A CHALLENGE TO TRADITIONAL MORAL THEORY

In the 1960s and 1970s, the field of moral development in psychology was dominated by a single figure. Lawrence Kohlberg, who might even be considered one of the founders of the field, constructed a scale of human moral development that was taken to be the model for understanding the evolution of a person's moral maturity.

His approach was to offer a three-level scale of development, where each level was divided into two stages. The first level is that of pre-conventional morality. At this level there is nothing we would recognize as a moral code. The first stage in this level is that of avoiding punishment. If the child does the right thing, it's simply to avoid whatever penalty their family happens to mete out for behavioural violations: room time, dessert withdrawal, loud rebukes, or some creative means of making the kid feel crappy for having done the wrong thing. This is followed by a second stage in which the goal is not avoiding punishment but gaining praise or some sort of other reward. It's still self-interested, but now the motivation is positive rather than negative. It's about acquiring a good rather than avoiding a loss: candy as opposed to time-out.

Conventional morality is the next level. Here's where most people end up, since they can't or at least don't rise to the level of post-conventional morality. The first stage in this level is interpersonal concordance. Here the goal is the moral approval of others, but it's limited to surrounding others – family and friends, mostly. In this period, the child conforms to the morality of those around them and does so to foster and nourish the connection with those with whom they are in contact. What matters is the local social bond rather than any overarching principles. From there, the person graduates to the fourth stage, that of law and order. Here there is a sense of right and wrong above and beyond personal relationships, but it's a rigid code that doesn't allow of nuance or exception.

If I had a dollar for every self-care book on the market, I’d be standing on a street corner handing this book out for free. There are thousands and thousands of them: emotional, spiritual, mindful, mental, health; for men, women, people with ADHD, people without ADHD, people who overthink, people who underthink, people with immature parents, people with substance abuse problems, narcissistic people, teenagers, dummies, breastfeeders, cats; there is even witchcraft for self-care, which, okay, is kind of intriguing.

This chapter isn't going to offer a bunch of advice about how to take care of yourself. (I’m hardly the person to do that.) Instead, it will consider one thinker's suggestion for a way to think about our lives as a whole. But mostly it's interested in the place of self-care in philosophy: how it looks, what role it has, how we might think about it. We’ll start with the place of self-care in traditional moral theories, then turn again to Harry Frankfurt and his interesting suggestion that self-love is the purest form of love, and finally to a historical view of self-care offered by the philosopher and historian Michel Foucault. All three traditional Western moral theories – consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics – offer a moral allowance for a person to look after themselves. Whether we would want to call these moral places “self-care” is another issue, one we’ll look into as we canvas each theory. None of them, however, require complete self-sacrifice in the name of moral rectitude. Morality isn’t, in these views, just about altruism, although in the end they’re all pretty stringent.

Consequentialism, especially in its most common form of utilitarianism, says that your interests don't count any more than anyone else’s. But they don't count for any less, either. Recall that consequentialism is interested in the results, or consequences, of an act. In its most popular utilitarian version, it focuses on happiness. More happiness, better; less happiness, worse. This is easy to misunderstand. More happiness doesn't mean happiness for more people. It just means more total happiness.

The previous chapter focused on care among human beings. However, care ethics isn't limited to humans. Recall Tronto and Fisher's definition of care: “On the most general level, we suggest that caring be viewed as a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world‘ so that we can live in it as well as possible”. The “world” they‘re referring to includes not just humans but other animals, the environment, social and political systems, precious objects, and so on. In this chapter, then, we‘ll turn our attention to some of the non-human inhabitants of our world in order to see what caring looks like in regard to them. Let's start with the inhabitants closest to us.

PETS

In our old house we sort of lived with a cat. The cat's name was Sammy, or Rufus, depending on which of our offspring you asked. I say “sort of ” because while the cat lived outside on a backyard lawn with a treehouse, we had decided to live inside prior to getting the cat. The reason Sammy/Rufus lived outside was that I was allergic to cats and my family wanted me to keep from having itchy skin and a runny nose all the time. They also respected the fact that I don't like pets. Because they cared.

