Big Thinker: Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir (1908—1986) was a French author, feminist and existential philosopher. Her unconventional life was a working experiment of her ideas – that one creates the meaning of life through free and authentic choices.
In a cruel confirmation of the sexism she criticised, Beauvoir’s work is often seen as less important than that of her partner, Jean Paul Sartre. Given the conclusions she drew were hugely influential, let’s revisit her ideas for a refresher course.
Women aren’t born, they’re made
Beauvoir’s most famous quote comes from her best-known work, The Second Sex: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”.
By this she means there is no essential definition of womanhood. Women can be anything, but social norms work hard to fit them into a particular kind of femininity. These social norms are patriarchal and born out of the male gaze.
The Second Sex argues that it’s men who define what women should be. Because men have always held more power in society, the world looks the way men want it to look. An obvious example is female beauty.
Beauvoir holds that through norms around removing body hair, makeup and uncomfortable fashion, women restrict their freedom to serve the male gaze.
This objectification of women goes deeper, until they aren’t seen as fully human. Men are seen as active, free agents who are in control of their lives. Women are described passively. They need to be protected, controlled or rescued.
It’s true, she thinks, that women aren’t always seen as passive objects, but this only happens when they impersonate men.
“Man is defined as a human being and woman as a female – whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.”
For Beauvoir, women are always cast into the role of the Other. Who they are matters less than who they’re not: men. This is an enormous problem for the existentialist, for whom the purpose of life is to freely choose who they want to be.
Everyone has to create themselves
As an existentialist, Beauvoir believed people need to live authentically. They need to choose for themselves who they want to be and how they want to live. The more pressure society – and other people – place on you, the harder it is to make an authentic choice.
Existentialists believe no matter the amount of external pressure, it is still possible to make a free choice about who we want to be. They say we can never lose our freedom, though a range of forces can make it harder to exercise. Plus, some people choose to hide from their freedom in various ways.
Some of us hide from our freedom by living in bad faith, embracing the definitions other people put on us. Men are free to reject the male gaze and stop imposing their desires onto women but many don’t. It’s easier, Beauvoir thinks, to accept the social norms we’re born into. To live freely and authentically is the greater struggle.
The importance of freedom led Beauvoir to suggest liberated women should not try to force other women to live their lives in a similar way. If a small group of women choose to reject the male gaze and define womanhood in their own way, that’s great.
But respecting other people means allowing them to live freely. If other women don’t want to join the feminist mission, Beauvoir believed they should not be forced or pressured to do so. This is important advice in an age where online shaming is often used to force people to conform to popular social views.
We’re as ageist as we are sexist
Later in life, Beauvoir applied her arguments about women in The Second Sex to the plight of the elderly. In The Coming of Age, she argued that we make assumptions and generalisations about the elderly and ageing, just like we do about women.
To her, it is as wrong to ‘other’ women because they are different from men, as it is to ‘other’ the elderly because they are different from the young. Feminist philosopher Deborah Bergoffen explains Beauvoir’s view: “As we age, the body is transformed from an instrument that engages the world into a hindrance that makes our access to the world difficult”.
Like women in The Second Sex, the elderly remain free to define themselves. They can reject the idea that physical decline makes them unable to function as authentic human beings.
In The Coming of Age, we see some of the foundations of today’s discussions about ageism and ableism. Beauvoir urges us to come back to a simple truth: the facts of our existence – what our bodies are like, for example – don’t have to define us.
More importantly, it’s wrong to define other people only by the facts of their existence.
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Ethics Explainer: Vulnerability
In philosophy, vulnerability describes the ways in which people are less self-sufficient than they think.
It explains how factors beyond our control – like other people, events, and circumstances – can impact our ability to live our best lives. The implications of vulnerability for ethics are considerable and wide reaching.
Vulnerability isn’t a new idea. The ancient Greeks recognised tuche – luck – as a goddess with considerable power. Their plays often show how a person’s circumstances alter on the whim of the gods or a random twist of luck (or, if you like, a twist of fate).
This might seem obvious to many people. Of course, external events can affect our lives. If an air conditioning unit falls out of an apartment and lands on my head tomorrow, it’s going to change my circumstances pretty dramatically. But this isn’t the kind of luck philosophers argue is relevant to ethics.
A question of character
The Stoics, a group of ancient Greek philosophers (who are experiencing a revival today) thought only our own choices could affect our character or wellbeing. If I lose my job, my happiness is only affected if I choose to react to my new circumstances badly. The Stoics thought we could control our reactions and overcome our emotions.
