Ethics Explainer: Truth & Honesty
How do we know we’re telling the truth? If someone asks you for the time, do you ever consider the accuracy of your response?
In everyday life, truth is often thought of as a simple concept. Something is factual, false, or unknown. Similarly, honesty is usually seen as the difference between ‘telling the truth’ and lying (with some grey areas like white lies or equivocations in between). ‘Telling the truth’ is somewhat of a misnomer, though. Since honesty is mostly about sincerity, people can be honest without being accurate about the truth.
In philosophy, truth is anything but simple and weaves itself into a host of other areas. In epistemology, for example, philosophers interrogate the nature of truth by looking at it through the lens of knowledge.
After all, if we want to be truthful, we need to know what is true.
Figuring that out can be hard, not just practically, but metaphysically.
Theories of Truth
There are several competing theories that attempt to explain what truth is, the most popular of which is the correspondence theory. Correspondence refers to the way our minds relate to reality. In it, truth is a belief or statement that corresponds to how the world ‘really’ is independent of our minds or perceptions of it. As popular as this theory is, it does prompt the question: how do we know what the world is like outside of our experience of it?
Many people, especially scientists and philosophers, have to grapple with the idea that we are limited in our ability to understand reality. For every new discovery, there seems to be another question left unanswered. This being the case, the correspondence theory leads us to a problem of not being able to speak about things being true because we don’t have an accurate understanding of reality.
Another theory of truth is the coherence theory. This states that truth is a matter of coherence within and between systems of beliefs. Rather than the truth of our beliefs relying on a relation to the external world, it relies on their consistency with other beliefs within a system.
The strength of this theory is that it doesn’t depend on us having an accurate understanding of reality in order for us to speak about something being true. The weakness is that we can imagine there being several different comprehensive and cohesive system of beliefs that, and thus different people having different ‘true’ beliefs that are impossible to adjudicate between.
Yet another theory of truth is pragmatist, although there are a couple of varieties, as with pragmatism in general. Broadly, we can think of pragmatist truth as a more lenient and practical correspondence theory.
For pragmatists, what the world is ‘really’ like only matters as far as it impacts the usefulness of our beliefs in practice.
So, pragmatist truth is in a sense malleable; it, like the scientific method it’s closely linked with, sees truth as a useful tool for understanding the world, but recognises that with new information and experiment the ‘truth’ will change.
Ethical aspects of truth and honesty
Regardless of the theory of truth that you subscribe to, there are practical applications of truth that have a significant impact on how to behave ethically. One of these applications is honesty.
Honesty, in a simple sense, is speaking what we wholeheartedly believe to be true.
Honesty comes up a lot in classical ethical frameworks and, as with lots of ethical concepts, isn’t as straightforward as it seems.
In Aristotelian virtue ethics, honesty permeates many other virtues, like friendship, but is also a virtue in itself that lies between habitual lying and boastfulness or callousness. So, a virtue ethicist might say a severe lack of honesty would result in someone who is untrustworthy or misleading, while too much honesty might result in someone who says unnecessary truthful things at the expense of people’s feelings.
A classic example is a friend who asks you for your opinion on what they’re wearing. Let’s say you don’t think what they’re wearing is nice or flattering. You could be overly honest and hurt their feelings, you could lie and potentially embarrass them, or you could frame your honesty in a way that is moderate and constructive, like “I think this other colour/fit suits you better”.
This middle ground is also often where consequentialism lands on these kinds of interpersonal truth dynamics because of its focus on consequences. Broadly, the truth is important for social cohesion, but consequentialism might tell us to act with a bit more or a bit less honesty depending on the individual situations and outcomes, like if the truth would cause significant harm.
Deontology, on the other hand, following in the footsteps of Immanuel Kant, holds honesty as an absolute moral obligation. Kant was known to say that honesty was imperative even if a murderer was at your door asking where your friend was!
Outside of the general moral frameworks, there are some interesting ethical questions we can ask about the nature of our obligations to truth. Do certain people or relations have a stronger right to the truth? For example, many people find it acceptable and even useful to lie to children, especially when they’re young. Does this imply age or maturity has an impact on our right to the truth? If the answer to this is that it’s okay in a paternalistic capacity, then why doesn’t that usually fly with adults?
What about if we compare strangers to friends and family? Why do we intuitively feel that our close friends or family ‘deserve’ the truth from us, while someone off the street doesn’t?
If we do have a moral obligation towards the truth, does this also imply an obligation to keep ourselves well-informed so that we can be truthful in a meaningful way?
The nature of truth remains elusive, yet the way we treat it in our interpersonal lives is still as relevant as ever. Honesty is a useful and easier way of framing lots of conversations about truth, although it has its own complexities to be aware of, like the limits of its virtue.
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BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
Sportswashing: How money and politics are corrupting sport
Many believe that sport transcends politics. But it can also be used as a political tool to distract attention from human rights abuses, making sportspeople and fans complicit.
Legions of football fans with faces daubed in their national colours fill the spotless new stadium and explode into a roar when their team lands the ball in the back of net at the FIFA World Cup 2022 in Qatar.
From the promotional video alone, the scene seems to exemplify what people love about big sporting events: the emotional highs and lows; the vibrant carnivale atmosphere; the fierce competitive spirit; the skill of the athletes.
But to the millions of migrant workers in Qatar, many of whom helped build the very stadiums that are to host the games, the World Cup likely means something very different.
Qatar has long been criticised for the kafala system of sponsorship-based employment for foreign workers, which has led to underpayment, wage theft and unsafe working conditions, leaving workers powerless to change their employment circumstances. Qatar also has a history of women’s oppression, with women requiring permission from a male guardian to exercise many basic rights, such as pursuing higher education, working in certain jobs or traveling abroad. LGBTI people have also been subject to discrimination and abuse in the country, even on the lead-up to the World Cup.
So it is no accident Qatar is spending billions to host the World Cup, with estimates suggesting the government has pumped over $US 220 billion into the event – more than fifty times what Germany spent in 2006 when it hosted.
This is ‘sportswashing.’ The Qatari government is hoping it can appropriate the positive associations fans have with football to elevate its own status on the international stage and distract from its ongoing human rights violations.
And Qatar is not alone in the practice: Saudi Arabia, another nation with a problematic human rights record, has spent over $US 2 billion on its LIV Tour for golf; and China, criticised for its ongoing persecution and internment of its Uyghur minority, spent billions hosting the 2022 Winter Olympic Games.
But what’s so bad about a country with a troubling human rights record supporting or hosting an unrelated sporting competition? Does watching or travelling to that country to attend the competition make spectators complicit in human rights abuses? And shouldn’t sport be kept separate from politics? To answer these questions, we first need to be clear about what sportswashing is.