I also say “lived with” instead of “owned”. Legally, of course, we owned Sammy/Rufus. If he had attacked a neighbour or a neighbour's pet, we would have been responsible for the damages. (He was actually pretty chill, so that wasn‘t a problem. Like other cats, he did go on the occasional walkabout, but that's pretty much it.) If we had mistreated him, we would have been liable under anti-cruelty laws. In short, we were responsible for him and his behaviour. In that sense, he was like our offspring back when they could properly be referred to as kids.

But notice here that responsibility doesn't require ownership. The fact that I‘m legally responsible for the behaviour of some creature does not necessarily mean that I own it.

VIGNETTES OF CARING

About a year ago I met a self-described surfer dude at a conference. We got to talking, and I asked him the kind of socially awkward question a philosopher who is writing a book on the philosophy of care might ask. “What would it be like for you”, I asked, “if all of a sudden you had some injury or developed some condition that barred you from surfing for the rest of your life?” Perhaps knowing that I was a philosopher and therefore to be given significant social indulgence, he didn't seem at all bothered by the question. He told me that it would be a great loss for him; in fact, he would feel as though he had lost a bit of himself.

Then I posed the following scenario. Suppose he had been unable to surf for a long time, but surfing had gone on without him. However, later, all surfing had to stop. It had been outlawed, or the climate crisis had made it impossible somehow, or something like that. Would that matter to him?

He immediately said that it would. He loved to surf, and would miss it terribly if he couldn't do it anymore. But it would be good to know that surfing was going on, even without him. It would be a real loss to him if it no longer happened. A different kind of loss from the one if he had to stop surfing himself, but still a real loss.

There are people who are really concerned about justice. Not the “It's unfair!” demand of justice for them, but justice itself. The kind of people I’m thinking of here have what we might call an ideal, an ideal that isn't just about what people experience when they are the object of injustice. Of course, there are different views of what is just. For some people, an equal distribution of social goods is the ideal of justice, while for others it would be merit-based: that is, people getting what they have earned. Still others think of justice in terms of maximum liberty for people to do what they want to do.

In the previous chapters we’ve been discussing care as having two fundamental characteristics: importance to the person who cares and a sense of loss (grief, regret, frustration, anger, and so on) if the object of care is threatened in some way. Back in the first chapter, however, I raised the question of whether caring could happen without the second characteristic. Could someone care about something without experiencing a sense of loss if that something is harmed or dies or disappears? Or, alternatively, is it impossible, really, to care about something without the possibility of a sense of loss as part of the package? In short, does care require vulnerability?

There are philosophies among whose goals, it seems, is to protect us against vulnerability – Buddhism and Stoicism in particular (both of which seem to be wildly popular these days as ways of coping with our fraught world). If caring and vulnerability are a package deal, this would seem to imply that Buddhists and Stoics are incapable of caring. That seems an odd thing to say. While for most of us caring and vulnerability go together, is it necessarily true? Are Buddhists and Stoics in fact barred from the experience of caring? The issue is more complicated to sort out than it might seem. In order to do that sorting, we’ll first need to get a basic grasp on these two philosophies.

BUDDHISM

The question “What is Buddhism?” is not so much a query seeking a simple answer as an opening onto a tangle of complexities. Basic issues, such as whether Buddhism is a philosophy or a religion, are subject of long debate and disagreement. I once wrote a column for a newspaper (2014b) that was mildly critical of Buddhism, and received a number of angry comments from self-professed Buddhists claiming that I had completely misunderstood what it was all about. (I know, I also found their anger ironic.) One person told me that by referring to the Four Noble Truths – more on that in a minute – I was being too logical and missing the point of Buddhism, which was really just a feeling. Now, in a way, I can get the sense of “that Buddhist feeling”, but I can't help thinking there's more to Buddhism than that.

