence solely in these terms then we’re relegating it to the moral realm of altruism. People who engaged in the Salt March, the Freedom Rides, the lunch counter sit-ins and many other campaigns of nonviolence during the Indian Independence and US Civil Rights Movements were beaten and publicly reviled. They were often trained beforehand in methods of nonviolent resistance in order to be able to withstand abuse while remaining steadfast and yet not retaliating. If this were all there was to nonviolence, it would lead us well beyond decency into more morally elevated territory.
While the type of noncooperation characteristic of the romantic views people have of nonviolence are certainly inspiring, nonviolence can involve more pedestrian activities. Public demonstrations are often expressions of nonviolence. Boycotting a company that engages in egregious practices like environmental degradation or callous treatment of its employees is a form of nonviolence. Campaigns of letter-writing on behalf of political prisoners of the kind Amnesty International organizes are examples of nonviolence. Reaching out to organizations that work in marginalized communities is an active way to engage in nonviolence. As I write these lines, there are two groups in an African American community in a nearby city that are trying to get streetlamps along a section of road in a poor area where many people have been killed at night by cars whose drivers cannot see them. I have met with organizers from these groups and have let others, particularly middle-class white folks, know about their campaign. Many of them are interested in assisting and have asked what they can do. Putting oneself at the disposal of groups like these is a way of engaging in nonviolent politics that offers solidarity with those who are struggling for justice on a scale that is smaller than the American Civil Rights Movement but nevertheless makes an important difference in people’s lives.
At the outset, one usually attempts to persuade those who are preserving an oppressive social arrangement to stop doing so. These attempts are also acts of nonviolence. In fact, both Gandhi and King insisted that before undertaking a campaign of noncooperation it is incumbent on people to seek to persuade their adversaries of the moral mistake those adversaries are making. For Gandhi, the necessity of persuasion was rooted in the idea we discussed above that one cannot assume one has access to the whole truth. In attempting to persuade an adversary one might discover that there is more to the adversary’s position than one had previously thought, or at least that the adversary, while mistaken, has a more sincere commitment to their position than it might have otherwise seemed. At this point we are assuming that civil persuasion has failed and further measures are needed. However, the insight behind Gandhi’s position—that nobody has access to the full truth—can continue to inform our actions.
In what follows I will stretch the concept of nonviolence a bit to encompass some of the activities we discussed in previous chapters, but I will try to preserve its core idea, one that has animated our discussions throughout: that others have lives to live and that acting decently involves a sensitivity to that fact. In my own view, that sensitivity as it is expressed in nonviolent action involves respecting both the dignity and the equality of others.10 Let us look at each in turn.
Dignity, as we might understand it here, has two sides. One side involves the treatment of others, and the other involves one’s own behavior. There is treating another as though they possess the quality of dignity and there is acting in a dignified manner. Although these are related, they are not the same thing.
Treating another as though they possess dignity is grounded in the philosophical idea of an intrinsic value. An intrinsic value can be contrasted with an instrumental value. Money, for instance, has only an instrumental value—it has value only inasmuch as it can obtain something else that is valuable. It has no value on its own. If we destroyed a piece of money, say by throwing away a penny, we don’t do it any harm. We haven’t violated it somehow. What has only instrumental value doesn’t require us to treat it in any particular way, except perhaps inasmuch as it would be helpful as a means to another end. We might put this by saying that anything that has only instrumental value has no value in itself.
Intrinsic value, by contrast, is a value something has in itself, a value that is to be respected not simply because of what else it can get us. Some people think that fine art has an intrinsic value. Van Gogh’s Starry Night, they would say, has the intrinsic value of beauty. Its value goes beyond the pleasure it gives anyone—that is only instrumental value. Rather, these people argue, even if there were nobody to see it, it would still be wrong to destroy the painting. Starry Night would still possess value in itself. One might say in a philosophical vein that a world in which Starry Night exists is a better world than one in which it didn’t, even if there were no human beings in either world to appreciate its existence.
