some meta-blather about care ethic
I'm not sure how I got on this lately, but I've been thinking a lot about care and justice ethic, and how influential that is in how I approach fictional characters. (By "not sure," I mean I don't even know what narrative got me onto this tangent, days ago. Such is the tangled bramble of fannishness and theory that is my mind.)
In a Different Voice (not-Cliff's notes) is one of those sociological texts that manages to nail one or two salient issues in a way I've never seen before or since, and then pads itself out with a pile of talking-around that might as well be "wince now wince now wince now wince now" c&p'd several thousand times over. The gem here is the author's identification of "care ethics" and "justice ethics," which she considers qualitatively different but of equal philosophical value. "Care ethic" describes a tendency toward moral reasoning which evaluates an action as right or wrong with an emphasis on how the action impacts other people involved in the scenario. "Justice ethic" describes a tendency to evaluate moral decisions based on abstract moral ideals.
Gilligan's argument is a critique of the then-dominant tendency to value justice ethic as being more morally mature than care ethic. Based on case studies of kindergartners (*wince*), the author notes a tendency of young girls to arrive at moral decisions through rudimentary consequentialism, and a tendency of young boys to utilize appeals to moral ideals. I am not sure that I would buy an argument that this distinction is innate or universal, but I do think it fits into modern western gender socialization. Boys are encouraged to identify with a moral actor empowered to make a decision, and to take for granted that they're above those who implement or experience the fallout from that decision. Gilligan argues, and I agree, that this is an expression and normatization of male privilege in the field of ethics.
I said up there that I'm not sure how I got here, but I've got a pretty good guess. The Wrong-Shipping meme gave me some severe BSG nostalgia of late, and so I found myself trawling around for a Laura Roslin meta/discussion fix (like you do). And it struck me that DAG, does she get a lot of flack for being "ruthless" or believing that "the ends justify the means" or for flat-out being "immoral." Even among MAH PEOPLE, on posts written by fellow Roslinites (obviously I acknowledge haters only to pity the fools), all those are the qualifiers to saying "but she did it to protect her people." She's unethical, but she's unethical to protect people, goes the common character analysis - thus implicitly conceding that protection of others is not a valid ethical priority.
Friends, LJers, lend me your pixels: dis bullshit. When assessing fictional moral actors and dilemmas, as in real life, I believe it is important to treat a care ethic as having at least equal moral weight as "justice ethic" traditional appeals to moral ideals. Talk about lots of narratives and lots and lots of characters below, but I think I've spoiler-tagged any specifics.
A couple of caveats: I don't believe this is the only way to distinguish characters or storylines, I don't believe that one ethos is in a vacuum better than the other, and I don't believe all characters are or should be moral in any capacity. When I say "-ethic" below, I mean characters or decisions that tend to lean clearly in one direction or the other, not a pure and total adherence to either ethos. Also, you know those posts where I do my laughable impersonation of someone capable of objective, even-handed analysis? Fair warning that this isn't one of them.
Though I would argue on priciple that care and justice are equally necessary to morality (in both fiction and life), I tend to favor care ethic for a lot of reasons. Care ethic, because modern mass media associates it more strongly with women and femininity, is underrepresented generally and frequently undervalued when it is represented. Justice ethic, which lends itself so easily to black-and-white idealistic Moving Speeches and Heroic Gestures, gets more than enough time in the entirely-too-uncomplicated sun. Seeing care ethic portrayed is a change of pace; seeing it done well is a rare treat.
Whole narratives which are willing to accept care ethic as one among several valid types of moral reasoning, rather than as presumably subordinate, do tend to show up in narratives which are heavily informed by modern feminism. The end of Buffy is an unapologetic embrace of the care ethos.