The Stoics, much like Buddhist philosophy, thought our main problem was one of attachment. The more attached to external things – jobs, wealth, even loved ones – the more we risk suffering if we lose those things. Instead, they recommended we only be concerned with what we can control – our own personal virtue. For Stoics, we aren’t vulnerable because the only thing that matters can’t be taken away from us: our virtue.
Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant had similar thoughts. He believed the only thing that mattered for ethics was that we act with good will. Whatever happened to us or around us, so long as we act with the intention of fulfilling our duties, we’d be in the clear, ethically speaking. It’s our rational nature – our ability to think – that defines us ethically. And thinking is completely within our control.
Both Kant and the Stoics believed the ethical life was invulnerable. External circumstances, like luck or other people, couldn’t affect our ability to make good or bad choices. As a result, whether or not we are ethical is up to us.
Can one ever be self-sufficient?
This idea of self-sufficiency has faced challenges more recently. Many philosophers simply don’t think it’s possible to be self-sufficient to the degree that the Stoics and Kant believed. But some go further – seeing a measure of virtue in vulnerability. For example, vulnerability has become a popular term among psychologists and self-help gurus like Brené Brown. They argue vulnerability, dependency, and luck make up important parts of who we are.
Several thinkers, such as Bernard Williams, Thomas Nagel, and Martha Nussbaum have criticised the idea of self-sufficiency. Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, for example, argues that dependency is in our nature.
We’re all born completely dependent on other people and will reach a similar level of dependency if we live long enough. In the meantime, we’ll be somewhat independent but will still rely on other people for help, for community, and to give meaning to our lives.
MacIntyre thinks this is true even if Kant is right and rational adults are invulnerable to luck (at least in terms of choosing to do their duty). However, against Kant, MacIntyre argues that our capacity for rationality is honed by education and the quality of our education is often beyond our control… as we are dependent on the judgement and circumstances of our parents, society, and so on. Thus, we remain vulnerable in important ways.
Mutual vulnerability
Dr Simon Longstaff, the CEO of The Ethics Centre, has made a different argument in favour of vulnerability. He argues, after Thomas Hobbes, that the reality of mutual vulnerability lies at the heart of how and why we form social bonds. As a result, he argues those who seek to eliminate all forms of vulnerability risk creating a world in which the ‘invulnerable’ show no restraint in their treatment of the vulnerable.
All of this might seem like another academic debate but our understanding of vulnerability has significant consequences for the way we judge ourselves and others. If vulnerability matters, we’re less likely to judge people based on their circumstances. We won’t expect the poor always to lift themselves out of poverty (because unlucky circumstances may deny them the means to do so) nor assume every person struggling with an addiction is necessarily morally deficient. They may simply be stuck with the outcome of events that were (at least initially) beyond their control.
We may also be a little less self-congratulatory. Recognising the ways bad luck can affect people means also seeing how we’ve benefitted from good luck. Rather than assuming all our fortune is the product of hard work and personal virtue, we might be moved by vulnerability to acknowledge how factors beyond our control have worked in our favour.
Finally, vulnerability is one of the concepts that underpins modern debates about privilege and identity politics. If we think people are self-sufficient, we’re less likely to think past injustices have any effect on their present lives. However, if we think factors beyond our control can affect not just our lives but also our character and wellbeing, we might see the claims of minorities in a more open light.
There is a final sense in which vulnerability might be important to ethics. The ‘invulnerable’ person may come to believe their judgement is perfectly formed. They might become ‘immune to doubt’. If people open themselves to the possibility they might be wrong, they live an ‘examined life’ – that is, an ethical life.
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What Harry Potter teaches you about ethics
If you’ve read the Harry Potter series – and let’s face it, many of us have – you will have gained insight into a number of things: the value of friendship, the nature of heroism, the redeeming power of love… the list goes on.
But amidst all the magic, there’s one lesson you might have missed – a lesson which is crucial to the way we think and talk about ethics. In Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Harry is able to secure the titular stone and keep it away from the villainous Voldemort for one simple reason. Even though the stone is powerful, Harry has no desire to use it.
Genius wizard Dumbledore protects the stone with an enchantment. Any person who wanted to use the stone to become immortal would never be able to access it. Only someone who wanted the stone for the right reasons would be successful. The benefits, in other words, were only available to people who didn’t want them.
If your only reasons for committing to ethics are external – because of what ethics will give you – then your motivation will come and go.
Working in ethics, it’s tempting to present the external benefits the ethical life provides to people. In convincing people to set aside self interest and do what’s right, we sometimes appeal to people’s self interest. We use the very logic we’re trying to unwind.
For example, we convince a business to take ethics seriously because it’ll enable them to recruit and keep better staff (it does). We tell a person that living ethically is more likely to make them popular, employable and happy, which it might.
