Welcome to Your mileage may varyMy new bi-monthly advice column offers you a framework for thinking through your ethical dilemmas and philosophical questions.
Your mileage may vary Unlike other advice columns, which usually aim to give you a single answer – the underlying premise is that there is Objective “correct” answers to the complex moral questions that life throws at us. I don’t buy that place.
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So I’m reimagining the genre. My advice depends on the column Value pluralismThe idea – developed by philosophers such as Isaiah Berlin and Bernard Williams – that each person has multiple values that are equally valid but that sometimes conflict with each other. When values collide, dilemmas arise.
What happens when you value honesty, for example, but want to use ChatGPT to write your wedding speech because it will be more efficient? Or when you value but desperately want to fight climate change There are children?
When you write in doubt, I will not give you my answer; I’ll show you how to find your own. First, I have to tease out the various values at stake in question. I will then show how wise people—from ancient philosophers to metaphysical thinkers to modern scientists—have thought about these values and the conflicts between them. Finally, I will guide you to decide which value you want to emphasize more. Only you can decide that; That is why it is called a column Your mileage may vary.
Here, I answer the first Vox reader’s question, condensed and edited for clarity.
My mother is retired, disabled and poor. I assist her in her medical care by setting up appointments, talking to her doctors, and finding the medical resources she needs for her many ailments. I was also able to find a home health aide to come to her home six days a week to help with daily cleaning, cooking and other tasks.
But as she ages, I know she will need more help than I can remotely provide. And I know I can’t take on the real tasks of caring for an elderly person with so many problems. … Am I a monster for accepting the fact that she will likely end up in a state-run retirement community?
Dear Definitely-Not-A-Monster,
This is not a traditional advice column, where someone writes a question and comes up with a simple answer. In your case, however, there is one question I can answer pretty easily right off the bat: “Am I a monster?” The answer is no. The world is not divided into good guys and bad guys (despite what fairy tales and superhero movies tell us). We are all only human, trying to live up to our values as best we can in the given circumstances.
It is clear that you have multiple values at once. You want your mother to be well taken care of. You also want to be well taken care of yourself.
What could be more natural? I imagine every animal on earth feels this dilemma in their guts. And, demographically, That is a fact That more and more people will find themselves in exactly this position as the baby boomers age. But I also know from personal experience that understanding how common confusion is makes the internal tug-of-war no less confusing or painful.
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People have grappled with this painful dilemma for thousands of years. They have come up with different ways to navigate the trade-offs between these competing values, depending on the social considerations of the time. We can learn from the insights they have shown along the way.
Historically, ancient traditions that take devotion very seriously recognize that there will always be a tension between caring for your parents and caring for yourself. In Judaism, “Honor your father and your mother” is one of the Ten Commandments – not all 10! In fact, biblical commentators have understood the second commandment in Deuteronomy, “Guard yourselves and be careful of your souls,” to mean that you are obligated to care for your own body and soul.
In the Chinese ethical tradition of ConfucianismYour body is considered a gift from your parents, so harming its health (for example, pulling yourself too thin) would be disrespectful to them. It means that caring for your parents cannot be a self-defeating value.
So to ask the question “How should my mom care?” Asking the question at the wrong level of granularity. A better question might be “How should my mom be cared for, considering everyone involved?”
To answer that, you want to think about your mom’s evolving needs, but you also have to think: How much bandwidth do you have in terms of your physical and mental health? Who else trusts you – a spouse, a child, a dear friend? What other commitments do you value?
You say directly, “I know I can’t do the real work of caring for an elderly person with so many problems.” It actually makes things a lot easier in your case. Even Immanuel Kant—the 18th-century German philosopher whom I think of as Mr. Duty— said it “should” “Can” means, if you have really thought about the situation and concluded that you cannot take care of your mother on your own, then you are not morally obligated.
But here’s a more radical point to internalize: even if we imagine a scenario where you can do Take all these tasks for your mom, it doesn’t mean you have to do them. Being able to do something is necessary but not sufficient to have an obligation to do it. Even if, for example, you can take your mom with you, it doesn’t automatically follow that it’s a wise idea. It depends on the impact on everyone involved — including you.
If you think the consequences of doing something, even something “good,” is forbidden, that is not an indictment of your morality as a person. Modern life does not make Care Simple.
As surgeon Atul Gawande explains in his book to be fatalChildren lived closer to their parents and parents died earlier. It was more possible for children to become caretakers for their parents. Now, we live in a globalized world where young people often migrate to seek education or work, and survival into old age is more common. (For someone born in 1900, the Global average life expectancy was 32 years old; Now that we have more medical knowledge and less poverty, it’s 71 years, and significantly higher in high-income countries.)
Also, today’s parents have children Later on In life than in the past, so when parents reach old age, their offspring are in their prime. That means young people are trying to establish their careers and raise their own children at a time when their parents feel ill and call for help – often from afar.
Our society is not set up to handle it. And that’s one reason why retirement communities first became a widespread fixture of American life in the 1960s.
These communities vary greatly in quality. You may try to find your mom with qualities that appeal to you, but you may also have to accept the fact that her living conditions may not be ideal. She may have an unhappy time there. It is a social failure that you cannot fix alone. If you’re in a position to improve the system — if you work in public policy, say — great! Consider pulling that lever. More likely, however, given the system you live in and all your other commitments, you want to focus on what you can do about it now.
The existence of retirement communities does not mean that you should completely exempt yourself from caring for your mother. How you approach caregiving has implications for that, but it also has implications for your own moral development.
Philosopher Shannon Valor argues That the experience of caring helps build our moral character, allowing us to develop qualities such as empathy, patience and understanding. So outsourcing that task doesn’t mean abdicating the duty of nurturing others; It would also mean cheating ourselves out of a precious opportunity for growth. Valor calls it “moral expertise.”
Yet she is careful to note that caring for someone else doesn’t automatically make you a better person. If you don’t have enough resources and support at your disposal, you can become burned out, bitter, and possibly even less empathetic than you were before.
As Valor says, there is a big difference between exemption from care and exemption from care. We don’t need the former, because caring can actually help us grow as moral beings. But we want the latter, and if the retirement community gives us that by making care more sustainable, that’s a win.
Bonus: What I read
- Ancient Greeks – they are just like us! Aware that we often act against one of our core values, they named the phenomenon: Akrasia Shayla Love does a great job By explaining it In The Guardian.
- Isaiah Berlin, the grandfather of value pluralism, emphasized that it is not the same as moral relativism. Makes his tongue-in-cheek writing style This little piece A fun read.
- I love when I stumble upon a philosophical idea that actually helps me a lot in real life. I was first introduced to the idea of “moral luck” by Bernard Williams The Aeon EssayIt has done it for me.
Post I cannot take care of all my mom’s needs. Am I a monster? appeared first Vox.