What is sportwashing?
Sportswashing refers to states – sometimes individiuals or corporations – that seek to use sport to bolster their image by distracting from their wrongdoing. It’s typically not just a matter of hosting games or supporting a national team but rather pumping money into sport specifically to change people’s attitudes about them.
Why sport?
Sport is more than just entertainment. It exemplifies what many people believe to be noble or aspirational virtues: discipline, hard work, individual excellence, teamwork. For spectators, sport generates intense feelings of belonging and a shared identity that verges on the sacred; a win for one’s team elevates oneself and one’s whole community. Sport also reaches a wide audience, including people who may not actively follow politics or world affairs.
So if a regime wants to bolster its reputation around the world, it’s hard to beat tapping into the positive associations people have with sport, especially high profile sports like golf, football or the Olympics. And all you need to do it is enough money. But what does all this money really achieve?
First impressions
What springs to mind when you think of Qatar? For many people whatever it is will be informed by what’s in the media. And if the media has been focusing on Qatar’s human rights violations, it’s these that can define their impression of the country.
This is why nations like Qatar are so keen to offer you new impressions. One function of sportswashing is to saturate the news – and internet search results – with topics other than human rights. If people know little about Qatar, and the World Cup pushes its human rights violations to the second page of Google’s search results, then fewer people will be made aware of them.
There’s another upshot of sportswashing: given many people have powerful feelings about sport, if the majority of the news they hear about Qatar is connected to their beloved game, then their feelings for sport can bleed over into their impression of the country.
Once that positive connection with sport is established, it can come to clash with negative associations they have about human rights violations, causing cognitive dissonance, which describes a tension between two opposing ideas. Most people tend to dislike the feeling of dissonance and will seek to eliminate it, often by ejecting one of the dissonant thoughts. Sportswashing nations hope that the ejected thought is the one about human rights rather than sport.
This is where sportswashing becomes ethically problematic. To the degree that it distracts from wrongdoing, such as human rights violations, it can contribute to the perpetuation of that wrongdoing. Countries are often motivated to enact reforms when they experience pressure from other states, especially large democractic states that are reacting to internal public pressure. If the population is distracted by sport, then public pressure can wane.
Just not cricket
Sportswashing is insidious, as it co-opts something that is otherwise benign and makes those who innocently endorse it complicit in achieving a political end.
But just because someone was not aware of, or chose to ignore, the political dimension of the sporting event, that doesn’t mean they are absolved of responsibility. Sadly, sportswashing makes anyone involved in it complicit to some degree.
If we believe that our ethical obligations extend to those parts of the world that we affect through our actions, then we must consider how our spectating or participating in a sportswashing event might contribute to perpetuating human rights abuses. If we are paying to attend a sportswashed event, we are contributing financially to enabling that event to take place, and through our attendance, we are normalising that activity for others.
There is an even greater ethical weight placed on the shoulders of sportspeople, who are often viewed as role models and whose behaviour can be seen to normalise certain values. This is why we place such emphasis on sportspeople behaving responsibly on and off the field, such as in nightclubs or in their private relationships.
If a sportsperson accepts money to participate in a sportswashed event, that sets a standard for others. And if they are aware of the ethically problematic nature of their hosts, then this opens them to a charge of hypocrisy, as in the case of Phil Mickelson, one of the world’s top golfers, who accepted $US 200 million to join the LIV Tour despite admitting he was aware of Saudi Arabia’s “horrible record on human rights”.
Washing sport
However, there are ways of pushing back against sportswashing. The first is to refuse to support it financially, such as by not buying tickets to the events or subscriptions to the coverage in the media. For some, this will mean missing out on watching a sacred sporting event, and it’s important not to understate how big a cost that might be for them.
However, if they choose to watch, they can consider how to reduce or nullify the impact of the sportswashing. That could involve informing themselves and others about the true state of affairs, reducing the informational distortion caused by sportswashing. In fact, there is evidence that Qatar’s World Cup sportswashing gambit may be backfiring by drawing attention to the very human rights issues it hopes to distract from.
Sportspeople have an even greater responsibility but also a greater potential impact for good. Some have refused to participate in sportswashed events, such as golfer Tiger Woods, who reportedly turned down an offer in excess of $US 700 million to join the Saudi-backed LIV Tour.
In some cases, participating in a sportswashed event can be offset if the individuals work to counter the sportswashed narrative, as in the case of the Australian Soccerros, who released a protest video about human rights in Qatar. While they are playing in the World Cup, they have used their platform to support migrant workers and the decriminalisation of same-sex relationships in Qatar. Football Australia also released a similar written statement. Arguably, more Australians now know about Qatar’s human rights record than if the state had never been chosen to host the World Cup.
When states are involved in funding sport, then sport can no longer be said to be removed from politics. Through sportswashing it becomes a political tool. If we want to maintain sport as a pure and sacred pursuit, then we must consider how we choose to engage with it and how we might avoid or counteract the power of sportswashing to distract or normalise wrongdoing.
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BY Dr Tim Dean
Dr Tim Dean is Philosopher in Residence at The Ethics Centre and author of How We Became Human: And Why We Need to Change.
When are secrets best kept?
Throughout the ages, people subject to the torments of even the most oppressive regimes have found solace in the fact that even when their bodies are controlled, their minds can remain free.
People have the capacity to hold information and beliefs that cannot be discerned by any mind other than their own. Of course, in many cases (but not all) the mental reserves needed to preserve a secret can be destroyed by those who employ torture. However, only the most vicious and desperate resort to such despicable acts – and even then, they can never be sure that what they are told is actually true. But that is another topic for another time.
For now, I want to highlight the remarkable strength of secrets – a strength conferred by their retention in regions of the human mind that are inaccessible to others.
The fact that we cannot ‘read minds’ allows each of us a particular kind of freedom.
However, it would be a lonely existence if we were not also endowed with the capacity to share our thinking with others through all of the forms of communication available to us – physical, verbal, literal, and symbolic. So, for the most part, we liberally share our thoughts, feelings and beliefs in word and deed – while retaining some things entirely to ourselves.
While this is the context in which secrets exist, it’s important to note the distinction between ‘having’ and ‘holding’ secrets. In the first case, secrets can be our own – something that we know we choose not to disclose to others. In the second case, secrets can ‘belong’ to someone else who has shared them with us – on the condition we preserve the secrecy of what has been disclosed.
There are many examples of both kinds of secret. For example, a person may have suffered some kind of sexual assault in their youth but, for a range of reasons, may never disclose this to another soul. It will be their secret – and they will take it to the grave. Alternatively, if they share this secret with another person – on the condition that no other person ever know this truth – then the latter person will have agreed to hold the secret for as long as required to do so by the person whose secret has been shared with them.