The problem is, if we’re serious about getting people to live ethically, even if we win the argument, we’ve failed in achieving our goal. As soon as someone commits to acting ethically for instrumental reasons – to make money, become popular or whatever – they’re no longer doing it because they think it’s right, they’re doing it because they think it’s effective.
This is a problem. If your only reasons for committing to ethics are external – because of what ethics will give you – then your motivation will come and go. The moment ethics doesn’t help you keep staff or stay popular, your reasons for committing to living an ethical disappear.
Genuine ethical behaviour isn’t only about doing the right thing, it’s about doing it for the right reasons. It means doing what’s ethical because it’s ethical, not because it’ll give us some other advantages.
The debates around torture are a good example of this. Recently, many opponents to torture have argued ‘torture doesn’t work’, so we shouldn’t do it. But this suggests that if torture did work, we wouldn’t have any problem with it. The logic of the argument supports abandoning torture but it also supports undertaking further research to find forms of torture that do work.
But the ethical argument against torture isn’t that it doesn’t work, it’s that even if it did work, it would be wrong. In whatever walk of life you apply it, ethical demands are at their strongest when they force you to choose between what’s beneficial and what’s right.
When someone starts to use the language of ethics to pursue their own ends, they often reveal themselves through hypocrisy. Often, they abandon their so-called values when the costs get too high.
It’s easy to do the right thing when it benefits you. Ethics asks you to set aside what’s convenient, profitable or comfortable and do what’s right. Genuine ethical behaviour isn’t only about doing the right thing, it’s about doing it for the right reasons. It means doing what’s ethical because it’s ethical, not because it’ll give us some other advantages.
In short, ethics is a totally different language to that of self interest, efficiency or effectiveness. It uses different arguments, demands a different kind of thinking and asks us to reconsider our priorities.
It’s only those who are authentically committed to ethics for its own sake who inspire support and trust in the long term.
The reason this is tricky for ethicists is because ethics is a Philosopher’s Stone of sorts. It does offer lots of benefits. But like the enchanted stone in Harry Potter, these benefits are only available to the people for whom ethics isn’t about achieving them.
People value authenticity and loathe hypocrisy. When someone starts to use the language of ethics to pursue their own ends, they often reveal themselves through hypocrisy. Often they abandon their so called values when the costs get too high. When this happens, the good will and support offered by others will disappear.
It’s only those who are authentically committed to ethics for its own sake who inspire support and trust in the long term. Like the magic stone, the benefits of ethics don’t come to those who seek them, they are given to those who deserve them.
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Big Thinker: Kwame Anthony Appiah
Kwame Anthony Appiah (1954-current) is a British born, American-Ghanaian philosopher.
He is best known for his work on cosmopolitanism, a philosophy that holds all human beings as members of a single, global community. A professor of philosophy and law at New York University, he also writes the popular everyday advice column ‘The Ethicist’ in the New York Times.
We’re responsible for every human being
Because Appiah is a cosmopolitan (meaning “citizen of the world”), he believes we have just as much moral responsibility to our neighbours as we do those halfway across the world. Our obligations to other people transcend national borders, the same way they bypass political ideas and religious beliefs.
However, these obligations shouldn’t mean treating yourself unjustly. Appiah doesn’t advocate for giving everything away so you are worse off than the people you are trying to help.
By focussing too much on eliminating everything bad from the world, Appiah worries we’d fulfil our duties to others at the expense of our duties to ourselves. We’d let go of everything that makes life worth living and meaningful.
He also thinks we’re more productive when we work together. He sees our duties to others as collective rather than individual. The best way to help other people is to unite and ensure nations can provide citizens with what they need to live a good life. This means working with international aid organisations and governments. We’re all in this together.
What unites us is stronger than what divides us
For Appiah, the other basic principle of cosmopolitanism is valuing people’s differences.
“Because there are so many human possibilities worth exploring, we neither expect nor demand that every person or every society should converge on a single mode of life.”
It’s not enough to campaign for international human rights for everyone. These matter, but we should also care about the specific things that give people’s lives meaning – culture, religion, art and so on.
Besides, underneath cultural differences are often shared values and practices. Whether it’s art, friendship, norms of respect or a belief in good and evil, the things that seem so different are often based in ideas we all share.
Moral progress isn’t made by argument
In The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen Appiah argues that seriously unjust practices aren’t defeated by new moral arguments. Instead, they’re defeated by changing attitudes about what’s honourable or shameful.
Appiah points to the overthrow of slavery in Britain and the US as being largely a product of honour. Even though slave owners and traders were aware of moral arguments defending the humanity of their so called stock, that didn’t provide the impetus to change. What really overthrew it was public criticism. The appeal to honour had far more influence than any moral and philosophical ideals.
