Humeans, Kantians and Aristotelians as parents.

What would be the characteristics of a Humean, a Kantian or an Aristotelian parent?

The Humean mother would give a lot to her child, moved by the sentiment rather than by an abstract sense of duty. She would support the son in everything he does and see his satisfaction as hers. She would be moved by sympathy.

But the human mother may not be the best type of mother when she has more than one child. If you have two children, you must be fair between them. And acting from sentiment may not be the best way to achieve fairness. Notice that treating your children as equals does not mean giving them equal amounts of resources (i.e. money).

Consider the following example: one of your children has a great musical talent, and she is accepted by a prestigious school. You need 2000 $ a month to support him and give him this chance. The other child goes to the university in the same city where the family lives. Suppose she has failed her applications to a better college in another city, or support she did not even apply. Does it follow that the mother should give 2000 $ to the other daughter, say, to live on her own, or, if she prefers to live with the family, to spend for holidays or other leisures? I do not think so.

Treating children as equals does not mean giving them equal share of resources. It requires to achieve more complex objectives such as for example, supporting their talents equally, giving them the same opportunities equally, and the like. And this is not done, in most cases, by giving them equal shares of resources, to spend as the two children like.

The humean mother can be a very good mother when she has only one child, but may have troubles when she has more than one child. For in order to treat her children as equals, she cannot simply be guided by her sentiments. If you let your action be guided by the sentiments you may very easily end up favoring a child over the other. This will especially be when the mother finds one of the two children easier to get along with, or nicer. (According to some psychologists even beauty could condition such responses.) Or, to make a more usual example, when you recognize yourself in the career of one child more than the other. The typical example is that of a parent who wanted to become a philosopher (or a pianist, or a novelist, or to get a degree), but could not do it, and projects this ambitions on her children. (I'm sure you are familiar with this from your life, or novels and films) Suppose that such a parent has two children: one that wants to study philosophy at the university (or to study piano, or to become a writer, or simply to get a degree), and another who does not like education and finds a job immediately after the high school. The first child is much lazier than the first, she does her degree very slowly and unsuccessfully; the second is hard-working, and has even chances of setting an activity on her own. But the Humean parent treats the first child much better than the second, he favors all of her aspirations, pays her summer schools, etc... The Humean parent, who follows the voice of her hearth, is very supportive with the one of the two children, but not enough supportive with the other, the one, let us say, who has not studied but has a good idea for a business and needs the support of her family to realize her dream.

The Kantian mother, by contrast, tries to deal with the requests of her child by applying principles. In this way she avoids being misled by sentiments and prejudices. The Kantian mother adopts the principle, for example, that she should not spend the family's money to support the living expenses of a child who does not want to find a job to support herself, or the principle that she should deprive herself of money, if one child has a real opportunity, but not simply to support the hobbies or leisure activities of the child. She tries to assess if she is following a reasonable principle, instead of listening to what her hearth tells her. If the principle sounds reasonable to her, she applies it. She can be consistent because she applies the same principles to all her children: hence she can be do what fairness requires, even in complicated situations. So she will use the money for her children , when the children really need them, and she will have the strength to say “no”, when the son asks for them, even if, had she followed her hearth, she would have give him money, just to see him happy. This mother knows that if she is unable to say “no” to a son, because she loves him a lot, she will be depriving all her other children, who do not ask so much, of resources that they are entitled to have. If any other child will be in a similar situation, she know that she will follow the same principle. In this way, she can assure herself that she is treating her children as equals, and that she is not being swayed by prejudices or emotions.

But even the Kantian parent is not a perfect parent, even if she may be in general fairer than the Humean parent. The problem of a Kantian mother is that there is no antecedent criterion to establish which concrete rules should be applied in a situation that presents itself in the novel way. The Kantian mother wants to apply the principle “treats your children as equals”. She understands this as “apply the same concrete rules in your decisions towards both of your children”. But the the rule “treats your children as equal” is silent on what specific behavior should be used to deal with the first child, when the mother faces a novel situation concerning his life. The only thing that fairness commands, is that, whatever rule the mother applies to the first child, she ought to apply the same rule when she deals with a similar situation involving the second child. But the imperative of treating your children as equals is silent on what counts as a good rule to apply in the first case. The Kantian mother risks to make twice as much mistakes as the Humean mother, and to do them for the sake of respecting her principle of fairness.

