'Situational Ethics'

One of my more popular posts , or to call them what they are, short essays, was I think "The Person and Her Situation." In it I proposed something I called 'situational ethics'. Admittedly this term is already taken, is someone else's intellectual property – I should find some other name for it, such as 'contextual ethics' or 'Cartesian ethics', but, the notion of the 'situation' being so central to the theory, until I am struck by some blindingly illuminating forked epiphany, I might as well stick with 'situational ethics' and hope some more original title will occur to me at a later moment. In tonight's Ost I want to talk about this theory a little more.

Fundamentally, the theory is based on a distinction between 'the person' and 'her situation'. The situation comprises that person's past and present, the people and institutions with which she interacts, her context, her milieux, her physical body, what she has seen and read and heard, even perhaps her beliefs. What some consider constituents of a person's identity, I view rather as constituents of that person's situation. Suppose one sees a homeless person on the street: one could 'other' that person, mentally put that person back in his or her place, by projecting the label 'homeless' onto him or her, in this way renouncing one's ethical obligation to respect the homeless person and remember that he or she is another human being. Or one can try to imagine the circumstances that might have driven this person onto the street – domestic violence, drug addiction, a failing Social Welfare system. The second operation seems to me more moral. The other day I was served at McDonalds by a girl wearing a hijab, a rare sight in Auckland. I could just tell myself that she is "Muslim/Other/Not-Me" – or I could wonder at her upbringing or consider the possibility that she has chosen to wear a hijab that day to express her solidarity with Muslims around the world who were affected by Trump's travel ban, or perhaps it is an aesthetic choice. Of course, I can't know her situation for sure unless I were to ask her questions, interrogate her, garner all that necessary information, and this might be seen as uncivil– but I can be sure that some causal situation underpins her decision to wear a hijab that day.

The basic idea behind what I am terming 'situational ethics' is that every human being is basically the same; what differs from person to person is each person's situation. The Christian precepts, "Love thy neighbour as thyself" and "There but for the Grace of God go I" are relevant here. If one understands another person's situation, really understands it, it becomes possible to empathise with that person. True empathy enables true compassion and arguably compassion is the basis of any real ethical system. Imaginative identification is the lesson of literature. When one reads The Lord of the Rings, one puts oneself in the shoes of one Frodo, hobbit, resident of the shire, tasked with the awesome duty of transporting the One Ring to Mount Doom. The reader is one with Frodo even though the reader's real-world situation differs from Frodo's fictional one. How would I behave if I were Frodo? Would I act differently? Has Frodo a choice? Or has he no choice at all?

I myself have a situation. I am 'white', 'male', 'thirty-something' and 'a New Zealander'. I live in an apartment and intend to study again this year. Some aspects of my situation are chosen but many are not. I do not consider any of these attributes part of my identity; rather I consider them part of my situation. Sometimes I can feel vague guilt about being white and male but there is nothing I can do about either. My skin colour and gender have consequences with respect to who I interact with, what jobs I can get, what friends I have. Even my friends, my social milieux, I haven't really chosen – I just acquired them more or less by accident.

Even a person's body is part of that person's situation. A person doesn't choose to have blue eyes or hazel eyes, a person doesn't choose his age or height, a person doesn't choose to be born with a harelip or Type-1 Diabetes. The person is not her body; she is something else. This is why I considered calling this theory "Cartesian ethics". It is a Dualist philosophy that draws a distinction between soul and body, between the Subject and her physical corporeal situation. All souls are the same; it is bodies and situations that differ.

What I calling 'situational ethics' is a kind of bastard child of Sartre's Existentialism. Sartre draws a distinction between the freedom of the Subject and 'facticity', facticity being a near synonym for what I am calling 'situation'. Sartre stresses freedom over facticity but I am stressing the reverse – and my focus is on what conditions must obtain to empathise with another, something I don't think Sartre talks about as much. To understand another we must understand her situation. I am arguing that people have much less freedom than Sartre argued. Yes, people make choices, decisions, but, once a decision is made, that decision becomes part of that person's situation, perhaps irrevocably. One can choose what to do but one cannot undo what one has once done. Suppose a girl tries to burn down her family home at seventeen and is consequently diagnosed 'schizophrenic'; that mistake and that label will perhaps haunt her for the rest of her life. Even ten, fifteen years later, when she tries to get out of the system and off the drugs, that one error will be used against her. If she is allowed to discontinue the medication, it will be argued, she will just try to burn down her house again. There is no escape. There is no salvation – unless something entirely outside the situation intervenes.