It’s easy to see in this example just some of the problems with secrets. Let’s suppose that the person who abused the youth is still at large – possibly still offending. Does the person who ‘holds’ the secret have an obligation to prevent harm that is greater than the obligation to protect their friend’s secret? One might hope that the friend would agree to reveal the identity of the malefactor. However, what if they refuse? What if a person at risk of abuse asks a direct question about the person whom you know to be a threat to them? Are you required to lie or to dissemble in order to keep the secret?
Of course, the ability to have and to hold secrets can also enable great evil. For example, some secrets can obscure damaging, false beliefs that – even if sincerely held – present grave risks to individuals or whole communities. We can see such ‘secret knowledge’ at work in certain cults and conspiracy theories. Because secret, these sometimes deadly false beliefs cannot be challenged or amended by exposure to the ‘sunlight’ of open enquiry and debate. Deadly secrets can fester and grow in the dark to the point where they can poison whole sections of the community.
What’s more, perverse forms of secrecy can be employed by powerful interests as a tool to control others. Whole regimes have been propped up by ‘secret police’, the cloaking of wrongdoing behind the veil of ‘official secrets’, and so on.
The ethics of secrets have a practical bearing on matters affecting individuals, groups and whole societies. Core questions include: Is there a distinction between a ‘confidence’ and a ‘secret’? Do certain people have a right to know information that others wish to keep secret? Are we ever obliged to disclose another person’s secret? What, if anything, is a ‘legitimate secret’? Who decides questions of legitimacy? How does one balance the interests of individuals and society?
Join Dr Simon Longstaff on Thur 23 Nov as he lifts the lid on secrets and their role in living an ethical life. The Ethics of Secrets tickets on sale now.
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BY Simon Longstaff
After studying law in Sydney and teaching in Tasmania, Simon pursued postgraduate studies in philosophy as a Member of Magdalene College, Cambridge. In 1991, Simon commenced his work as the first Executive Director of The Ethics Centre. In 2013, he was made an officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for “distinguished service to the community through the promotion of ethical standards in governance and business, to improving corporate responsibility, and to philosophy.”
Those regular folk are the real sickos: The Bachelor, sex and love
In 2021, the star of the US iteration of The Bachelorette, Katie Thurston, made international news off the back of one thirty second clip. In it, Thurston, all smiles and fey giggles, announced that she was forbidding the male contestants searching for her endless love from masturbating.
“I kind of had this idea I thought would be fun, where the guys in the house all have to agree to withhold their self-care as long as possible, if you know what I mean,” Thurston told the show’s two hosts, to a great deal of laughter and blushing. What was she was doing was what Bachelorette stars – and indeed many of those who feature in that brand of modern reality television focused on love and sex – have done for years.
Namely, she was upholding the show’s characteristic, and very strange, mix of euphemism and the explicit stating of norms that are so well-trodden in the culture that they’re not even acknowledged as norms at all.
Indeed, the most surprising thing about the clip was that it generated chatter, from both mainstream outlets and social media, in the first place. The Bachelorette’s habit of not so much ignoring the elephant in the corner, but ignoring the corner, and the walls connected to the corner, and perhaps even the entire room, has been part of its fabric from its very conception.
This is a show ostensibly about desire and love – which is a way of saying that it is about different states that circle around, and often lead to or follow from, sex – that shirks desperately away from most of the ways that we understand these things.
All we get on the desire front is a lot of people who pay a certain kind of attention to their bodies, occasionally – extremely occasionally – kissing one another. And all we get on the love front is a lot of talk about forever and eternity, along with roses, champagne flutes, and tears. Sex, meanwhile, lies far beyond the show’s window of acceptable or even conceivable behaviours. It’s there but it’s not there, a part of the very foundation of the show that’s still so taboo that if someone dares speak it aloud, as Thurston did, they’ll be the odd one.
This backlash to a bizarre norm constructed and maintained by the cameras was taken to an extreme in the case of Abbie Chatfield, a contestant on the Australian version of the show. For daring to tell Bachelor Matt Agnew that she “really wanted” to have sex with him, and admitting that she was “really horny”, Chatfield drew ire from not only the usual anti-sex bores, but from the so-called “sensible mainstream centre.” She was called a slut; her behaviour designated outrageous.
Such a backlash wasn’t just a policing of women’s bodies, though it was that. It was also a policing of the very standards of desire, part of a long attempt to prettify and clean up matters of sex and love, into “good” (read: socially acceptable) talk about these matters, and “bad” (read: unhinged, dangerous, impolite) talk about them.
In a society with a healthier understanding of sexuality, Chatfield wouldn’t be the deviation. The whole strange apparatus around her would be.
Whose Normal?
What makes The Bachelor and The Bachelorette such fascinating, internally frustrated objects is that their restating of the normal reaches such a volume, and resists so many specifics, that it reveals how utterly not-normal, arbitrary, and ill-defined most normal stuff is.
For instance, there is much talk in The Bachelor and The Bachelorette about romantic “compatibility”, a bizarre standard frequently talked about in the culture without ever being actually, you know, talked about. On this compatibility view of love, the pursuit of a significant other is a process of finding someone to fit into your life, as though you have one goal for how you want to be, and only one person who can help you achieve that. It’s that popular meme of the human being as an incomplete jigsaw puzzle, picking up pieces, one by one, and trying to slot them in.
What The Bachelor and The Bachelorette usually reveal, however, is that actually working out who is “the one” for you is much more difficult than the show’s own repeated emphasis on compatibility implies.
The stars of these shows frequently love and desire multiple people at the same time – the entire dramatic tension of the show comes from their final selection of a partner being surprising and tense.
If this compatibility stuff was as simple as it often described – or even clearly explicated – then we’d know after thirty seconds spent between potential two life partners that they’d end up together. There’d be no hook; no narrative arc. Eyes would lock, hearts would flutter, and the puzzle piece would just slot in.
In actuality, on both of these shows, the decision to pick one person over another frequently feels deeply random, and the always vague star usually has to blur their explanations even further into the abstract to justify why they want to be with him, and not with him, or with him.
The Bachelor and The Bachelorette are supposedly triumphant testaments to monogamy – almost all seasons of the show, except the one starring Nick Cummins, the Honey Badger, end with two and only two people walking off together.
But actually, in their typically confused way, they also end up explicating the benefits of polyamory. Often, the stars of these shows have a lot of fun, and derive a lot of pleasure and purpose from being intimate and romantic with a number of people at the same time. When it comes time to choose their “one”, it is frequently with tears – on a number of occasions, the stars have said, in so many words, “why not both?”