Narratives, or individual character arcs. BSG has piles of issues around gender, around morality, and around women as moral agents. But the issues it had were glaring because it did reach in a way that very, very few narratives ever do. One thing it did that I have never seen before or since was that for over three and a half seasons, it had at the heart of its narrative a traditionally-feminine woman who was care ethic through and through, and it identified that ethos in no uncertain terms as being what made her strong. In no way did Laura Roslin have to be what the (21st century western blah blah) audience would consider "like a man" to be her amazing save-the-frakkin'-world-again self. Not physically, not in terms of self-presentation, and not morally. Not only that, but when she does "falter" in a way that bites her in the ass, it's her few forays into justice ethic. When she[S3]
chooses the ideal of democracy over her sense of responsibility and acknowledges Baltar as the winner of the election, she gets New Caprica. She supports torturing him not because she thinks it'll help, but because she wants her pound of flesh. When she goes through with Baltar's trial rather than give in to the ease and security a prompt secret airlocking would provide, she loses out spectacularly. Baltar brings out the worst in her, and he does it because he pushes exactly the right buttons to make her forget her dedication to protection of human beings, in service of some or other normative ideal.That is so rare, and completely fascinating. She is just the best, y'all.
Partly, I acknowledge, my eagerness to cheer on care ethic narratives is one of those situations where I believe it's what's right but am not sure I'd be able to follow through in thise situations, so seeing what I like to think I'd be strikes a strong chord. I see that struggle a lot in Sam Winchester, who wants to help, who is so deeply compassionate, who knows you should stop bad things from happening even to bad people - but with that visceral impulse toward vengeance, which is but justice ethic at its ugliest; who, when His People are hurt, would hold a grudge if it were an anvil slathered in Crisco.
Characters and whole stories that depict the constant human navigation not of good and bad, but of ways to be good, grab me and don't let go. I only connect with RTD's Doctor Who, not because I think it's a better narrative overall (I'm not entirely sure I do think that) but because Ten's struggle to understand his place on the care-justice continuum is one of his story's most consistent themes, and might well be his core conflict. My darling bb SPN-angels, built never even to consider the possibility of anything other than obedience to the Word ("justice ethic" at its most extreme) and learning that to feel is to let care ethic creep in and whip the rug out from under them. I bow before that last arc of BtVS S5, to a point where I can't re-watch it. Because this is what it's all about: should they choose to reduce death and pain, by breaking this deep moral taboo? And I think Buffy's answer to that question is so wrong. I think her position in those last few episodes is selfish and pointless and absolutely indefensible under this care ethic by which I truly do endeavor to live. But it's still when I engage most deeply with the character, because in my because-just-because big-sistery lizard brain, I can't bring myself to humor the possibility that I'd act any differently.
I love stories about good and bad, or gray and gray, as much as stories about ways to be good, though it's a struggle for narratives not to take the easy way out by conflating the two. Very few aphorisms make me stabbier than "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." Because the fuck it is. Good Intentions Boulevard is a dusty little two-way country road. Good Rationalizations Freeway, on the other hand, is eight bottlenecked lanes going south. It's misleading, which is bad enough on its own, but it also seems to me to be whipped out with a lot more frequency to delegitimize the perfectly responsible care-ethic concern for consequences of action and inaction. And given the strong overlap between care ethic and performance of femininity, that just starts to feel an awful lot like the same tired original sin nonsense.
That's not to say I need or want all or most decisions to come up against this issue, neither do I need care ethic decisions to be defensible to me or anyone but the character involved. Those three Petrova women are gloriously amoral forces of nature 99% of the time, but when they do make a moral choice, they always come up care-ethic. Between all of them in all aired episodes, I don't think they've once mentioned classifying a decision as "right or wrong." In the very rare instances they do give a damn, it is all about "how will this directly affect the few people in the world who matter to me others?"
All my Most Hateds? If they're moral actors at all (Draper isn't, which is of course valid as a narrative choice), they're justice ethic and insufferably macho about it. I can't pretend ever to have been nuts about Angel. But what still sends me into hissing spitting fits about him is the way he pretended to embrace care ethic in Epiphany with that "smallest act of kindness blah blah kick me I'm a liarface" and then turns around to that perverted justice ethic of a finale, wherein he actually embraces "because FUCK YOU" as a moral ideal. (In fairness to the show as a whole, I think that was exceptional characterization, and I can't not applaud Whedon's choice for "most heroic AtS character arc." BUT STILL BOO HISS.)