Whether or not folks agree that art has intrinsic value, almost everyone agrees that human beings do. What that value is can be a matter of dispute. Immanuel Kant thought that the intrinsic value human beings possessed, the value that must be respected, is rationality. In fact, he thought that any being that possessed rationality would have the same intrinsic value as human beings, and so didn’t necessarily restrict this type of intrinsic value to humans. For Kant, to have dignity was to have rationalit
y. Other philosophers have found the idea of rationality too restrictive to stand as the intrinsic value of human beings. After all, many small children and—to return to our example from last chapter—people with brain damage do not have much in the way of rationality. Does that mean that we can treat them as less than fully human, or that they do not possess the intrinsic value of other human beings?
We saw in the previous chapter that moral individualists might believe that small children and people with severe brain damage do not possess the richness of experience of others (richness of experience roughly being their candidate for intrinsic value). However, for them the goal was not to eliminate these humans from moral consideration but instead to raise other beings up for greater moral consideration. If we choose rationality as the intrinsic value possessed by human beings, that path isn’t open to us. Humans that were less than fully rational would simply not be human in the sense required to possess intrinsic value.
So what should stand as the intrinsic value possessed by human beings? My proposal is one that we have already seen, in this chapter and previous ones: the capacity “to engage in projects and relationships that unfold over time; to be aware of one’s death in a way that affects how one sees the arc of one’s life; to have biological needs like food, shelter, and sleep; to have basic psychological needs like care and a sense of attachment to one’s surroundings.” This is a less restrictive criterion than rationality, or at least less than the kind of full-blooded rationality that philosophers like Kant have in mind. However, it does, I hope, capture what many of us feel is the intrinsic value to be respected in human beings. It is what gives human beings dignity. To treat a human being as having dignity, then, is to treat them as possessing the intrinsic value of the capacity to engage in projects and so on.
What does this mean for how we should treat our fellow human beings? Although we will be able to offer a more specific answer to this question in a bit, after our discussion of equality, we might briefly characterize this by saying that there are certain limits beyond which our treatment of human beings cannot go, unless there are extraordinary circumstances. (Self-defense against an attack by another human being might be such a circumstance.) To treat people with dignity requires that we not shut people off from developing important life projects and significant relationships or bar them from meeting their basic biological needs. In order to thrive people must, in addition to fulfilling needs like food, sleep, and shelter, be able to engage in projects of various sorts that unfold over time, often with other people who matter to them. These projects can be of various kinds: friendships, meaningful work, love relationships, even hobbies. To prevent people from doing these things is to fail to acknowledge their dignity, that is their intrinsic value as human beings.
It is important to recognize, however, that respecting the dignity of another does not require that we are never coercive toward them. This is an important insight, one that some of Gandhi’s followers themselves failed to recognize.11 Projects that are important to people may include the oppression of others or at least participating in projects among whose effects, whether they know it or not, is the oppression of others. Preserving the dignity of another does not mean that we must allow them to do that. Through nonviolent means we can seek to prevent their engaging in these projects, but we must not prevent their having access to other projects, projects that don’t oppress others. We might, for instance, seek to block the operations of a company that contributes to climate change, and even go so far as to shutter it. But we cannot seek in the name of retribution to prevent the company’s employees from finding other work. (Once again, there are exceptions. Perhaps the company owners, if they knowingly sought to contribute to the destruction of the environment, should receive adequate punishment before being allowed to pursue other projects.)