When Anthony Morgan and Steven Gerrard approached me about writing a book on the philosophy of care, I was immediately drawn to the project. Not only is care a central (but often philosophically neglected) aspect of the human – as well as non-human – experience, but we live in a time where the call to care has largely been sidelined in favour of various calls to arms. What follows is my attempt to offer at least an overview of some of the richness that philosophical thought about care has to offer.

My thanks go to both Anthony and Steven for allowing me the space to write this book and for their suggestions along the way. My former colleague Chris Grau has, as always, been a wonderful conversational partner in the face of a number of sticky philosophical points. My spouse, Kathleen, read the entire manuscript and offered many suggestions that I hope will make the book less incoherent and poorly considered than it otherwise might have been.

I dedicate this book to Kathleen, David, Rachel and Joel. Where would I be without their caring?

There are many things, aside from surfing, that we may care about, and many ways of caring. We care about people, ideals, places, sports, activities and non-human animals. Within these categories, and undoubtedly others, we have particular objects of care. We have friends, loved ones and close acquaintances. We care about justice or equality or decency or duty or happiness or some combination of these. We might care about Peru or England or Japan or Brunei or Sierra Leone or Norway. Basketball, hockey, curling, handball and baseball are all objects of care for many. And we care about our pets or our environment or the Brazilian rain forest or the continued existence of Siberian tigers.

Moreover, across these particular objects of care are different kinds of caring: love, concern, rooting (in the case of sports teams), enjoyment, pride, protectiveness, and the various forms of engagement that these and other types of care involve.

The objects and types of care listed here – along with many others you undoubtedly thought of while reading these – although extensive, don't capture the most significant aspect of care. Care is what ties us most profoundly to the world. It is our way of binding ourselves to the world through our passionate engagement with particular things in particular ways. It reveals who we are by revealing our most important relationships with what is outside of us.

And even to use the phrase “outside of us” doesn't capture the pervasiveness of the world through our caring. In caring, not only do we reach out both emotionally and behaviourally to the world; the world reaches into us. Our caring happens out there, to be sure. But it also happens in here, where my thoughts and my emotions are born and nourished. It is the profoundest form of commerce between me and the world in which my life takes place. Were there no caring, both me and the world would be diminished, impoverished in numerous ways.

This book has been only an introduction to the philosophy of caring. But the philosophy of caring is, in many ways, itself only in its infancy. Frankfurt's writings on care date from the early 1980s, as does care ethics.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has generated a staggering amount of hype in the past several years. But is it the game-changer it has been cracked up to be? And, if so, how is it changing the game? John Zerilli's 2021 book, A Citizen's Guide to Artificial Intelligence, explores the implications of AI for our lives as citizens across a number of different domains, including political, legal and economic ones. In this conversation with Zerilli, Shannon Vallor, one of the world's leading AI ethicists, explores the interplay between the ethical and the political, the scope of AI ethics, the dangers posed by our increased reliance on AI systems, and much more.

Shannon Vallor is the Baillie Gifford Professor in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh. Her research explores how emerging technologies reshape human moral and intellectual character, and maps the ethical challenges and opportunities posed by new uses of data and artificial intelligence.

John Zerilli is the Chancellor's Fellow in AI, Data and the Rule of Law at Edinburgh Law School. His research interests include the interplay between cognitive science, artificial intelligence and the law.

John Zerilli (JZ): I am interested in addressing more than just what we would consider to be questions of an ethical nature pertaining to the individual and how they confront moral dilemmas in their own lives. So, my first question is about AI ethics as a discipline, and how it connects to politics. There is this meme that suggests that AI ethics really isn't a very interesting specialization at all, because the questions that pop up are just questions whose answers are uncontroversial. The meme states that, “The ethics of AI is no different from the ethics of a pencil”. The idea is that you shouldn't go around stabbing people with pencils, you shouldn't use pencils to write racist or sexist things, you shouldn't throw pencils at people, and so on. Similarly: don't be racist with AI technologies, don't be sexist, don't write and perpetuate discriminatory stereotypes using AI. Is there anything more to AI ethics than just this sort of bland vision?