For, if the Kantian mother makes a wrong decision when dealing with the situation of the first child, for example because she does not support her ambitions enough, she is going to do a wrong decision when dealing with the situation of the second child by applying a similar principle,even if she realizes now, dealing with the second child, that she could have been more generous with the first as well as with the second.

The problem arises because the Kantian mother, as well as the Humean mother's behavior, is not free from the influence of (possibly uneducated) sentiments. Suppose that the Kantian mother loves the second child more than the first, or tends to favor the second child more because she identifies more easily with her. Suppose that this mother has failed to be appropriately supportive of the first child's ambitions (because she does not identify with her, or does not love her enough.) Now the situation materializes, in which the second child has an important opportunity. The mother realizes now that it would not be generous enough towards her child, if she does not do some extra sacrifice in order to support her ambitions. She also realizes, a fortiori, that she has not been as supportive with the ambition of the first child as she should have been. She realizes, that is, that the principle which she applied in the first case was not reasonable, or that it was not reasonably applied. But given that she wants to treat her children as equals, she must decide not to support the ambition of the second child as well. A humean mother would have acted unfairly, by supporting the ambitions of the second child even thought she behaved in a different way with the first. A Kantian mother acts with fairness, but in this way fails to be appropriately generous with both children.

The problem of the Kantian mother shows the limitations of the Kantian approach in ethics. Sticking to principles and applying them in an universalistic fashion is not a guarantee of acting in the right way, unless the decision made in the first case of the application of the rule was a reasonable one in the first place.

The Aristotelian mother should overcome the problems of both the Humean mother (who acted as her sentiments or feeling moved her to act) and of the Kantian mother. The Aristotelian mother understands that it is not enough to apply reasonable rules consistently, if she does not have the practical wisdom to know how a certain rule should be applied in the first place (for example knowing how to apply the rule “be generous and supportive of your children's ambitions when they face good opportunities" in practice). Aristotelian morality realizes that knowing how to apply such rules means also having well-developed and rational sentiments and dispositions. For the problem of the Kantian mother was that she was had not been generous enough with the first child, and had failed to support her adequately when she needed this support. What prevented her to act with the right degree of generosity was her insufficient degree of empathy towards the aspirations of the first child, or her (unconscious) lack of sympathy towards the first child (a problem that did not arise when the second child found herself in a similar situation.) Aristotelian ethics knows that without a therapy of this mother sentiments towards the first child, this mother cannot apply the right rule and make the right decision in the first case. The Aristotelian mother tries to act reasonably, but knows that reason cannot tell her how much to give to her children, if it is not accompanied by well-developed emotions.

These are roughly the reasons, which lead me to favor the Aristotelian picture of morality, in which reason penetrate and shapes the sentiments, to both the Humean, based upon the sentiments, and the Kantian one, based upon pure reason.

The state, no-smoking policies, obesity, and the control of the body.

Apparently Blair "wants Britons off the sofa", as the news reported.
The author of this blog is quite near to positions of ethical perfectionism, and to the centrality of the idea of the good life for ethics. Still, the emerging "perfectionist" tendencies in society and politics, for example in its dealing with issues such as smoking and obesity worries me a bit.

What one notices is first of all a significant tendency of political institutions to deal with people's bodies and the issues concerning it. Recently, the Italian Ministry for Youth Policies, decreed that models can work only if they have a BMI (Body Mass Index) higher than 18. This policy is aimed at reducing anorexia both in young models and in younger and less young women that may be influenced by such models.

The body is therefore an "object" to be legislated upon. Laws both against anorexia and against obesity consider it as an object to be measured. It is striking that policies are concerned with both types of excess. The state, therefore, exert a pressures on either boundaries (against too much weight and against too little). This amounts, from the logical point of view, to endorsing a model of normality.

Should a government push the citizens to realize "healthy" life-styles? And does it not amount, also in view of the previous example, to imposing to its citizens a specific model of how their body should be? One almost gets the feeling that the body represents the new frontier of control by the state, after that the absorption by most democratic societies of liberal political ideas made the control of people's minds off-limit.

The most traditional forms of liberalism sees the role of the state described in the former paragraphas illegitimate. But the government may invoke different justifications for their policies, justifications in terms of political justice and economic efficiencies. For it is usually assumed that economic efficiency can be defined in value-neutral terms (in so far as people preferences are taken into account as they are , and not evaluated in terms of a pre-defined notion of the good), and that there are fairness-based laws which do not require substantial and controversial moral assumptions in order to be accepted by everybody.