We have focused here on the particular intrinsic value associated with human beings. This is because we are interested in the common space of politics, a common space that centrally concerns humans. Before turning to our second type of dignity, we should note in passing that the intrinsic value we have described here is not the only type of intrinsic value there is. In chapter 4 we considered another form of intrinsic value, although we didn’t call it that. The capacity for suffering seems to confer an intrinsic value on many living beings, a value that humans also embody but that isn’t limited to humans. We might say that that capacity is implicit in parts of the description of human dignity that we have considered here, while for nonhuman animals that capacity is more limited. Although nonhuman animals, like us, require food, sleep, and shelter, and many of them need significant relationships with others, rarely do they engage in the kind of long-term projects characteristic of human life. To treat most nonhuman animals with dignity, then, is to acknowledge and respect their capacity for suffering.
So far we have discussed the side of dignity concerned with those whom nonviolence seeks to confront. The other side concerns ourselves as political actors. It is a matter of dignified behavior. How can we act in a dignified way in the space we share with others? One way to think of this is that we seek to create ourselves as models of political behavior, that we behave in such a way that we would be happy for others to emulate. To act with dignity is to navigate through common space in a way that others, unless they were too blinkered by their own views, would not find repulsive or embarrassing or that one would not be embarrassed to see in another. Lashing out verbally or physically against others, placing them in humiliating circumstances, spreading lies or rumors about them, trying to blackmail or extort from them, intimidating them for no important political end: all these are examples of undignified behavior that a person seeking to act nonviolently would reject. If dignity involves the recognition of the intrinsic value of another, it also involves a certain way of moving through shared space that can act as a standard for others to emulate and that one can look back on without regret.
If dignity is one of the values associated with nonviolence, equality is the other. The idea of equality is one that has run like a thread through the previous chapters and has a hallowed place in US history, stretching back to the Declaration of Independence’s second paragraph, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” (Although we should note the term men and its implicit reference only to certain men.) It is the presupposition that each of us is equally capable of creating a life for ourselves and that this capacity should figure foremost in our political considerations. Or, to put it in terms we have just seen, it would be the idea that nobody has greater intrinsic worth than anyone else.
We should be clear about what this means, since it is easy to misunderstand. As we have seen, to say that people are equal is not to say that everyone deserves the same thing. Recall our example of the two people and the aspirin. Nor does it mean that what people do in their lives doesn’t have any bearing on what they deserve, that everyone deserves equal respect regardless of how they act. Equality in the sense we are speaking of here is neither about need nor deservingness. It is instead about recognizing that all individuals have an intrinsic value, a value that they bear simply by being alive as human beings (or, in a different way and with a different value, nonhuman animals). This value does not render their actions irrelevant as to how we should treat them. A person can be punished for committing crimes, and at the limit may be liable to be killed in self-defense. (Does recognizing the value of equality prohibit capital punishment? That would be a larger debate, but I suspect the answer is yes.) But it does require that, however I act, I recognize the other as just as much a person as I am and act out of that recognition.
This presupposition of the equality of everyone can, as we have seen, lead us toward a position of extreme altruism. If everyone has equal intrinsic value, shouldn’t I treat everyone as equal to me and therefore not allow myself or those I care about any greater moral regard than a stranger (assuming that the stranger hasn’t done anything wrong)? That is precisely the position of
the altruist, and what we are seeking here is decency rather than altruism. Would nonviolence then require of us an altruism that would be impractical for most of us to achieve?
In the case of nonviolent political action, I don’t believe that altruism is necessary, nor that the presupposition of equality requires it. The presupposition of equality arises in a particular political context, one in which the adversary (whether individual or institutional) is committing oppressive actions against others. This adversary has already engaged in unjust behavior. The question we are considering is one of how to treat the other in our opposition to them, given that what they have done is morally compromised. We are not, as it were, starting from a zero point at which everyone is morally okay and therefore deserves equal moral consideration, which would be the assumption of extreme altruism. So in recognizing the equality of everyone, we do not have to place everyone on the same moral ground. Rather, what we need to do is to recognize the equal intrinsic value of everyone, their equal dignity as human beings, and use that to inform our actions. To put it another way, one that the philosopher Kant would fine congenial, we cannot treat others simply as means to our ends but must recognize them as ends in themselves.