Get Those Freaks Away From Me
And why not both? Or more than both? The season of The Bachelor where no contestant is eliminated, everyone goes on dates together, and they all end up having sex and falling in love with one another, is no stranger than the season where only two walk into the sunset.
Monogamy is a norm, which is to say that it is an utterly arbitrary thing spoken loudly enough to seem iron-wrought. Norms are forceful; they tell us that things are the way they are, and could be no other way. In fact, they are so forceful that they have to state not only their own definitional boundaries, but also the boundaries of the thing that they are not – not just pushing the alien away, but the very act of designating things alien in the first place.
It was the philosopher Michel Foucault who noted this habit of branding certain objects, habits, or people as “other” in order to better understand and designate the normal. The Bachelor and The Bachelorette do this both frequently and implicitly, never drawing attention to the hand that is forever sketching abrupt and hurried lines in the sand.
Just consider the things that would be astonishing in the shows’ worlds, without even having to be taboo. For instance, imagine a star being perfectly happy committing to none of the contestants, and merely having sex with a few of them, one after the other. Or a star choosing a contestant but, rather than speaking of their flawless connection together, emphasising “mere” fun, or “mere” pleasure.
None of the preceding critique of these shows is a call to eradicate romantic and sexual norms altogether, if such an definitional cleansing were even possible. We have to make decisions about how we navigate the world together, and norms become a shorthand way of describing these decisions. What we should remember throughout, however, is that we are free to change this shorthand up whenever we like. And more than that, we should resist, wherever possible, the urge to create the other.
After all, if The Bachelor and The Bachelorette tell us anything, it’s that those regular folks are the real sickos.
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BY Joseph Earp
Joseph Earp is a poet, journalist and philosophy student. He is currently undertaking his PhD at the University of Sydney, studying the work of David Hume.
Appreciation or appropriation? The impacts of stealing culture
It’s Halloween season. Perhaps your child has just watched Encanto and they’ve asked to wear Bruno’s ruana as a costume for trick-or-treating. Deciding how to answer requires traversing murky moral territory and unpacking the term ‘cultural appropriation.’
Recently, there has been a serious shift in thinking about what makes for an ethically appropriate costume, attracting considerable media attention from the likes of The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Conversation. The primary concern is that when white people dress-up in outfits removed from their original cultural context, this constitutes cultural appropriation. But what exactly makes cultural appropriation ethically problematic? And does this mean that certain Halloween costumes, such as Bruno’s ruana, are off-the-table for white people?
At the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in September 2022, the session ‘Stealing Culture’ questioned whether cultural appropriation is an important ethical concept at all. This sounds like a strange enquiry since the answer seems like a clear ‘yes’. However, Luara Ferracioli, a philosopher at the University of Sydney, gave a surprising response: while charges of appropriation target serious moral wrongs, “we don’t need an umbrella term like ‘cultural appropriation’”. It is merely a catch-all phrase for a range of problematic behaviour that doesn’t capture anything morally distinctive.
When there is something genuinely wrong that a charge of cultural appropriation aims to pick out, Luara argues that we would do better simply to help ourselves to the variety of familiar and more precise ethical concepts already at our disposal, such as exploitation, misrepresentation, and causing offense. This results in a striking conclusion: the term ‘cultural appropriation’ is redundant, so we should eliminate it from our moral vocabulary.
I disagree with Luara. The concept of cultural appropriation is an important resource for moral thinking because it allows us to identify a very specific way that marginalised cultures are subjected to erosion by outsiders and subsumed within dominant ways of life. And with Halloween just around the corner, we should be especially worried about the appropriation of culturally significant outfits.
So what is cultural appropriation?
Starting with the second part of the term, appropriation involves taking something for one’s own use, often without permission. Cultural appropriation occurs when what is taken belongs to a culture that is not one’s own. A distinctive watermark of our time is the salience of this phenomenon in the public’s moral imagination, tending to focus on situations where a cultural material is taken out of context and worn solely for looks.
Overwhelmingly, the moral concern of appropriation has been directed at the practices of white people, such as Justin Bieber’s wearing of dreadlocks, Timna Woollard’s mimicking of Indigenous art, and the use of tribal symbolism by the Washington ‘Redskins’. As we approach Halloween, costumes are becoming a primary source of worry. Animated films such as Moana, Coco, Aladdin, and Mulan are extremely popular with children, and a spring of inspiration for potential ‘costumes’—such as the ruana worn by Bruno in Encanto. The main characters of these films are not white. And the films track the stories of protagonists engaging with distinctive forms of life, and the particular problems that emerge within them, may be quite unfamiliar to the typical white person.
When a white child wears, say, a ruana to resemble Bruno, what causes uneasiness is not just that it might be offensive. Rather, what makes it troubling is its connection to the historical oppression responsible for existing systems of unjust hierarchy, such as egregious histories of settler colonialism, on-going practices of ethnic discrimination, and growing material inequalities that track skin-colour.
What makes cultural appropriation ethically problematic?
Cultural appropriation is ethically problematic because of its unique way of exacerbating conditions of unjust inequality. Because of this, we must be extremely judicious about our choice of Halloween costume.
When a white person wears a ruana as a costume, each instance might not appear to require much moral attention. But when these acts are repeated over time, what emerges is something dangerous. A causal feedback loop between the taker and the cultural material results in changing the material’s significance. For example, the ruana, which is native to Colombia, and initially made by its indigenous and Mestizo people, risks transformation from being a garment contained within Colombian culture and history, to a ‘costume’ available for white people to imbue with new cultural meaning.
This is what make cultural appropriation a unique moral issue. Because cultural materials partly define the identity of a cultural group, such as the kippah for Jewish people or the kimono in Japanese culture, when these materials are appropriated by another group and imbued with new cultural meaning, the boundaries between the groups start to blur.
It becomes difficult to locate the fault lines between the culture that has taken and the culture that has been taken from. Continuing with our example, if the ruana becomes forcibly transfigured to meet the costume-related desires of white society, this will result in the ruana becoming a ‘shared’ cultural material; something that neither belongs to just one culture, but a common artefact that partly defines both.
Perhaps this doesn’t seem like such a bad thing. Cultural exchange can be mutually beneficial, after all. But in the context of historical oppression, cultural appropriation is morally alarming. Consider Colombia. It was colonised by the Spanish in the 1500s, and with this came violence, genocide, disease and environmental destruction. The impacts of this history are still felt today, with socio-economic disparities, compromised life opportunities, insecurity and violence, political instability, mass displacement, and a struggle for the recognition and respect of indigenous peoples.
Being sensitive to the history of oppression and its present impact means we must be morally on-guard against appropriation.