We can see honour as the middle ground between narrow self interest and self sacrificing altruism. Appiah’s point is a powerful one for people wanting to make change in the world. It would be great if everyone did the right thing for its own sake but sometimes we need a push. Honour, praise and shame can be just the thing.
It’s important to note Appiah thinks honour and ethics are separate. What is seen as honourable isn’t always the same as what’s right. Killing someone in defence of your honour is one clear example.
What’s more, as anyone who has ever logged onto Twitter knows, praise and shame can be abused. Because they are so effective at changing people’s behaviour, it’s tempting to use them when it’s entirely inappropriate. And sometimes this has disastrous effects.
The deeper point is we aren’t purely rational creatures. We work on emotion and our thoughts and actions are driven by cultural attitudes and judgements.
Being aware of this means we might be able harness our communal nature as a force for good and speak both to people’s heads and hearts.
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Putting the ‘identity’ into identity politics
‘Identity politics’, much like ‘political correctness’, is being battered in the public square.
Rather than becoming a serious category of political critique, its obscurity of meaning makes it a useful tool for opposing political ideologies. It is used as a pejorative for the political left and, at the same time, as a euphemism for white supremacy (‘white identity’). Now, even notionally left-leaning figures have started railing against identity politics, calling it divisive.
The hackneyed left/right distinction will not help us to understand the debate over identity politics. Indeed, this conflict may well reflect and reveal deep, structural features of what it is to be a human.
What is identity politics?
Identity politics seeks to give political weight to the ways in which particular groups are marginalised by the structures of society. To be a woman, a person of colour, transgender or Indigenous is to be born into a set of social meanings and power relations that constrain what sort of life is possible for you.
Your experience of the world will be conditioned in very different ways from those on the other side of social power. Identity politics, at its simplest, is an attempt to expose and respond politically to this reality.
Importantly, identity politics has always been a reaction to liberalism, although both frameworks have the same end goals of equality and ending oppression. A liberal approach to social justice sees the demand for political equality as emanating from a shared human dignity. As such, it de-emphasises difference. If only we look past the superficial things that divide us, we’re told, we see a common humanity. It washes away any justifications for discrimination on the basis of race, gender or orientation.
But liberalism can tend to mask the circumstances that make us need liberating in the first place. By focusing on universalism – the ways in which you and I are the same – I may well become more aware of our shared human equality and less sensitive to how different our lived experiences may be. So the forms of privilege I enjoy and you lack remain invisible to me.
Liberalism at its most strident treats every person as a sort of abstract locus of radical freedom and rationality. Identity politics resists that abstraction – an abstraction which, as identity politics points out, implicitly serves those on the privileged end of power imbalances. In doing so, liberalism makes it harder for us to see and dismantle the structures that perpetuate inequality.
The real gulf here isn’t between left and right or between minority and majority, it’s between two conceptions of how human beings stand in relation to their historical and cultural background. Are we defined by our place within society or do we somehow transcend it?
The philosophy of identity
“What are we?” should be the simplest question to answer, yet it is one of the most annoyingly intractable problems in philosophy. Are we minded animals or embodied minds? Are we souls? Bodies? Brains? Particular bits of brains? All of these answers have been tried, and all answer some of our everyday assumptions about personal identity while running afoul of others.
What they all have in common is they treat selves or persons as a type of object. They all regard the person from a third-person perspective. That’s the perspective we take on other people all the time, both in our everyday interactions and in trying to influence human behaviour via psychology, medicine, marketing, politics and so on. And we can take a third-person perspective on ourselves, too. Whenever you ask, “Why did I act like that?” you’re viewing yourself as an object and wondering what forces made you act one way instead of another.
Yet in your self-reflection you never, to borrow a phrase from Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘coincide’ with yourself. You view yourself as an object. Just by doing that you go beyond yourself, make yourself something different to the self you’re contemplating. Just as the eye can never catch sight of itself (but only, at best, a reflection of itself), you can only see yourself by being something more than yourself, so to speak.
You detach from all that you are – your history, your memory, your character – in order to observe yourself. That ability to detach is precisely what makes reflective endorsement or rejection of your concrete identity possible at all.
So which one are we? The observer or the observed? The object we contemplate in a field of other objects and forces – a mass of psychological drives subject to cause and effect – or the conscious subject that somehow detaches from all that? The answer has to be ‘both’. We are pretty clearly physical objects, prone to various forms of constraint, influence and control.
Yet we cannot simply disavow our past, our language or the identities society imposes on us either. But we are also something more, something that can step back from what we are, something that appears to itself as free. We’re doomed to be both these things. Our destiny is internal division.
