So building an ethic on caring seems both reasonable and important. One may well ask, at this point, whether an ethic so constructed will be a form of “situation ethics.” It is not, certainly, that form of act-utilitarianism commonly labeled “situation ethics.”21 Its emphasis is not on the consequences of our acts, although these are not, of course, irrelevant. But an ethic of caring locates morality primarily in the pre-act consciousness of the one-caring. Yet it is not a form of agapism. There is no command to love nor, indeed, any God to make the commandment. Further, I shall reject the notion of universal love, finding it unattainable in any but the most abstract sense and thus a source of distraction. While much of what will be developed in the ethic of caring may be found, also, in Christian ethics, there will be major and irreconcilable differences. Human love, human caring, will be quite enough on which to found an ethic.
We must look even more closely at that love and caring.
2
THE ONE-CARING
RECEIVING
CARING INVOLVES, FOR the one-caring, a “feeling with” the other. We might want to call this relationship “empathy,” but we should think about what we mean by this term. The Oxford Universal Dictionary defines empathy as “The power of projecting one’s personality into, and so fully understanding, the object of contemplation.” This is, perhaps, a peculiarly rational, western, masculine way of looking at “feeling with.” The notion of “feeling with” that I have outlined does not involve projection but reception. I have called it “engrossment.” I do not “put myself in the other’s shoes,” so to speak, by analyzing his reality as objective data and then asking, “How would I feel in such a situation?” On the contrary, I set aside my temptation to analyze and to plan. I do not project; I receive the other into myself, and I see and feel with the other. I become a duality. I am not thus caused to see or to feel—that is, to exhibit certain behavioral signs interpreted as seeing and feeling—for I am committed to the receptivity that permits me to see and to feel in this way. The seeing and feeling are mine, but only partly and temporarily mine, as on loan to me.
Although receptivity is referred to by mystics, it is not a mystical notion. On the contrary, it refers to a common occurrence, something with which we are all familiar. It does not have to be achieved by meditation, although many persons do enter a receptive state in this way. We are interested here in the reception of persons, however, and we do not receive persons through meditation. Yet a receptive state is required. It can happen by chance when our manipulative efforts are at rest. Suppose, for example, that I am having lunch with a group of colleagues. Among them is one for whom I have never had much regard and for whom I have little professional respect. I do not “care” for him. Somewhere in the light banter of lunch talk, he begins to talk about an experience in the wartime navy and the feelings he had under a particular treatment. He talks about how these feelings impelled him to become a teacher. His expressions are unusually lucid, defenseless. I am touched—not only by sentiment—but by something else. It is as though his eyes and mine have combined to look at the scene he describes. I know that I would have behaved differently in the situation, but this is in itself a matter of indifference. I feel what he says he felt. I have been invaded by this other. Quite simply, I shall never again be completely without regard for him. My professional opinion has not changed, but I am now prepared to care whereas previously I was not.
Mothers quite naturally feel with their infants. We do not project ourselves into our infants and ask, “How would I feel if I were wet to the ribs?” We do this only when the natural impulse fails. Naturally, when an infant cries, we react with the infant and feel that something is wrong. Something is wrong. This is the infant’s feeling, and it is ours. We receive it and share it. We do not begin by trying to interpret the cry, although we may learn to do this. We first respond to the feeling that something is the matter. It is not foolishness to begin talking to our child as we respond to the cry. We say, “I’m here, sweetheart,” and “I hear you, darling,” as we move physically toward the child. And, usually, we comfort first, saying, “There, there. Everything is all right,” before we begin to analyze what is the matter. We do not begin by formulating or solving a problem but by sharing a feeling. Even when we move into the problem identification stage, we try to retain alternating phases of receptivity. We say, “Do you have a pain?” or its equivalent in baby talk. We do not expect, certainly, that the infant will respond verbally, but the question and its tone impel us to attentive quietude. We await an answer of some sort. We watch for a knee to be drawn up, the head to be tossed, a fist to be sucked.
Now it is just nonsense to say that a feeling response to my infant’s cry will “reinforce his crying behavior.” To begin with, I am not sure what is meant by “to reinforce,” and I suspect that, if it has any meaning in the real world, I cannot know what is being reinforced without being inside the one whose behavior is being so affected. But the sort of empathy we are discussing does not first penetrate the other but receives the other. Hence I do not “reinforce.” I receive, I communicate with, I work with. If by “reinforce” we mean simply that the likelihood of the behavior’s being continued is increased, then, in the case we are discussing, the claim is quite simply and demonstrably false.
There is another point to be made here. When we consider reinforcement strategies, we are obviously in a manipulative mode. We want to change the other’s behavior. The mother as one-caring, however, wants first and most importantly to relieve her child’s suffering. But, the philosopher asks, suppose the child is not suffering? Suppose it has merely acquired a bothersome habit of crying at the same hour every night? For that matter, how can you even know that you are actually “receiving the other"?
How can I know? We must move cautiously here. The entire program I am trying to establish hangs on the answer to this question. If I respond that I cannot be mistaken in a basic act of receptivity, I fall into the trap that has already snared the phenomenologist when he speaks of the infallibility of basic intuitions. He asserts his position and presents it as right by definition. Surely, I do not want to respond in this way. Gently, gently, I must resist my colleague’s efforts to bring me into the standard mode of argumentation. I am not claiming that I know either in my receptivity itself or in my description of it. It is not at bottom a matter of knowledge but one of feeling and sensitivity. Feeling is not all that is involved in caring, but it is essentially involved.
When I receive the other, I am totally with the other. The relation is for the moment exactly as Buber has described it in I and Thou.1 The other “fills the firmament.” I do not think the other, and I do not ask myself whether what I am feeling is correct in some way. When I have a sudden, severe pain in my mouth, for example, I may complain of a toothache. I cannot be wrong in responding to what I feel as a pain. It is not a matter of knowledge at all. Later, when the pain has gone and I think back on it, however, I may say, “Well, I guess it was not a toothache after all. It’s gone. Perhaps it was a bit of neuralgia caused by the cold or altitude.” I do not say, “Well, I guess I did not have a pain.” Of course I had a pain. My error, if one occurred, lay in assessing the pain as a toothache. Similarly, I may, in looking back, become aware that there was a failure somewhere in my movement from feeling to assessment. But in the receptive mode itself, I am not thinking the other as object. I am not making claims to knowledge. There can be failures to receive, and we shall discuss such cases, but these are not matters of faulty claims to knowledge.
But am I not making claims to knowledge as I describe the state of one-caring in moments of caring? What is offered is not a set of knowledge claims to be tested but an invitation to see things from an alternative perspective. When I describe the one-caring in particular situations, we should not infer that one who behaves or feels differently in similar situations is necessarily one who does not care. To begin with, I am denying the sort of generalizability that would be required to make such a judgment. Situations of relatedness are unique, and it is my purpose to build a picture of one-caring from a collection of concrete and unique situations.