Colonisation in particular requires a special kind of wariness. Given how cultural appropriation can erode and obscure cultural identity boundaries, it is instrumental in furthering colonising projects. Specifically, the effect of cultural appropriation on cultures is asymmetrical: marginalised cultures become ‘subsumed’ within dominant ways of life. For example, the ruana, if continuously used by white people, could become a shared cultural artefact dominantly understood as a colourful ‘poncho’ to be worn at Halloween, rather than something at the heart of Colombian cultural practices.
This unique way of exacerbating conditions of inequality means that cultural appropriation is a moral concept worth holding onto. Contrary to Luara’s scepticism, there isn’t anything else in our bag of moral terminology up to the task of capturing the distinctive wrong that historically marginalised cultures face when they are subjected to changes from the outside.
Appreciate, but not appropriate
Does this mean we can never engage with unfamiliar cultural materials? In order to answer, we must consider the distinction between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation. Where the former erodes cultural boundaries, the latter respects them. But appreciating culture takes considered effort.
Firstly, it’s important to learn the cultural significance of a material and whether its use is a contribution to an existing cultural practice, rather than playing a role in establishing a new one. Secondly, we should understand whether others will interpret their use of a cultural material in the same way as them. For example, when one wears a ruana to a traditional Colombian festival, one contributes to existing cultural practices, and one can be seen by others to be participating in this way. This keeps the ruana within its cultural domain rather than giving it new meaning that overshadows it original significance.
When it comes to a child requesting to wear a culturally significant outfit for Halloween we need to be mindful of the context in which it is worn, and if it’s taken outside of its cultural context, then consider whether it could be a case of cultural appropriation.
And remember that there are kinds of costume that do not risk diluting other cultures or reinforcing historical injustices. By practising cultural awareness, we can enjoy events like Halloween and do so in a way that respects and appreciates other cultures.
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BY Paul-Mikhail Catapang Podosky
Paul-Mikhail Catapang Podosky (he/they) is a Filipinx philosopher, passionate about all things related to human drama. His research investigates the limits of conceptual engineering as a tool for promoting social justice, and in the critical philosophy of race and gender, he explores the politics of classification, with a specific focus on mixed-race identity. Previously, he was Global Perspectives on Society Fellow at New York University, and he is presently Lecturer in Philosophy at Macquarie University.
The sponsorship dilemma: How to decide if the money is worth it
More sporting and arts bodies are thinking hard about whom they’re willing to accept funding or sponsorship deals from. But how are they to weigh the competing interests of their organisations, players and artists, and the general public?
When First Nations netballer Donnell Wallam spoke out to seek an exemption from wearing the logo of major sponsor, Hancock Prospecting, she sparked a national conversation around the role of sponsorship in sport, and what voice players ought to have in choosing which sponsors they accept and which logos they wear on their jerseys.
In the case of Wallam, Netball Australia had just signed at $15 million sponsorship deal with Hancock Prospecting, run by Gina Reinhart, the daughter of the founder, Lang Hancock. This was seen by Netball Australia as a much-needed injection of funding to compensate for the multi-million dollar debt the sport’s governing body had accrued during years of COVID-19 lockdowns and travel restrictions.
But Wallam saw something else. Front of mind for her were comments made by Lang Hancock in a 1984 documentary where he advocated that any Indigenous peoples who had not been assimilated ought to be rounded up and sterilised.
After a weeks of debate and negotiation, Hancock Prospecting withdrew from the sponsorship deal, offering short-term funding until the sporting body could find a new sponsor. In a parting shot, the company released a statement saying “it is unnecessary for sports organisations to be used as the vehicle for social or political causes” and that “there are more targeted and genuine ways to progress social or political causes without virtue signalling or for self-publicity”.
However, there is good reason to believe that Wallam and Netball Australia’s actions were more than a ‘virtue signalling’ exercise, but rather part of an increasing trend of sporting bodies and other organisations thinking carefully about whom they accept funding from and which industries they are willing to be associated with.
In recent times, a group of high-profile Freemantle Dockers players and supporters have called for the club to drop oil and gas company Woodside Energy over concerns about climate change. Australian test cricket captain, Pat Cummins, has also declined to appear in any promotional material for Cricket Australia sponsor Alinta Energy, a move backed by former Wallabies captain, and ACT senator, David Pockock.
Arts organisations have been wrestling with similar questions for some years, prompted by incidents such as the Sydney Biennale in 2014 severing its relationship with Transfield, which operated immigration detention centres, after an artist boycott, and the Sydney Festival in 2022 deciding to suspend all funding agreements with foreign governments after an artist boycott due to a sponsorship agreement with the Israeli embassy.
So how should businesses and other organisations, including sporting and arts bodies, decide whom to accept money from? How should they weigh the interests of players, artists, supporters and the wider public with their financial needs and their organisational values? How do they avoid making rash decisions that themselves trigger a backlash?
How to decide
These are difficult questions to answer, which is why The Ethics Centre has developed a specialised decision-making approach, Decision Lab, to help businesses and other organisations navigate difficult ethical terrain and make better decisions.
The Decision Lab process is designed to bring implicit thinking and buried assumptions to the surface so they can be discussed and debated in the open, providing tools to evaluate decisions before they are committed to so that key considerations are not overlooked.
The foundation of the Decision Lab is gaining a deeper understanding of the organisation’s foundational purpose for being, its values and the principles that guide it. These ought to be the starting point of any big decision, but published mission statements and codes of ethics are often overwhelmed in practice by the organisation’s Shadow Values, which are woven into the unspoken culture. The Decision Lab seeks to bring these values to the surface so they can scrutinised, revised and applied as needed.
The Decision Lab also employs a decision-making model that follows a step-by-step process that covers all the elements necessary to make a comprehensive and defendable decision. This includes factoring in what is known, unknown and assumed, such as how the funding might positively or negatively impact the community, or how it might help to promote a cause that the organisation doesn’t believe in.
It also considers the impacts of a decision on all stakeholders, including the wider community and future generations, and not just those who are closely connected to the decision.
The process also teases out the specific clash of values and principles around a particular decision, which is useful because many dilemmas follow a similar form. So if an organisation has an existing solution to one problem, it might find it already has the necessary reasoning and jusification to respond to another situation that follows the same pattern.
Finally, the Decision Lab applies a ‘no regrets’ test to ensure that nothing has been overlooked. This helps avoid situations where a decision is made yet it runs into problems that could have been forseen if the organisation had applied a more rigorous decision making process, such as a counter-backlash by other segments of their community.
The Decision Lab supports the executive team to align their decisions with the organisation’s ethics framework and helps to communicate with all the key stakeholders the rationale for decisions. By applying a more rigorous decision-making process, an organisation is better able to balance competing interests, resulting in more ethical decisions aligned to its purpose, values and principles that will hold up in the face of scrutiny.