Making sense of the identity politics debate
How does any of this relate to the issue of identity politics? Well, consider the two political anthropologies sketched above – one view says we’re constrained by the identities we find ourselves born or built into, the other that we’re all free, rational, autonomous agents.
These are exaggerations of course – most liberals don’t think we’re completely unaffected by our social situation and most proponents of identity politics don’t think we’re completely lacking in autonomy. But they pick out a genuine point of disagreement.
Both identity politics and universalism answer different but real dimensions of human existence.
One way to think of that disagreement is as a clash between the type of self we might take ourselves to be – as an object determined by history and society, or as a free, undetached locus of consciousness. That is not the whole story, but it opens up one useful way to think about it. Both identity politics and universalism answer to different but real dimensions of human existence.
Rather than simply insisting on one approach to the complete exclusion of the other, we should consider how both might be responses to irreducible and contradictory aspects of what we are.
The question is where we go from there.
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BY Pat Stokes
Dr Patrick Stokes is a senior lecturer in Philosophy at Deakin University. Follow him on Twitter – @patstokes.
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.
Easter and the humility revolution
Whether you’re sceptical there’s a man upstairs, are a lapsed Christian, or have another faith, you’re likely to be celebrating Easter. You might swap church for chocolate and paid leave, but it’s a celebration nonetheless.
For people who believe Jesus is the Son of God, the next few days mark the most important time of the year. From Holy Thursday to Easter Sunday, Christians will reflect on the death and resurrection of Christ.
It’s a story that “transformed the world we live in” according to Natasha Moore, research fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity. Moore says some of the character traits we value so highly today have their origins in what is said to have happened in those few days in Jerusalem. She takes us through the significance of Easter.
Humility: “Your Lord and teacher has washed your feet”
“The big one is humility”, Moore explains. “The fact that we today value humility and we think about leadership as service to those under your power – we trace that back entirely to Jesus.”
This all stems from the central message of Easter and of Christianity itself: God became a man and allowed himself to be killed to redeem humanity.
This was revolutionary when you compare it to the prevailing ideas about power and leadership at the time.
We have to think differently about hierarchy, privilege, power, service, leadership, and all those things.
Before Christianity, there was no real sense that humility was a virtue. Although the Ancient Greeks had a sense of hubris – excessive pride that would be punished by the gods – there was still a firm emphasis on achievement, power and status as the ways to determine someone’s moral worth.
“In the ancient world, humility was indistinguishable from humiliation … It would be horrifying that someone with power would come down to the level of someone below them,” says Moore. “If our god could submit to death and even a shameful death [like crucifixion] … we have to think differently about hierarchy, privilege, power, service, leadership and all those things.”
Tonight, priests at local parishes all the way up to the Pope himself will try to recreate these lessons. They will humble themselves by washing the feet of their congregation members.
“You see someone like the Pope doing that – power voluntarily lowering itself – and there’s something really compelling about that still,” says Moore.
Reflections on humility, service and leadership today seem appropriate. In Australia, there have been challenges posed to politicians around their use of entitlements and whether they’re being used to serve the community. We’ve witnessed populist political campaigns trying to take down ‘the elite’, suggesting the time is right for a robust conversation on what it means to lead.
Gratitude: “Give thanks to the Lord”
One of the more striking differences between the messages in the Easter story and our modern values is how people feel about being in debt. For most of us, debt is a bad thing. Whether financial or otherwise, we feel uncomfortable when we owe somebody something.
Writer Erin Joy Henry gives voice to this tendency, as she recalls declining help when moving houses despite feeling completely overwhelmed. “I didn’t want to feel that I owed anyone anything, and I constantly needed to prove to myself that I was completely self-sufficient,” she says.
Easter is a time when Christians reflect and give thanks for a debt they could never repay. They believe humanity could never redeem itself from its past sins. Instead, Jesus came to Earth and “wiped the slate clean” on behalf of humanity. “That leaves us with a massive debt of gratitude”, Moore says.
We are completely interdependent on so many other humans and so many other human activities.
This state of debt runs deep for Christians. “If God has created us, if every breath we breathe is his air into the lungs he’s given us, we owe God from the start,” Moore explains.
There’s a universal truth here. The idea of self-sufficiency is “by and large, an illusion”.
Despite the value we place on independence and autonomy, Moore thinks “we are completely interdependent on so many other humans and so many other human activities”.
Instead of avoiding debts and trying to live independently, she thinks we should lean in to interdependence and be thankful for the support we receive.
“Gratitude is an impulse that makes us happier and healthier. It’s how we’re made. I don’t think there’s a downside.