Because ideals are so very personal, justice ethic in narratives tends to lean on serious protagonist privilege, and without conscious consideration can end up virtually indistinguishable from garden-variety MAN PAIN. That Awful Man with his cryptic "worthy of survival" mantra he can't be bothered to actually abide by himself is only a credible moral agent if the viewer intensely privileges justice over care. Because what, the moral choices of one or two decision-makers can earn a death sentence for not only themselves, but for other individuals who don't even know that decision is occurring? Care ethic presumes, at bottom, that because individuals have intrinsic worth of their own their suffering is worth preventing and their lives are worth preserving. From this valid moral perspective, his gravelly-voiced navel-gazing about that doesn't make him a Great Thinker, it makes him a self-absorbed douche.
If there's a huge change in my reaction to a character, it's often roughly correlated to a significant shift of the character's perspective between care and justice. In retrospect, I was done with Dean Winchester the moment he[did a spoilery thing] jumped ship from care to justice in the S4 finale, when he had the nerve to puff himself up over his brave willingness to prioritize the amorphous ideal of Sam's humanity over oh, SAM'S LIFE. He lost me forever when he started appropriating care ethic in order to rationalize severe abuse of his family (yeah, yeah, forcibly lobotomizing people ain't nothin' but a thing if you say it's cause you REALLY LOVE THEM, spare me).In contrast, I had started engaging with Lee Adama a couple of seasons before, but I don't really fall for him until S4, when he gets off his rigid justice high horse and acknowledges that principles exist to serve people, not the other way around, and learns to use his dedication to ideals in service of humanity - and sure enough, this happened roughly in tandem with the character's becoming comfortable in his own gender presentation.
This isn't total, of course. I have lots of beloved characters I consider justice-oriented (Anya, for the obvious starter, though also Bonnie Bennett, and of course the Trickster). I don't do so hot with narratives that are too eager to romanticize forgiving and forgetting. Partly that's out of a pragmatic recognition that sometimes the pretense of a clean slate is not helpful, but I also do think there are situations where anger is not only justified but a vital function of self-worth.
These two ethos aren't really separate, of course. If you want peace, you must work for justice. An eye on ideals can help us take better care of each other, and a good ethical code will be rooted in the desire to do good and not harm to others. The endpoint is the same. But I'm realizing that one of my personal favorite themes in the world is the roadmap there.
In a Different Voice (not-Cliff's notes) is one of those sociological texts that manages to nail one or two salient issues in a way I've never seen before or since, and then pads itself out with a pile of talking-around that might as well be "wince now wince now wince now wince now" c&p'd several thousand times over. The gem here is the author's identification of "care ethics" and "justice ethics," which she considers qualitatively different but of equal philosophical value. "Care ethic" describes a tendency toward moral reasoning which evaluates an action as right or wrong with an emphasis on how the action impacts other people involved in the scenario. "Justice ethic" describes a tendency to evaluate moral decisions based on abstract moral ideals.
Gilligan's argument is a critique of the then-dominant tendency to value justice ethic as being more morally mature than care ethic. Based on case studies of kindergartners (*wince*), the author notes a tendency of young girls to arrive at moral decisions through rudimentary consequentialism, and a tendency of young boys to utilize appeals to moral ideals. I am not sure that I would buy an argument that this distinction is innate or universal, but I do think it fits into modern western gender socialization. Boys are encouraged to identify with a moral actor empowered to make a decision, and to take for granted that they're above those who implement or experience the fallout from that decision. Gilligan argues, and I agree, that this is an expression and normatization of male privilege in the field of ethics.
I said up there that I'm not sure how I got here, but I've got a pretty good guess. The Wrong-Shipping meme gave me some severe BSG nostalgia of late, and so I found myself trawling around for a Laura Roslin meta/discussion fix (like you do). And it struck me that DAG, does she get a lot of flack for being "ruthless" or believing that "the ends justify the means" or for flat-out being "immoral." Even among MAH PEOPLE, on posts written by fellow Roslinites (obviously I acknowledge haters only to pity the fools), all those are the qualifiers to saying "but she did it to protect her people." She's unethical, but she's unethical to protect people, goes the common character analysis - thus implicitly conceding that protection of others is not a valid ethical priority.