The Ethics Centre is a thought leader in assessing organisational cultural health and building leadership capability to make good ethical decisions. To find our more about Decision Lab, or arrange a confidential conversation contact the team at consulting@ethics.org.au. Visit our consulting page to learn more.
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Should corporate Australia have a voice?
The Albanese government is preparing for the fight of its life to convince Australians an Indigenous advisory body, known as the Voice to Parliament, should receive a simple “yes” in a referendum due to take place in October 2023. But whether the Australian business community should abstain or pick a side in the campaign is a little more complex.
Some business leaders have already openly backed the Voice. CSL’s Brian McNamee called embedding Indigenous people into our Constitution for the first time nothing less than a “greater need” for the nation. Lendlease’s CEO Tony Lombardo said his company was “right behind” the Uluru Statement from the Heart and had urged his staff to think deeply about the constitutional amendment and the benefits for our First Nations peoples and the broader Australian community.
But business taking a public stance wasn’t always so. In decades prior, corporations strained to stay impartial by not weighing in on heavily politicised or social issues, seeing it as a polarising death wish amid the cohort of its customers who may err to the other side (though big political donations were a telling exception to this unofficial rule).
But the rise of social media in the era where progressive politics has assembled earth-shaking movements like Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and the fight to stop climate change has created a corporate environment where it’s not only expected companies to weigh in on big-ticket items – it’s great for business if they do.
Nearly 80% of Australians believe big brands should use their power to make an impact for real-world change on social and workplace inequality, according to research conducted by Nine and cultural insights agency FiftyFive5 – and it can turn into big bucks for corporations.
When beloved ice cream brand Ben & Jerry’s, which accounts for 3% of the worldwide market, announced in 2021 that it was stopping sales “in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT)” because it was “inconsistent with our values”, Ben & Jerry’s sales saw a 9% yearly growth (though frustrated parent company Unilever denied the two were linked).
And it seems the Albanese government is all but expecting corporate Australia to take a stance on the Voice one way or another. In 2019, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declared to the Business Council of Australia that business should feel free to speak out on social issues that align with their values.
“The most successful businesses operate in ways that reflect the values of their employees and their customers,” the then-opposition leader said.
“You are not just takers of profit – you see yourselves as part of the community.”
Albanese’s comments followed a heated speech from Scott Morrison’s assistant minister Ben Morton declaring chief executives “too often succumb or pander to similar pressures from noisy, highly orchestrated campaigns of elites typified by groups such as GetUp or activist shareholders”, foreshadowing the Teal uprising in the May federal election.
But corporate activism doesn’t have to mean go woke or go broke – as long as a company is seen as being consistent with its long-held values, a customer base or wider community will accept a more conservative position on a social or political issue too, as Daniel Korschun and N. Craig Smith write for the Harvard Business Review.
“People are surprisingly accepting of a company’s political viewpoints as long as they believe that it is being forthright,” the pair write.
“When a company makes sudden changes to its procedures or identity, it can raise red flags, especially with consumers for whom reliability is essential.”
To this end, a corporate in Australia that openly supports the “Yes” campaign for the Voice to Parliament may first quietly seek to understand the company’s own history with Indigenous Australia to avoid damning accusations of “woke washing” from the public.
Director of The Ethics Alliance, Cris Parker suggests leaders seek the answer to questions like: how many First Nations people are employed at the organisation, and is it far less than the 3% in wider society? Has the organisation proactively supported these staff, providing a culturally sensitive environment that recognises Indigenous rights?
“Basically, are you living the values of whatever social issue internally that you are considering speaking out about publicly?” Parker says.
For instance, when Nike released its “Dream Crazy” campaign to support Colin Kaepernick taking a knee during the American national anthem to protest police brutality, some were quick to point out Nike’s own reputation for using the sweatshop labour of people of colour abroad in countries like China.
Further, hot-button issues can polarise people not only within the customer base but within the work culture. Parker suggests that a corporation may add the most value during this time by fostering an environment where people can respectfully share ideas and reflect on issues together.
“Perhaps standing on a pedestal isn’t the approach which will have the greatest impact. Perhaps the impact of corporations is to demonstrate the ability to create spaces where there can be civil and informed debate – not to provide the decision or choice but to impartially inform employees and encourage intelligent enquiry,” Parker continues.
“When organisations shift to a specific advocacy position, particularly if it’s about members of our community, they risk disempowering those members and really we should be supporting self-determination.”
The best way to do this? Go back to the work culture, Parker suggests, and seek to use organisational values to create space for discussion, where crucially, everyone can feel included in the conversation.
Image by Matt Hrkac
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You might be interested in…
BY The Ethics Alliance
The Ethics Alliance is a community of organisations sharing insights and learning together, to find a better way of doing business. The Alliance is an initiative of The Ethics Centre.
BY Emma Elsworthy
Before joining Crikey in 2021 as a journalist and newsletter editor, Emma was a breaking news reporter in the ABC’s Sydney newsroom, a journalist for BBC Australia, and a journalist within Fairfax Media’s regional network. She was part of a team awarded a Walkley for coverage of the 2019-2020 bushfire crisis, and won the Australian Press Council prize in 2013.
Big Thinker: Kimberlé Crenshaw
Kimberlé Crenshaw (1959-present) is one of the most influential feminist philosophers of our time. She is known for her advocacy for American civil rights, being a leading scholar of critical race theory, and pioneering what we now know as the third wave of feminism.
Crenshaw was born in Ohio, US in 1959. As a child, she grew up through the US civil rights and second wave feminist movements, both which occured throughout the 1960s and 70s. This time of revolutionary movements towards equality influenced how Crenshaw was raised.
“My mom was a little bit more radical and confrontational and my father was a little bit more Martin Luther King and ‘find common ground’. Which is probably why there are strains of both of those in my work.”
In 1984, Crenshaw graduated from Harvard Law School. At this time, there was only one woman and one Black professor of the 60 who were tenured. She is now a tenured professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and splits her time there with the Columbia School of Law in NYC.
Where do race and gender meet?
“I argue that Black women are sometimes excluded from feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse because both are predicated on a discrete set of experiences that often does not accurately reflect the interaction of race and gender.”
Crenshaw is most notable for coining the term “intersectionality,” which refers to the idea that when someone has multiple identities, it causes them to experience different and compounded forms of oppression. Rather than oppression being additive across multiple identities, intersectionality tells us that the experience of oppression will be multiplied. For example, a Black woman will experience discrimination because she is Black, because she is a woman, and also because she is a Black woman – which is a different kind of discrimination altogether.
“Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated.”
In the academic world, the term intersectionality debuted in Crenshaw’s 1989 paper Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. Many scholars would say that the publishing of this paper catalysed the third wave of feminism, which is characterised by advocates demanding a more wholistic type of equality for people of all genders, races, socioeconomic backgrounds, abilities, ages, and in all countries.
Two years after the paper was published, Crenshaw assisted Professor Anita Hill’s legal team during Judge Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearing to the US Supreme Court in October of 1991. In an interview with the Guardian, she reflects that the experience cemented the need for an intersectional theory of social justice. It was clear that “race was playing a role in making some women vulnerable to heightened patterns of sexual abuse [a]nd … anti-racism wasn’t very good at dealing with that issue.”
Intersectionality finally appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary in 2015, where it is defined as “the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.”
A founder of critical race theory
“You can’t fix a problem you can’t name.”
Crenshaw has also spent a large part of her academic career developing and writing about what is now known as critical race theory. In its purest form, critical race theory is a 40-year-old academic framework that concerns itself with defining and understanding the plethora of ways that race impacts American institutions and systems, and how American institutions and culture uphold racist ideals. Crenshaw’s own definition, however, is more of a verb than a noun. For her, critical race theory is “a way of seeing, attending to, accounting for, tracing and analysing the ways that race is produced.”
One of the big cultural issues in the 21st century in America has been whether to teach critical race theory in public schools across the country. Parents and politicians across America have fought to remove what they think critical race theory is out of children’s education. They have argued that CRT is racist and teaches kids to “hate their own country.” Crenshaw now says she sees her work “as talking back against those who would normalise and neutralise intolerable conditions in our lives.”
Where to now?
Crenshaw continues to educate and inspire the next generation by teaching classes in Advanced Critical Race Theory, Civil Rights, Intersectional Perspectives on Race, Gender and the Criminalization of Women & Girls, and Race, Law and Representation at UCLA. At Columbia, she continues to work on the AAPF and through the forum, co-authored a paper in 2015 with Andrea Richie entitled Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women.
She regularly writes for a number of publications and provides commentary for the new outlets MSNBC and NPR. Crenshaw also hosts her own podcast Intersectionality Matters.
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BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
Age of the machines: Do algorithms spell doom for humanity?
The world’s biggest social media platform’s slide into a cesspit of fake news, clickbait and shouty trolling was no accident.
“Facebook gives the most reach to the most extreme ideas. They didn’t set out to do it, but they made a whole bunch of individual choices for business reasons,” Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen said.
In her Festival of Dangerous Ideas talk Unmasking Facebook, data engineer Haugen explained that back in Facebook’s halcyon days of 2008, when it actually was about your family and friends, your personal circle wasn’t making enough content to keep you regularly engaged on the platform. To encourage more screentime, Facebook introduced Pages and Groups and started pushing them on its users, even adding people automatically if they interacted with content. Naturally, the more out-there groups became the more popular ones – in 2016, 65% of people who joined neo-Nazi groups in Germany joined because Facebook suggested them.
By 2019 (if not earlier), 60% of all content that people saw on Facebook was from their Groups, pushing out legitimate news sources, bi-partisan political parties, non-profits, small businesses and other pages that didn’t pay to promote their posts. Haugen estimates content from Groups is now 85% of Facebook.
I was working for an online publisher between 2013 and 2016, and our traffic was entirely at the will of the Facebook algorithm. Some weeks we’d be prominent in people’s feeds and get great traffic, other weeks it would change without warning and our traffic and revenue would drop to nothing. By 2016, the situation had gotten so bad that I was made redundant and in 2018 the website folded entirely and disappeared from the internet.
Personal grievances aside, Facebook has also had sinister implications for democracy and impacts on genocide, as Haugen reminds us. The 2016 Trump election exposed serious privacy deficits at Facebook when 87 million users had their data leaked to Cambridge Analytica for targeted pro-Trump political advertising. Enterprising Macedonian fake news writers exploited the carousel recommended link function to make US$40 million pumping out insane – and highly clickable – alt-right conspiracy theories that undoubtedly played a part in helping Trump into the White House – along with the hackers spreading anti-Clinton hate from the Glavset in St Petersburg.
Worse, the Myanmar government sent military officials to Russia to learn to use online propaganda techniques for their genocide of the Muslim Rohingya from 2016 onwards, flooding Facebook with vitriolic anti-Rohingya misinformation and inciting violence against them. As The Guardian reported, around that time Facebook had only two Burmese-speaking content moderators. Facebook has also been blamed for “supercharging hate speech and inciting ethnic violence” (Vice) in Ethiopia over the past two years, with engagement-based ranking pushing the most extreme content to the top and English-first content moderation systems being no match for linguistically diverse environments where Facebook is the internet.
There are design tools that can drive down the spread of misinformation, like forcing people to click on an article before they blindly share it and putting up a barrier between fourth person plus sharers, so they must copy and paste content before they can share or react to it. These have the same efficacy at preventing misinformation spread as third-party fact-checkers and work multi-lingually, Haugen said, and we can mobilise as nations and customers to put pressure on companies to implement them.
But the best thing we can do is insist on having humans involved in the decision-making process about where to focus our attention, because AI and computers will always automatically opt for the most extreme content that gets the most clicks and eyeballs.
For technology writer Kevin Roose, though, in his talk Caught in a Web, we are already surrounded by artificial intelligence and algorithms, and they’re only going to get smarter, more sophisticated, and more deeply entrenched.
70% of our time on YouTube is now spent watching videos suggested by recommendation engines, and 30% of Amazon page views are from recommendations. We let Netflix preference shows for us, Spotify curate radio for us, Google Maps tell us which way to drive or walk, and with the Internet of Things, smart fridges even order milk and eggs for us before we know we need them.
A commercialised tool one AI researcher told Roose about called pedestrian reidentification can identify you from multiple CCTV feeds, put that together with your phone’s location data and bank transactions and figure out to serve you an ad for banana bread as you’re getting off the train and walking towards your favourite café.
And in news that will horrify but not surprise journalists, Roose said we’re entering a new age of ubiquitous synthetic media, in which articles written by machines will be hyper personalised at point of click for each reader by crawling your social media profiles.
After 125 years of the reign of ‘all the news that’s fit to print’, we’re now entering the era of “all the news that’s dynamically generated and personalised by machines to achieve business objectives.”
How can we fight back and resist this seemingly inevitable drift towards automation, surveillance and passivity? Roose highlights three things to do:
Quoting Socrates, Know Thyself. Know your own preferences and whether you’re choosing something because you like it or because the algorithm suggested it to you.