Non-violence: “He who lives by the sword dies by the sword”
“Jesus up-ended hierarchies but he also up-ended conflict … Instead of responding to violence and hostility in kind, he counselled his followers to turn the other cheek, go the extra mile and to love their enemies,” says Moore.
Although this seems “counterintuitive and incredible difficult to do,” there’s evidence to suggest it’s effective.
In Why Civil Resistance Works, researchers Maria J. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth studied a range of activist movements between 1900 and 2006. Moore summarises their findings and says that “non-violent resistance is twice as effective as violence in achieving the goals of the campaign.”
This non-violent approach has often been criticised. Many think by refusing to fight injustice, we allow it to prosper. As Barack Obama said while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, “A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince Al-Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.”
For Moore, the evidence says something different. “That sort of action can be really powerful and challenge injustice in a way violent resistance doesn’t necessarily achieve”.
It also has important lessons today. We are increasingly hostile in dealing with disagreement. From debates around punching political opponents in the face to the general tone of online discussions, perhaps non-violence is the path forward.
“Is there a way to respond to abuse and hostility online in ways that break the cycle of outrage, criticising and abusing one another?” Moore asks.
“Jesus really offers a model – you have to break that cycle”.
Reading the story today
“I would encourage somebody who isn’t religious to read the story, because it’s so culturally significant,” says Moore. However, she cautions against seeing Easter as a fictional story. It matters historically and theologically that people believe Jesus was God.
“He wouldn’t have upended the hierarchies of the ancient world and made us think the poor and the despised and the executed are still people who are immeasurably valuable … if we didn’t think he was God.”
This doesn’t mean we have to convert to the faith to get any meaning out of the story, but it might require us to be open to all possibilities.
“The story is open to anybody. It invites us to figure out what we think.”
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BY Natasha Moore
Dr Natasha Moore is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity. She has a PhD in English Literature from the University of Cambridge.
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.
Ethics Explainer: Dignity
When we say someone or something has dignity, we mean they have worth beyond their usefulness and abilities. To possess dignity is to have absolute, intrinsic and unconditional value.
The concept of dignity became prominent in the work of Immanuel Kant. He argued objects can be valuable in two different ways. They can have a price or dignity. If something has a price, it is valuable only because it is useful to us. By contrast, things with dignity are valued for their own sake. They can’t be used as tools for our own goals. Instead, we are required to show them respect. For Kant, dignity was what made something a person.
Dignity through the ages
Beliefs about where dignity comes from vary between different philosophical and religious systems. Christians believe humans have dignity because they’re made in the image of God. This is called imago dei. Kant believed humans possessed dignity because they’re rational. Others believe dignity is a way of recognising our common humanity. Some say it’s a social construct we created because it’s useful. Whatever its origin, the concept has become influential in political and ethical discourse today.
A question of human rights
Dignity is often seen as a central notion for human rights. The preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognises the “inherent dignity” of “all members of the human family”. By recognising dignity, the Declaration acknowledges ethical limits to the ways we can treat other people.
Kant captured these ethical limits in his idea of respect for persons. In every interaction with another person we are required to treat them as ends in themselves rather than tools to achieve our own goals. We fail to respect people when we treat them as tools for our own convenience or don’t give adequate attention to their needs and wishes.
When it comes to practical matters, it’s not always clear what ‘dignity and respect for persons’ require us to do. For example, in debates around assisted dying (also called assisted suicide or euthanasia) both sides use dignity to argue for opposing conclusions.
Advocates believe the best way to respect dignity is by sparing people from unnecessary or unbearable suffering, while opponents believe dignity requires us never to intentionally kill someone. They claim dignity means a person’s value isn’t diminished by pain or suffering and we are ethically required to remind the patient of this, even if the patient disagrees.
Who makes the rules?
There are also disputes about exactly who is worthy of dignity. Should it be exclusive to humans or extended to animals? And do all animals possess intrinsic value and dignity or just specific species? If animals do have dignity, we’re required to treat them with same respect we afford our fellow human beings.
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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.
5 ethical life hacks
It’s not all tough decisions – walking, sleeping and reading are some ways you can seamlessly strengthen your ethical muscles every day. Here are some activities that can help refine your ethics while you’re busy in your day-to-day life.
Get back to nature
Aristotle believed everything in nature contains “something of the marvellous”. It turns out nature might also help make us a bit more marvellous. Research by Jia Wei Zhang and colleagues revealed how “perceiving natural beauty” (basically, looking at nature and recognising how wonderful it is) can make you more prosocial. Specifically, it can make you more helpful, trusting and generous. Nice one, trees.
The apparent reason for this is because a connection with nature leads to heightened positive emotions. People are happier when they are connected with nature and other research suggests happy people tend to be more prosocial. Inadvertently, as Zhang and his colleagues learned, this means nature helps make us better team players.
