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.

I have described what Karl Polanyi called the formalist approach to economy, effectively neoclassical economics: a concern with people allocating their limited resources between alternative ends. Economists call those ends “preferences”, take them as given and do not investigate them, or even really care about them. This is most obvious in their approach to markets. There, a mass of people with a variety of preferences and a range of resources are treated as an undifferentiated mass called something such as “market demand”. All that seems to be important is the transaction of money for objects. In the preceding chapter I showed the way that something else concerns many economic anthropologists: the ways that the circulation of objects reflects and affects social identities and relationships. For Marcel Mauss, and for anthropologists generally, objects that circulate in this way are called gifts, while objects that circulate in an impersonal market are called commodities.

This anthropological use of the term “commodity” is different from the Marxian use. There, as I noted previously, what is important about a commodity is not the sort of transactions in which it circulates but, instead, that it is produced with the intention of selling it, such as the cloths described in Chapter 2 (see Carrier 2018a). Further, in the market such commodities commonly are fetishized. This means that they are presented, and seen, as bearers of use and exchange value that are stripped of the processes and relations by means of which they are produced and brought to our consideration. On a supermarket shelf the bottle of soft drink tells us that it is cool and refreshing and its price is displayed. Nothing, however, tells us about the people who thought it up and made it, the drivers who brought it to the store or the assistants who put it on the shelf.

The anthropological use of “commodity” differs as well from common use, which shares that fetishism. In that use the term refers to an object that is mass-produced and with few or no distinguishing features, such as table salt or plain white T-shirts. Firms do not want to make or sell such things, but commonly seek to distinguish their wares in some way.

The countries that I know best have societies of mass consumption, and at its simplest this means that its members have a lot of stuff. They have so much that, as I noted previously, some people make a living telling them that they ought to have less, that they ought to declutter their lives and that they ought to give and value experiences rather than things. Seeing consumption as stuff accords with the economistic view of people in the market, which says that (a) people have desires, (b) if they have the money to do so they buy things that will satisfy those desires and (c) that is pretty much the end of the story.

Economic anthropologists interested in consumption view things differently, and for them the story does not end when people buy things. The buying is important, but they approach it in terms of the origin and nature of the desires and of the social and cultural context of what happens after our consumer brings the stuff home. Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood (1978: 66– 7) say that ignoring those desires and that context means that we would find it hard to distinguish the gourmet's meal from “solitary feeding, where the person wolfs or bolts his food, probably standing by his refrigerator in his overcoat”.

“What happens after our consumer brings the stuff home” covers a vast range of activity. Indeed, some have complained that the term covers so much that it is effectively meaningless; for a long time my working definition of “consumption” was “not production”. This means that what I say of work on consumption by economic anthropologists has to be very selective. One could invoke Douglas and Isherwood's (1978: 57) definition: “[A] use of material possessions that is beyond commerce and free within the law.” That has the authority of Douglas's stature in anthropology, but it is remarkably vague and its use of “material” and “possessions” is more restrictive than many would like. After all, a person at a concert can reasonably be said to be consuming music, even though the music is neither material nor the listener's possession.

I have shown how consumption reflects and makes meaning. Whether we intend it or not, whether we are conscious of it or not, what we know or are told of who consumes what serves to divide the people and things around us into different groups, which often carry evaluations and even moral loads. These groupings, meanings and associated evaluations are public, in the sense that they are what we see in movies and on television and what we read in the newspapers and on the web. They are, in a way, what everybody knows.

Of course, there is more to consumption than the expression and reproduction of public meanings. When we consume things, personal meanings and relationships also are important. They arise from our dealings with and use of different things in different contexts with different people. Economic anthropologists are some of those who have described these things and how they can be important for understanding consumption.

Consuming for social relations

Consumption routinely occurs in social relations, and it should be no surprise that it can affect and reflect those relations. This is the point that Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood pursue in The World of Goods. There they do battle with economists about why people consume the things that they do. Is it price? If so, why does the demand for some goods go down when the price goes up, while for others the demand does not change much and for yet a few others the demand goes up? Alternatively, is it the utility of things: how their properties mesh with people's wants and needs? Perhaps – but which wants and needs? Douglas and Isherwood have an answer. For them (1978: 111), “there is only one type of physical property of consumption goods that need be considered: the capacity of goods to increase personal availability”.

By that they mean that goods are valued to the degree that they allow people to interact with others. Those others can be members of the household, friends or casual acquaintances. They even can be strangers, to whom one wants to appear a proper or even desirable fellow being, a suitable candidate for interaction. The importance of this interaction intrudes on us regularly.

I have described some of the important analytical models that economic anthropologists use when they approach production and circulation, as well as historical changes in these two realms of economic life, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom. Now I want to show the kinds of insights that the models and histories can provide by using them to address something that those who read this book are likely to see as familiar: Christmas.

In the United States and the United Kingdom, Christmas is a holiday. The 25th of December is a holy day marked on the church calendar of western Christian denominations, and many believers observe it with special services and ceremonies. But Christmas is also a civic holiday, one that those of any or no religion are likely to observe as well, but in a different sense. They are likely to observe it in the shops as the Christmas displays go up and seasonal items appear on the shelves. They observe it in the office parties and family gatherings that litter December. They observe it on radio and television, as Christmas music and movies appear. Even the online solitaire that I play has a special design for playing cards at Christmas. It is this that makes Christmas a ubiquitous set of activities and experiences in these countries, and it is this civic event that concerns me in this chapter. I want to make that familiar event seem strange by making use of those analytical models and historical changes.

If you think about it, Christmas is full of contradictions for those who experience it. People tell each other that it is a festive season of good cheer, but, equally, they say that the fun is going out of it, swamped by materialism and commerce. Christmas goods seem to appear in the stores earlier every year, as do the advertisements on television telling us to buy more and more things for more and more people. This slights the religious beliefs that many see as an important part of Christmas and conflicts with religious reservations about wealth and its display. In spite of people's concern with the garish commercialization, the stores get more crowded and the websites get slower.