One such justification starts from the existence, in most European democracies, of state-founded health care. It regards the issue of a fair distribution of its costs (fairness-based justification) or the issue of the minimization of its cost (efficiency-based justification).

The efficiency based justification first: states (that is, all of us, as taxpayers) have an interest in reducing avoidable health-care expenditure, in order to cut fiscal pressure or devote it to other social goals. Physically fitter citizens, it is often assumed, means reduced health expenditure. Or at least this is assumed to be true for what regards certain habits, like smoking, or the habits connected to obesity, for which extensive statistical research has been carried out.

Against this, it may be argued, does the state have an absolute obligation in favor of efficiency?

Because of the issue about financing health care, governments can justify policies apt to discourage the adoption of certain habits. The efficiency – based argument can ground a fairness-based argument: people who incur into “self-inflicted illnesses” represent a cost to the state that is more than what these people are entitled to receive.

Governments can therefore refuse the claim that are trying to push individuals to pursue what they see as “good” habits, in absolute terms. Certain eating habits, they can claim, are not good or bad in absolute terms, but only vis-a-vis the avoidable additional costs that smokers and people who eat in excess produce. The issue is an issue of justice: the state must prevent people who inflict harm to themselves to deprive others of otherwise available public resources. They can appeal to a liberal principle, the principle that social costs should be divided equally, or in a fair way. They must also appeal to intuitive notions about responsibility: the state should not pay (in the form of health care services) for solving every problem of which the individual can be held responsible.

In other words, the justification adduced by the state touches the big philosophical issue about the relation between responsibility, free will, and determinism. And this may represent a point of weakness, in so far as this issues are far from being well understood both philosophically and scientifically.

Another philosophical difficulty is the following. As we have seen, a liberal state professes not to be guided by value-judgments in its choice of behaviors or habits that ought to be penalized or promoted. The state penalize a certain habits, not because the majority finds it objectionable, or repellent, but because – so it is argued – they are linked – demonstrably, in statistical terms - to bad health and higher costs for the community. (Notice that the connection here is statistic.)

But is it really so? I'm not challenging the validity of statistical law. The point is that we have so many statistics about these two issues: smoking and eating habits, but there are other correlations between habits and health that are not as much studied, maybe because these habits are assumed to be legitimate. (Think about sports whose impact on health is more negative than positive, in statistical terms, at least when practiced above a certain age or for too many years. Or think about risky sports like free-climbing.)

The above referred attitude (what to study, which correlations to focus upon) must be understood in terms of commonly shared values. Western societies are – sociologically speaking – developing a perfectionist attitude towards the body. It is as if, having satisfied his or her needs as primate – food, family and house – human beings in the west need to set themselves higher goals. TV and other media present a very easy perfectionist goal: that of a beautiful, fit and healthy human body. This perfectionist ideal, more than any other, is apt to be picked up by the masses.

It requires only one instrument: the body that each of us has. It may require a bit of money for the gym, but basic physical exercise can be made at a little cost (jogging). And since the ideal is usually superficially presented (it is more an ideal of “beauty”, not of “health”), there is always the possibility to achieve it by not eating. Perfection in the body, as opposed to perfection in music or poetry, does not require musical instruments, libraries, and expensive teaching.

(This process may have occurred in history already. I'm thinking about Hegel's remarks in the “lectures on the history of philosophy”, about the ideal of the body and gymnastic in early Greek thought.)

Where am I going with this? It is in the nature of democratic governments to pick up societal tendencies, urges and values. Moreover, in the last 50 years we saw the fall of traditional ideologies. As an effect of this, of course, religious values came up on the scene. But religious values are not a viable option for our secularized societies.

Governments need to direct their actions through values that form consensus. In expressing policies directed to favor certain ideals of physical fitness and beauty, the government picks up and relates to a set of ideals which are, and are becoming increasingly popular. This of course creates a circle, a positive feed-back effect.

In conclusion, the regulation of “healthy” practices by the state may not be completely neutral in terms of values, because of the political pressure to adequate their conduct to the conceptions of the good that are widely shared. There is a legitimate suspicion that the government's action directed to deal with this issues is conditioned by widely shared value-judgments which escape the net of political values such as fairness and efficiency.

I'm not claiming that a state should be neutral, and avoid this sort of policies. But I think we should try to understand their meaning, and maybe complement them in some way. Recognizing them for what they are (or may be), namely, policies with a perfectionist background, may force us to open our eyes on their adequacy as the expression of a good perfectionist ideal.