Read literature to develop ‘Theory of Mind’
In psychology, ‘Theory of Mind’ refers to the ability to understand the emotions, intentions and mental states of other people and to understand that other people’s mental states are different from our own, which is a crucial component of empathy. Like most things, our Theory of Mind improves with practice.
David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano think one way of practising and developing Theory of Mind is by reading literary fiction. They believe literature “uniquely engages the psychological processes needed to gain access to characters’ subjective experiences” because it doesn’t aim to entertain readers but challenge them.
Work up a sweat
As well as the health benefits it brings, exercise can make you a more virtuous person. Philosopher Damon Young believes exercise brings about “subtle changes to our character: we are more proud, humble, generous or constant”.
Pride is usually seen as a vice but exercise can give us a healthy sense of pride, which Young defines as “taking pleasure in yourself”. Taking pleasure in ourselves and recognising ourselves as valuable has obvious benefits for self-esteem, but it also gives us a heightened sense of responsibility. By taking pride in the work we’ve invested in ourselves, we acknowledge the role we have making change in the world, a feeling with applications far broader than the gym.
Take meal breaks when you’re making decisions
In 2011, an Israeli parole board had to consider several cases on the same day. Among them were two Arab-Israelis, each of them serving 30 months for fraud. One of them received parole, the other didn’t. The only difference? One of their hearings was at the start of the day, the other at the end.
Researcher Shai Danzigner and co-authors concluded “decision fatigue” explained the difference in the judges’ decisions. They found the rate of favourable rulings were around 65% just after meal breaks at the start of the day and lunch time, but they diminished to 0% by the end of the session.
There’s some good news though. The research suggests a meal break can put your decision making back on track. Maybe it’s time to stop taking lunch at your desk.
Get a good night’s sleep
We’ve been starting to pay more attention to the social costs of exhaustion. In NSW, public awareness campaigns now list fatigue as one of the ‘big three’ factors in road fatalities alongside speeding and drunk driving. It turns out even if it doesn’t kill you, exhaustion can lead to ethical compromises and slip ups in the workplace.
In 2011, Christopher Barnes and his colleagues released a study suggesting “employees are less likely to resist the temptation to engage in unethical behaviour when they are low on sleep”. When we’re tired we experience ‘ego depletion’ that weakens our self-control. Experiments conducted by Barnes’ team suggest when we’re tired we’re vulnerable to cutting corners and cheating. So, if you’re thinking of doing something dodgy, sleep on it first.
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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.
You are more than your job
There are many ways we define our personal identity. Often, we define it by the roles we play in life.
We might think of ourselves as a child, parent, sibling, spouse, lover, friend… It is remarkable how we integrate all these different roles and relationships into our own, singular person.
People may often identify themselves according to their work. It’s been happening throughout history, as we can hear in occupational surnames such as Carpenter, Carter, Baker and Wheeler. We even link our identity with what we do for bureaucratic reasons. For example, every traveller is required to state their occupation when departing from or arriving in Australia.
Personal value has shifted focus from our character, personality, and relationships, to our role or place in society. It is no longer a question of who we are but what we do.
Casual conversations, too, eventually veer towards the question, “what do you do?” But a few years ago, I noticed the response to the question “How are you?” was changing from “I’m well” to “I’m busy”. I wondered what lay behind this altered response. What were they trying to say?
I concluded that the words “I am busy” are a proxy for “I am valued/needed”. My worth is affirmed by the fact I am in demand to the point of being busy.
If I’m correct, this marks a subtle but important change. Personal value has problematically shifted focus from our character, personality and relationships to our role or place in society. It is no longer a question of who we are but what we do.
Perhaps we should reflect on some of the deeper questions to do with identity, meaning and value.
For the most part, we might not notice this change in emphasis. However, if what I suspect is true, a holiday such as the enforced Christmas vacation could be a period of stress and dislocation for people who define themselves by their work – especially if they live alone and are without family or friends.
For some people, a job is not only a source of identity, it may also be their principal social environment, providing a regular opportunity for human contact. For such people, being deprived of this context can be a profound loss. To be ‘on leave’ is to be cut off from their principal source of identity.
Those of us with established social networks could help by reaching out to such people and making sure they’re included in holiday celebrations. Among other things, this sends a signal that the person is valued for more than their work.
Work-focused individuals could also volunteer with charities during the holiday season. This would provide a readymade social context and a valuable, alternative source of meaning and identity.
However, especially at Christmas time, perhaps we should reflect on some of the deeper questions dealing with identity, meaning and value. At the heart of ethics is a belief in the intrinsic worth of every person – irrespective of their gender, race, religion, sexuality… or job.