Friends, LJers, lend me your pixels: dis bullshit. When assessing fictional moral actors and dilemmas, as in real life, I believe it is important to treat a care ethic as having at least equal moral weight as "justice ethic" traditional appeals to moral ideals. Talk about lots of narratives and lots and lots of characters below, but I think I've spoiler-tagged any specifics.
A couple of caveats: I don't believe this is the only way to distinguish characters or storylines, I don't believe that one ethos is in a vacuum better than the other, and I don't believe all characters are or should be moral in any capacity. When I say "-ethic" below, I mean characters or decisions that tend to lean clearly in one direction or the other, not a pure and total adherence to either ethos. Also, you know those posts where I do my laughable impersonation of someone capable of objective, even-handed analysis? Fair warning that this isn't one of them.
Though I would argue on priciple that care and justice are equally necessary to morality (in both fiction and life), I tend to favor care ethic for a lot of reasons. Care ethic, because modern mass media associates it more strongly with women and femininity, is underrepresented generally and frequently undervalued when it is represented. Justice ethic, which lends itself so easily to black-and-white idealistic Moving Speeches and Heroic Gestures, gets more than enough time in the entirely-too-uncomplicated sun. Seeing care ethic portrayed is a change of pace; seeing it done well is a rare treat.
Whole narratives which are willing to accept care ethic as one among several valid types of moral reasoning, rather than as presumably subordinate, do tend to show up in narratives which are heavily informed by modern feminism. The end of Buffy is an unapologetic embrace of the care ethos.
Narratives, or individual character arcs. BSG has piles of issues around gender, around morality, and around women as moral agents. But the issues it had were glaring because it did reach in a way that very, very few narratives ever do. One thing it did that I have never seen before or since was that for over three and a half seasons, it had at the heart of its narrative a traditionally-feminine woman who was care ethic through and through, and it identified that ethos in no uncertain terms as being what made her strong. In no way did Laura Roslin have to be what the (21st century western blah blah) audience would consider "like a man" to be her amazing save-the-frakkin'-world-again self. Not physically, not in terms of self-presentation, and not morally. Not only that, but when she does "falter" in a way that bites her in the ass, it's her few forays into justice ethic. When she[S3]
chooses the ideal of democracy over her sense of responsibility and acknowledges Baltar as the winner of the election, she gets New Caprica. She supports torturing him not because she thinks it'll help, but because she wants her pound of flesh. When she goes through with Baltar's trial rather than give in to the ease and security a prompt secret airlocking would provide, she loses out spectacularly. Baltar brings out the worst in her, and he does it because he pushes exactly the right buttons to make her forget her dedication to protection of human beings, in service of some or other normative ideal.That is so rare, and completely fascinating. She is just the best, y'all.
Partly, I acknowledge, my eagerness to cheer on care ethic narratives is one of those situations where I believe it's what's right but am not sure I'd be able to follow through in thise situations, so seeing what I like to think I'd be strikes a strong chord. I see that struggle a lot in Sam Winchester, who wants to help, who is so deeply compassionate, who knows you should stop bad things from happening even to bad people - but with that visceral impulse toward vengeance, which is but justice ethic at its ugliest; who, when His People are hurt, would hold a grudge if it were an anvil slathered in Crisco.
Characters and whole stories that depict the constant human navigation not of good and bad, but of ways to be good, grab me and don't let go. I only connect with RTD's Doctor Who, not because I think it's a better narrative overall (I'm not entirely sure I do think that) but because Ten's struggle to understand his place on the care-justice continuum is one of his story's most consistent themes, and might well be his core conflict. My darling bb SPN-angels, built never even to consider the possibility of anything other than obedience to the Word ("justice ethic" at its most extreme) and learning that to feel is to let care ethic creep in and whip the rug out from under them. I bow before that last arc of BtVS S5, to a point where I can't re-watch it. Because this is what it's all about: should they choose to reduce death and pain, by breaking this deep moral taboo? And I think Buffy's answer to that question is so wrong. I think her position in those last few episodes is selfish and pointless and absolutely indefensible under this care ethic by which I truly do endeavor to live. But it's still when I engage most deeply with the character, because in my because-just-because big-sistery lizard brain, I can't bring myself to humor the possibility that I'd act any differently.