A dialogue between a philosopher and a unfaithful wife.

A dialogue between a philosopher and an unfaithful wife.

Philosopher: P

Wife: W.

W: Hi P, I’d like to talk with you about an ethical issue.

P: What do you want to talk about?

W: Do you remember the last discussion we had, on whether it could be ever morally justified to fake an orgasm?

P: Yes.

W: Do you still believe what you told me?

P: Yes. My point was that in certain circumstances faking an orgasm may be the most reasonable thing to do. Suppose a woman loves her husband and they have children. He is a wonderful as a dad and as life companion, and a very responsible partner. Sex had never been particularly intense, moreover its quality has decreased with the time, until a point when the woman cannot have orgasms. She talks to him about the problem, she tries to instruct him about how they may have a better sex. He tries, he makes the effort. But the results do not come. But the stability of the family is based upon another type of love and affection. She realizes that he would suffer from knowing his inability to satisfy her, and – knowing her husbands personality – justly fears that if he were to know this, it may eventually turn up in a divorce... so the welfare of the children may be affected... In a case like the one I described, I think, it may not be wrong for the woman to fake an orgasm.

W. I’ve been faking my orgasms for years. My situation is similar to the one of the woman you described in your example. Now that I know that you’re quite open minded about such issues – I feel comfortable to ask you to judge me about something I’ve been doing lately. I’ve been sexually unfaithful to my man, betraying him with another lover since a couple of months.

P: Oh no, oh no. I think now you’re doing something wrong.

W: Why? Look: my husband will never get to know this. I love him. He’s a wonderful man, but my situation in terms of sexual life was just like the one of the woman in the example.

P: Why is it so much better with your lover? Are you in love with him? Are you attracted by him more than you are by your man?

W: Not really. Believe me, I really really love my husband. But we have a problem over a certain sexual practice. I need to XXXXXXXXXXXXX in order to reach an orgasm, and this is something my husband just cannot force himself to do. The new sexual partner likes the practice. So with him, I can have an orgasm easily. With this extra ingredient, with those orgasms, I'm in peace with my self, and even my family life has gained from this. My husband is happy, we still make sex, and he's got no problem getting aroused and enjoying our sex, at least now that I also fake my orgasms. Why should I not preserve this delicate equilibrium?

P: I think that you can do something wrong to someone, without making him less happy or inflicting pain of some sort.

W: Sorry, I cannot understand. I am sure that he’s never going to know about this fact. My partner is absolutely reliable. Nobody else can discover this. I’m sure it cannot be known. So what’s the problem? How can I be acting wrongly, if I found the solution that does not to hurt anybody?

P: If there is some value in promises, and if breaking them can be wrong even when this cannot be discovered, you must recognize that you are doing him a wrong, even if he may never discover you. If you accept the general principle, you should be more careful in thinking that.

W: I cannot understand what you say. How can it be wrong to do something if it will do nobody a harm.

P: We have duties towards other people that go beyond the physical or psychological harm that we can inflict to them. So let me ask you a question: suppose that you promise to your best friend, who is soon going to die, that you are going to care after his child. It is not that, if you do not, the children will die or anything particularly unpleasant will befall him. He will only go to the orphanage, and after one or two years probably he will be adopted by another family. Our orphanages are not those terrible institutions that they used to be one centurty ago. Of course, I'm not denying that if you would take the child and raise him as if he were yours, you would be doing that child a favor. But still, if you would not do it, he would not end up worse than many other children. Imagine that you do not know the child, but you were the best friend of his father. What would you do?

W: I will maintain the promise. But look, that does not prove your point. I would maintain it because his child’s well-being is at stake. If my friend had asked me something silly, for example, that I’d listen to Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue”, I may promise it indeed to him, but I would not feel bound to respect this promise after his death. It’s the well-being of the child that matters in this case.

P: This is not so simple. If all that matters is the sufferance of the child, why should you not feel a similar obligation towards other children who live in the orphanage, and would also be better off by being adopted by you? Whatever special duty you feel that you have towards this particular child, derives from your special relation with their father, and the promise you made to him. You do not regard yourself to have any similar obligation to other children in a similar situation.

W: Ok I grant your point, as a general one. But I still cannot see how it applies to the case we are discussing.

