Circles of Belonging

I’ve recently been reading about some Hollywood folks who are very concerned with how women are treated.  One of them, the director Lexi Alexander, tweeted the following:

A crew guy just said that he follows me on Twitter & wanted to thank me because he has 2 daughters. Will it always take daughters to care?

This is the fundamental problem suggested by my article on ethics vs. morals, and discussed by more philosopher and social scientists than one could possibly list. What does it take to care about people we don’t and will never know?

I care about how women are treated because they’re humans.  Why wouldn’t I care?

But why stop there? The murder of dolphins and whales, who are sentient, offends me greatly as well. Why prioritize human intelligence?

Where does the circle of belonging, of inclusion, stop?  Where do we say “That person’s problems are not my problem?”

It’s perfectly natural to care about our families, our loved ones, and especially our children, more than we care for others.  We are responsible to them to an extent we aren’t responsible to someone who lives half the world away—responsible for feeding them, housing them, clothing them, and indeed providing love to them, a need that virtually all sentient creatures have. (Remove whales or dolphins from their mothers and they are profoundly effected; while elephants clearly mourn their dead.)

At the same time, to overly prioritize those we know is to become monsters.  To say “my child is worth a hundred other children’s lives” is to have crossed over the abyss and descended into hell. The hells created by those in the “I’ve got mine, screw you, Mack” crowd are legion.

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The history of human civilization can be read as expanded circles of belonging—from bands (not families, bands) to tribes, to kingdoms and empires and on to nations.  The national impulse, responsible for so much evil, also saw the rise of benefits like pensions and unemployment insurance and universal healthcare.  Those who belonged to my nation deserved such things.  They were “one of us.”

For the longest time much of this was done through religion: The Zeus cult allowed those who belonged to it to not be strangers. People who belonged to the cult, even if of different polis or tribe, could trade together, because they were members of the same cult. If they did not treat each other properly, they believed Zeus would punish them.

Powerful, self-identifying groups of this nature, from followers of Confucius to Christians, from secular humanists to enlightenment thinkers, have brought people together and forged bonds of trust, duty, and belonging that crossed barriers of tribal, local, or even other religious circles.  The humanist claims a duty to all of humanity, believing that everyone has certain rights, including to food, shelter and fair law (justice).

There are those who go further, giving rights to non-human sentients and even animals that are traditionally our food animals.

One can make a full ethical case for all of this, but one can also make a pragmatic argument. Healthy, happy people are better to live around. Economic cripples don’t contribute to civic or economic life nearly as much as they could; the poverty of others, whether material, spiritual, or ethical impoverishes me, because I lack whatever they could have given to the world, were they able.

The same is true of the larger web of life. As animals and plants die, what they contributed to the ecosphere is lost and that loss diminishes the world in ways that will effect me, whether through loss of seafood, loss of oxygen, loss of key nutrients, or loss of potential scientific discoveries, now impossible. Every dead species is lost genetic code, code which may have held secrets to make us much richer: medicines, chemicals, genetic modifications, and so on.  We are killing the web of life which supports us and killing the wealth that nature has created for us.

The pragmatic argument is important, but pragmatics alone are never enough: Without an ethical argument, many people will violate the norms as soon as it is convenient to them; while without the pragmatic argument others will violate the norm because it makes no sense to them. (Why not kill if it’s in my interest?  Sure as heck the people who lead us have no qualms about doing so.)

To manage an ecosphere, and to manage a world full of sentients, requires valuing them intrinsically, as well as functionally—both for what they do for us and for themselves, irrespective of their utilitarian value. Until we create an ethics which does this, not only will we be far less happy and prosperous than we could be, but we will lurch from ecological disaster to ecological disaster.

The creation of an ethics of inclusion, a broad circle including all life and much that is not alive, is one of the key tasks before us.