I love stories about good and bad, or gray and gray, as much as stories about ways to be good, though it's a struggle for narratives not to take the easy way out by conflating the two. Very few aphorisms make me stabbier than "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." Because the fuck it is. Good Intentions Boulevard is a dusty little two-way country road. Good Rationalizations Freeway, on the other hand, is eight bottlenecked lanes going south. It's misleading, which is bad enough on its own, but it also seems to me to be whipped out with a lot more frequency to delegitimize the perfectly responsible care-ethic concern for consequences of action and inaction. And given the strong overlap between care ethic and performance of femininity, that just starts to feel an awful lot like the same tired original sin nonsense.
That's not to say I need or want all or most decisions to come up against this issue, neither do I need care ethic decisions to be defensible to me or anyone but the character involved. Those three Petrova women are gloriously amoral forces of nature 99% of the time, but when they do make a moral choice, they always come up care-ethic. Between all of them in all aired episodes, I don't think they've once mentioned classifying a decision as "right or wrong." In the very rare instances they do give a damn, it is all about "how will this directly affect the few people in the world who matter to me others?"
All my Most Hateds? If they're moral actors at all (Draper isn't, which is of course valid as a narrative choice), they're justice ethic and insufferably macho about it. I can't pretend ever to have been nuts about Angel. But what still sends me into hissing spitting fits about him is the way he pretended to embrace care ethic in Epiphany with that "smallest act of kindness blah blah kick me I'm a liarface" and then turns around to that perverted justice ethic of a finale, wherein he actually embraces "because FUCK YOU" as a moral ideal. (In fairness to the show as a whole, I think that was exceptional characterization, and I can't not applaud Whedon's choice for "most heroic AtS character arc." BUT STILL BOO HISS.)
Because ideals are so very personal, justice ethic in narratives tends to lean on serious protagonist privilege, and without conscious consideration can end up virtually indistinguishable from garden-variety MAN PAIN. That Awful Man with his cryptic "worthy of survival" mantra he can't be bothered to actually abide by himself is only a credible moral agent if the viewer intensely privileges justice over care. Because what, the moral choices of one or two decision-makers can earn a death sentence for not only themselves, but for other individuals who don't even know that decision is occurring? Care ethic presumes, at bottom, that because individuals have intrinsic worth of their own their suffering is worth preventing and their lives are worth preserving. From this valid moral perspective, his gravelly-voiced navel-gazing about that doesn't make him a Great Thinker, it makes him a self-absorbed douche.
If there's a huge change in my reaction to a character, it's often roughly correlated to a significant shift of the character's perspective between care and justice. In retrospect, I was done with Dean Winchester the moment he[did a spoilery thing] jumped ship from care to justice in the S4 finale, when he had the nerve to puff himself up over his brave willingness to prioritize the amorphous ideal of Sam's humanity over oh, SAM'S LIFE. He lost me forever when he started appropriating care ethic in order to rationalize severe abuse of his family (yeah, yeah, forcibly lobotomizing people ain't nothin' but a thing if you say it's cause you REALLY LOVE THEM, spare me).In contrast, I had started engaging with Lee Adama a couple of seasons before, but I don't really fall for him until S4, when he gets off his rigid justice high horse and acknowledges that principles exist to serve people, not the other way around, and learns to use his dedication to ideals in service of humanity - and sure enough, this happened roughly in tandem with the character's becoming comfortable in his own gender presentation.
This isn't total, of course. I have lots of beloved characters I consider justice-oriented (Anya, for the obvious starter, though also Bonnie Bennett, and of course the Trickster). I don't do so hot with narratives that are too eager to romanticize forgiving and forgetting. Partly that's out of a pragmatic recognition that sometimes the pretense of a clean slate is not helpful, but I also do think there are situations where anger is not only justified but a vital function of self-worth.
These two ethos aren't really separate, of course. If you want peace, you must work for justice. An eye on ideals can help us take better care of each other, and a good ethical code will be rooted in the desire to do good and not harm to others. The endpoint is the same. But I'm realizing that one of my personal favorite themes in the world is the roadmap there.