Resist Machine Drift – this is where we unconsciously hand over more and more of our decisions to machines, and “it’s the first step in losing our autonomy.” He recommends “preference mapping” – writing down a list of all your choices in a day, from what you ate or listened to, to what route you took to work. Did you make the decisions, or did an app help you?
Invest in Humanity. By this he means investing time in improving our deeply human skills that computers aren’t good at, like moral courage, empathy and divergent, creative thinking.
Roose is optimistic in this regard – as AI gets better at understanding us and insinuating its way into our lives, he thinks we’re going to see a renewed reverence for humanism and the things machines can’t do. That means more appreciation for the ‘soft’ skills of health care workers, teachers, therapists, and even an artisanal journalism movement written by humans.
I can’t be quite as optimistic as Roose – these soft skills have never been highly valued in capitalism and I can’t see it changing (I really hope I’m wrong), but I do agree with him that each new generation of social media app (e.g. Tik Tok and BeReal), in the global West at least, will be less toxic than the one before it, driven by the demands of Millennials and Generation Z, and those to come.
Eventually, this generational movement away from the legacy social media platforms, which have become infected with toxicity, will cause them to either collapse or completely reshape their business model to be like newer apps if they’re going to keep operating in fragile countries and emerging economies.
And that’s one reason to not let the machines win.
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BY Nick Jarvis
Nick Jarvis is a Sydney-based editor and writer on the arts, culture and technology. He's written for The Ethics Centre, the Walkleys, Sydney Festival, Sydney Film Festival, Vice and many Australian arts organisations. He currently works for Sydney Festival.
Should we abolish the institution of marriage?
As it stands, in the western world, marriage is the legal union between two people who are typically romantic or sexual partners. Some philosophers are now revisiting the institution of marriage and asking what can be done to reform it, and if it should exist at all.
The institution of marriage has been around for over 4,000 years. Historians first see instances of marriages popping up around 2350 BCE in Mesopotamia, or modern day Iraq. Marriage turned a woman into a man’s object whose primary purpose was producing legitimate offspring.
Throughout the following centuries and millennia, the institution of marriage evolved. As the Roman Catholic church grew in power throughout the 6th, 7th, and 8th centuries, marriage became widely accepted as a sacrament, or a ceremony that imparted divine grace on two people. During the Middle Ages, as land ownership became an important part of wealth and status, marriage was about securing male heirs to pass down wealth and increasing family status by having a daughter marrying a land-owning man.
“The property-like status of women was evident in Western societies like Rome and Greece, where wives were taken solely for the purpose of bearing legitimate children and, in most cases, were treated like dependents and confined to activities such as caring for children, cooking, and keeping house.”
The thinking that a marriage should be about love really only began in the 1500s, during a period now known as the Renaissance. Not much improved with regard to equality for women, but the movement did put forth the idea that two parties should enter a marriage consensually. Instead of women being viewed as property to be bought and sold with a dowry, women had more autonomy which elevated their social status. Into the 1700s, while the working class were essentially free to marry who they wanted (as long as they married people in the same social class), girls born into aristocratic families were betrothed as infants and married as teenagers in financial alliances between families.
But marriage doesn’t look like this anymore, right? It’s easy to forget that interracial marriage was illegal in the United States until 1967 and until 1985 in South Africa. Marital rape only became a crime in all American states in 1993. Australia only legalised gay marriage at the end of 2017, making it one of 31 countries to do so. In the 4,000 years of marriage, most legalised marriage equality has happened in the last 50 years.
The nasty history of marriage has prompted some philosophers to ask: is it time to get rid of the institution of marriage? Or, is it possible to reform?
An argument for the abolition of marriage
“Freedom for women cannot be won without the abolition of marriage.”
In the last hundred years, there has been plenty of discourse about where marriage fits into modern life. One notable voice, Sheila Cronan, a feminist activist who participated actively in the second wave feminist movement in America, argued that marriage is comparable to slavery, as women performed free labour in the home and were reliant on their husbands for financial and social protection.
“Attack on such issues as employment discrimination are superfluous; as long as women are working for free in the home we cannot expect our demands for equal pay outside the home to be taken seriously.”
Cronan believed that it would be impossible to achieve true gender equality as long as marriage remained a dominant institution. The comparison of marriage to slavery was hugely controversial, though, because white women had significantly better living conditions and security than slaves. In a modern, western context, Cronan’s article may seem like a bit of an overstatement on the woes of marriage.
Is there an alternative to abolition?
Another contribution to the philosophy of marriage is the work of Elizabeth Brake. Instead of abolishing marriage, she puts forward a theory in her 2010 paper What Political Liberalism Implies for Marriage Law called “minimal marriage,” which claims that any people should be allowed to get married and enjoy all the legal rights that come with it, regardless of the kind of relationship they are in or the number of people in it.
Brake argues that when the state allows some kinds of marriages but not other kinds, the state is asserting one kind of relationship as more morally acceptable than another. Marriage in the western world provides a number of legal benefits: visitation rights in hospitals if someone gets sick, fewer complications around joint bank accounts, and the right to inherit the estate if a partner dies, to name a few. It is also often viewed as a better or superior kind of relationship, so those who are not allowed to get married are seen as being in an inferior kind of relationship.
Take for example the case of two elderly women who are close friends and have lived together for the last 30 years. If one of the elderly women falls ill and needs to go to hospital, her friend might not be able to visit her because she is not a spouse or next-of-kin. If she passes away and her friend is not in her will, then the friend will have no say over what happens to her estate. The reason these friends were not married was because they felt no romantic attraction to each other. But Brake asks us: why should their relationship be seen as less valuable or less important than a romantic one? Why should their caring relationship not be afforded the legal rights of marriage?
Many legal rights are tied to marriage. In the US, there are over 1000 federal “statutory provisions,” or clauses written in the law, in which marital status is a factor in determining who gets a benefit, privilege, or right. Brake argues that reforming marriage to be “minimal” is the best way to ensure that as many people as possible have these legal rights.
So, what should the future of marriage be?
Many people today will say that the day they got married was one of the best days of their lives. However, just because we have a more positive view of it now does not erase the thousands of years of discriminatory history. In addition, practices such as child marriage and arranged marriages that no longer occur in the western world are still the norm in other parts of the world.
While Cronan presents a strong argument for abolishing marriage and Brake presents a strong argument for its reform , we need to examine the underlying social ills that make marriage so complicated. Additionally, there’s no guarantee that abolishing or reforming marriage will eliminate the sexism, racism, and homophobia that create the conditions for marriage to be so discriminatory in the first place. Marriage may not be creating inequality as much as it is a symptom of inequality. While the question of what to do with marriage is worth interrogating, it’s important to consider the larger role it might play in creating social change and working towards equality.
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