Abstract
The common objection to Black Lives Matter (BLM), both as a mantra and as a movement, is a seemingly benign universal affirmation, ‘All lives matter’. However, there’s a prima facie sense in which normative moral relativism (suspiciously) drives defenders of ‘All lives matter’ to an incomprehensible false equivalence and a fundamental rejection of what care ethics entails. As Carol Gilligan explains, ‘Care ethics is a feminist philosophical perspective that uses a relational and contextual-bound approach toward morality and decision making’. 1
There is nothing in the proposition ‘Black Lives Matter’ that is question begging. Quite frankly, this proposition is motivation for human agents to be other-regarding to those who have been systematically denied their right to be an ‘other’. Had all lives been subject to kidnapping, chattel (and holocaust) slavery, a ferocious Middle Passage, premediated massacre and murders, genocide, ethnic cleansing, catatonic rape, existential invisibility, destroyed generations, dehumanization, disenfranchisement, mass incarceration, and so on, people of virtue would say (and must say), ‘All lives matter’.
But this is not the case – especially in 21st-century America. Proposing ‘All’ as a moral value is inconsistent with the context of the last 401 years – it’s illegitimate, apathetic, insensitive, and a fundamental rejection of empathy and care ethics. On the other hand, proposing ‘Black’ is contextual, empathic, caring and fundamentally consistent with the historical narrative.
Black people were a matter of commodity during the period of slavery: 1619 to 1865. Generation of white families became wealthy when Black lives mattered for their prosperity, but today Black lives don’t matter for them, thus Black lives matter less. European explorers flocked to Africa to find riches by human trafficking African people. By the 17th century, more than 54,000 voyages were made to Africa and more than 12 million Africans were captured and brought to the Americas. 2 Very few people at that time considered the ethical ramifications of their actions. The explorers simply made themselves believe Black lives did not matter because Black people were not human beings. When Africans were kidnapped, they left behind everything. Not only were they stripped of material wealth as they knew it, they were also stripped of their dignity, name, religion and culture. That Africans were used as experiments for many things, without compassion for their humanity, is well documented. The BLM movement recognizes this and brings all people together for a common cause.
According to their website, BLM is a global movement to fight for freedom, liberation, and justice for Blacks. 3 In 2020, even though BLM began in the United States, it is a movement demanding human rights for African Americans and Black people in other parts of the world. The movement attracted global attention in response to the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American family man, murdered while in police custody on 25 May 2020. A Minneapolis police officer knelt on Floyd’s neck for 8 min and 46 s, while Floyd was handcuffed and face down. Three other police officers aided the officer; none of them offered any objection – none was empathic enough to halt the murder. Their silence spoke loudly of their lack of care. Certainly, their acts were in violation of several normative theories, like deontology and consequentialism, but their gross lack of empathy and care was a significant affront to empathy and care ethics.
This raises some very salient questions about the implications of care ethics. These other normative theories, for example, are vulnerable to attack in at least two ways: justice and free speech. First, both deontology and consequentialism tend to view justice as either masculinist, abstract or both. This means that there are unique moral dilemmas where different moral judgements can be inferred based upon the fragility of a premise. Valid/unsound arguments aren’t strangers to this moral anomaly. Second, freedom of speech is often defended as inviolable for both deontology and consequentialism. Both tend to prioritize rules or consequences (respectively) over the marginalized and, in this case, over the BLM movement. But this is not the case with relational care ethics. For (feminist) relational care ethicists, justice is not abstract or arbitrary. It is an accentuation of the quote often attributed to Benjamin Franklin, ‘Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are’. Care ethics, more than any other, posits justice as a care act (rather than a rule or consequential act).
The BLM movement has expanded to a plethora of physical, social, psychological and spiritual injustices targeting the collective wellbeing of African Americans. The strength of BLM is its ability to connect common values, experiences, customs, ethics and reach to the soul of one’s humanity. The BLM movement has a spiritual ethos that started in a place (United States), with a people (African Americans), but its greatest intrinsic ethical value is correlative to relational care ethics. BLM is essentially about having empathy with Black people and caring enough about their wellbeing to get into (in the words of Congressman John Lewis, who passed away 17 July 2020) ‘Good trouble’.