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BY Simon Longstaff
Simon Longstaff began his working life on Groote Eylandt in the Northern Territory of Australia. He is proud of his kinship ties to the Anindilyakwa people. After a period studying law in Sydney and teaching in Tasmania, he pursued postgraduate studies 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.” Simon is an Adjunct Professor of the Australian Graduate School of Management at UNSW, a Fellow of CPA Australia, the Royal Society of NSW and the Australian Risk Policy Institute.
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.
The etiquette of gift giving
I enjoy giving gifts, especially for my children. It’s an opportunity to think about them, who they are now and how they’re developing.
I want the gift I choose to be liked by the person who receives it but I also expect it to do other things. Does this gift tell them they are understood? Loved? Appreciated? Does it reflect our relationship? It’s a bit of a gamble and is easy to get wrong, which is why I’m often a little freer with spending my money and time on a gift than I am usually.
This deeply personal way of thinking about gifts isn’t unusual but it overlooks the shared, ritualised aspects of gift exchange. In childhood we learn a polite dance of expectation and obligation. Even though gift-giving is meant to be spontaneous and honest, it follows a predictable script of performed generosity and gratitude.
In Brooklyn Nine-Nine, the dramatic Gina offers a great example of this. She secretly opens all her presents in advance so she can rehearse her ‘opening’ expressions for later.
A gift might be given freely and without coercion, but it doesn’t come without basic obligations for the receiver of the gift: to accept the gift, to express gratitude, to reciprocate. While a gift might express or help reinforce a relationship, the giver’s intention alone is no guarantee of success.
‘Charity gifts’ like providing clean water for a community overseas are undoubtedly well motivated, but do they serve the same purpose as traditional gift giving?
The rise of ‘charity gifts’ interrupts our usual expectations of a gift as an exchange between two people or families that is motivated by a relationship. Interestingly, by donating money to a charity in another’s name the ordinary social expectations of giving are preserved. The relationship between giver and the nominal recipient of the gift might even be bolstered without any tangible exchange occurring between them.
The ultimate recipient of the gift might benefit from it but they are receiving anonymous charity rather than a gift. You might even argue that they are part of the gift being given. For those considering ‘charity gifts’, it’s worth asking: what are you giving, to who, and why?
You’re unwrapping a present, surrounded by family when you unveil the most garish, knitted socks from great Aunty Mavis. Do you have to keep them? Are you obliged to wear them?
This situation makes the tacit expectations around how to receive gifts more overt. We don’t know much about great Aunty Mavis’s motivations. She might have simply enjoyed knitting the socks and have little interest in our feelings about them. The situation requires what sociologist David Ekerdt calls an “act of reception”. Without it, Mavis’s gift giving gesture will hang in the air like an unshaken hand.
A common response, I suspect, to avoid an uncomfortable situation would be to graciously accept the gift without giving offence, and then to quietly dispose of it later. Think Colin Firth’s character wearing the Christmas themed jumper in Bridget Jones.
Of course, there’s a choice here. I’d probably put the socks on immediately and see what I could discover about them and myself, but I wouldn’t pretend to like them if I didn’t.
Children are often encouraged to write ‘Christmas lists’ and send them to Santa. Later in life, lots of people are explicit in the gifts they want to receive for Christmas or birthdays. Do these trends encourage us to think about gift giving in a different way?
As I write this, my almost eight year old has stuck a sizeable birthday list on the fridge. She wants these things but she also wants me to understand her. Her list is an attempt to ensure I don’t get her wrong. The list is important, but as her parent I don’t only want to give her the things she wants. This is where gifts differ from simply an exchange of money for goods in the market. Gifts entail risky choices and unpredictable receptions.
It feels as though there’s a tension between the act of giving a gift itself, which is an act of generosity, and the general climate of the season, which seems more self-interested. Is that tension inescapable?
Gift giving usually has a dose of both. We give because we want to, but also because we expect something in return. Even if we don’t expect the straightforward exchange of a gift in return, we might hope for a stronger relationship, to be held high in someone’s opinion, or simply to be appreciated as kind, thoughtful or generous.
To be clear, this is not the same variety of self-interest as the stereotypical selfish consumer always hungry for more. It’s self-interest, yet I don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong in wanting our lives to be good with caring relationships. Perhaps when it comes to choosing a gift, we don’t need to be so quick to disown having a pinch or two of self-interest in the gift-giving game. It might even lead to a better choice of gift than great Aunty Mavis’s socks.
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BY Ruth Quibell
Ruth Quibell is a sociologist based in Melbourne. Her most recent book is The Promise of Things.