My view on the world runs completely counter to 'essentialism'. I believe a person is not defined by his or her prior actions –  although if he has done wrong I also believe he should apologise for his mistake and atone. This is how he shows that he is not the same person as the one who made the mistake. A couple of years ago the Prime Minister of this country became the object of international ridicule for pawing at a waitress's pony-tail. In an interview with a reporter here recently he said something like 'People would react differently if they knew my side of the story'. What could Key possibly say to exonerate himself? Did she compel him to grab her pony-tail somehow? Key's lack of remorse or self-knowledge seems to me worse than the actual incident. Shouldn't he just admit that he has a bit of a compulsive fetish for pony-tails – but is trying to get over it?

What I have been calling 'situational ethics' (which I now admit is closer to Existentialism than I realised when I first talked about it) is based on something like Cartesian Dualism. I am not however making a metaphysical claim. I am not saying that there is both a spiritual world and a physical world. Cartesian Dualism is problematic. One difficulty it faces is that it is difficult to know what belongs to the realm of the soul and what belongs to the realm of the body. Do pleasure and pain belong to the soul or to the body? Every human is a corporeal entity, we eat and shit, shave occasionally, menstruate once a month. We could define the domain of the spiritual by subtracting everything from our experience that is physical – but then there would not be much left. Happiness and unhappiness seem to arise out of one's situation. Do souls in heaven fuck or do they just sit on God's left hand and sing Hosannas? I have been celibate on Earth so long, it seems unfair to have to be celibate in Heaven as well.

This theory, as I just said, is not a metaphysics; rather it is a kind of fiction on which we can base an ethical system. It is a story that can help us become more virtuous. It resembles in this way Nietzsche's theory of Eternal Recurrence. When Nietzsche proposed this rhetorical gambit, this modern myth, he was not saying that we literally live our one life over and over again for all eternity – he was saying rather that we should endeavour to conduct our lives as though this were the case, as though it was true. Likewise  I am not literally saying that there are two realms, spiritual and physical, that all souls are the same and only bodies and situations differ. Rather I am saying that we should try to live our lives as if this were the case. And that this way of looking at the world is the best way to help us understand others. It is a kind of necessary fiction.

At this point in the essay, I want to change the topic. Bear with me – I will come back to the original thesis soon. I want to talk about sexuality again, briefly. On his show a little while ago Stephen Colbert mocked vice-president for his homophobia, joking that Pence believed homosexuality to be "a choice that can be cured". This was funny because everyone knows that people are born one way or the other and can't change – right? Liberal heterosexuals generally don't take this essentialist notion to its logical conclusion. If homosexuality is a congenital condition, like Spina Bifida or Motor Neuron Disease, it is possible that there are many people out there who are gay but who might not want to be, an idea that makes ordinary heterosexuals uncomfortable. Even when people say sexuality is innate, deep down they want to believe it a choice, that gay people want to be gay. Films like Pride (there are other examples but I can't think of any offhand) present the idea that gay people want to come out and are happier when they do so. But when you think of many famous gay men such as Freddy Mercury, George Michael, Alan Turing (Oscar Wilde perhaps?), none of them came out voluntarily; all were outed. I am unsure what conclusion to draw from this but the reader can perhaps go further.

When I was a child I often listened to George Michael and I want to say a couple of words about him. He died recently, of course. Songs like "Faith", "Jesus to a Child" and some famous pictures of him wearing a crucifix earring suggest that he was a Christian. Still he was outed as a result of performing "a lewd act" in a Californian public bathroom in 1998 – I see shades of what happened to John Nash back in the 'fifties. Now, ordinary atheistical heterosexuals, as I used to be, might see Michael's assumed Christianity as a kind of cover, a plausible alibi or hypocritical imposture, a diversion. A real Christian wouldn't perform any kind of lewd act in a public bathroom. Yet after his death it was revealed that in semi-retirement Michael had donated millions of dollars anonymously to various charities. Perhaps Michael's faith was genuine, perhaps he was something that would have seemed unthinkable, a contradiction in terms, a few years back - a Christian homosexual. This might seem an odd appellation to give to a man who released a song in 1988 called "I Want Your Sex", a song that was banned by many commercial radio stations. But apparently Michael intended this song to be about sex within a committed monogamous relationship. (My source for all this, by the way, is Wikipedia and various Women's Magazines.)

To return to the original topic, I should say, again, that I am opposed to essentialism. Sexuality is not innate and neither is schizophrenia. Conditions like this belong to the person's situation rather than the person. Perhaps what happened to George Michael in that bathroom was at best a mistake, at worst entrapment. Perhaps Michael accepted the label applied to him as a result of this event because he knew it was impossible to fight back. We live in a very unforgiving era. But perhaps this might change.