P: Well, I think that by betraying your man for another man you are doing him a wrong, even if he does not know – and will never know – about it. You are behaving unjustly to him by being unfaithful to him, and that's the sense in which you’re doing him a wrong. Try to think it in this way: there is a close relationship between the value of trust, intimacy and love. Doing sex with another man counts as a severe break in the relationship of trust and intimacy. And it affects love too. So you should be concerned about that if you think that love is an important part of your relationship, or that your partner feels in this way.

W: I still cannot see why. After all you admitted that it was ethically OK for a woman in my situation to fake her orgasm, if required by preserving the stability of the relationship and thereby the well-being of the children. And that is a case of lying, certainly a betrayal of trust and intimacy.

P: But there is lying and lying. Don’t you see that you are lying about something more important?

W: Why? You appealed to the values of trust and intimacy are values, which are connected to love. But why is sexual fidelity so important? I believe that, in the eyes of my man at least, the reason why it is important that I make sex with him, is that otherwise it will signify that he cannot satisfy me as a woman, and this is something he will not accept. Sexual satisfaction is the point that hurts most. Intimacy and trust, as you said, are important, so it is never ethical to fake an orgams. A woman should always tell the truth. By telling the truth, the man can struggle to try to satisfy her. When this is not possible, they should either split, or the man should find the way to live with this thought, and maybe allow her wife to have sex with other people. But this is a conclusion very few man, in our society, will accept.

P: But you must assume he’s a reasonable and mature man, and he cares for the well-being of your children as much as you do, and maybe you will both work out a solution. You respect your man only if you do not base your decisions on your own evaluations of how he shall react. You must assume that he can act freely, and that if you do not let him outside of your choices, you can all together make the choice that is best for all of you.

W: But then I should reason in the same way about the truth of my sexual gratification. I should not hide the truth to him, even if there is some concrete chance that this may endanger our stability as a couple.

P: Not necessarily. Your man would never tolerate the idea that you betray him for another man. This means that your fidelity is valuable to him. It is valuable intrinsically because it is connected to trust, and trust is connected to intimacy and the meaning of being a loving couple. And going to have sex with another man, hiding this from him, just deprives both of your lives from these values. Even faking your orgasms meant betraying these values, but to a lesser extent. It is hard to explain why to a lesser extent, but I think it has to do with the symbolic value that sexual fidelity has within our monogamous culture, over and above what it tells about the man's ability to satisfy a woman, even if that is an important aspect of it. Let me add that,by hiding this to him, you are also acting unfairly. You are granting yourself the possibility of getting sexual satisfaction from other people, while he may deprive himself of this satisfaction even when he may desire it. You are awarding you a right that you are not awarding to him.

W: But if I will tell him, we will split. So maybe this is what is most ethical to do. I shall just tell him about my problem, and what will come will come. I shall not regard any amount of well-being of my children as more important than my happiness, or the respect that is due to my husband.

P: I do not agree. It was justifiable to fake your orgasms for the sake of saving the children some pain. It is not ethical to be sexually unfaithful to your man. If you fake your orgasms, you can save your children some pain. That should be your main goal. But you should also respect your husband, since you say that you love him, and he seems to deserve your trust, if you want to regard yourself as moral. If you want to be moral, you should not tell him about his inability to satisfy you in bed, if you are pretty certain it will lead to separation, which will damage heavily the well-being of your children. You should continue to fake your orgasms if that is needed to make your husband happy, and stop seeing your lover. Sometimes being moral requires big sacrifices.

W: I’m sorry, but it seems to me that your view suffers from a wrong conception of woman and sex. You seem to view woman primarily in their function as bearer of children and as supporters of a family. You seem to recognize no woman the right to have a sexually rewarding life. You do not seem to understand the importance of sex in a relationship.

P: Why?

W: Because you are telling me that I should give up my sexual satisfaction. My children are 7 and 8 . How long should I wait? Shall I wait until they are 12 and 14? It may be even worse for them then. Or until they will be 20? Fifteen years without sexual satisfactions can be all - right for a woman? Is that what you think?

P: Morality requires that you sacrifice your sexual pleasure for this higher causes. Is your sexual pleasure as important as the sufferance of your children?

W. That does not look like morality to me, but rather like moralism. We agreed that my man did not deserve to be sacrificed for the sake of the welfare of my children. But then, neither shall I sacrifice my welfare for the same purpose. The welfare of my children is not all that matter: there is also my well-being. And that depends from how well my sexual life is going, to a great extent.

My reader, let me ask you a question: who do you think is right? Or maybe, none of them can be right , because the institution of monogamy and the symbolic meanings we attach to it has already ruined the couple's life, so that there is no ethical way out?