“Never eat anything with a face”: Ontology and ethics

Moral decision-making and ontology

When I was about eight years old, I liked to watch the ants swarming on the sidewalk outside my parents’ house. I also liked to stomp them. They were small and vulnerable, I was large and powerful, and squashing them was something I could do—no one stopped me, and the ants themselves could make no case for their own preservation. It was satisfying, because every day a new swarm appeared, the numbers never seemed to diminish, and I could once again control the ants’ lives by ending them.

Then one day, when I went out to stomp ants, I hesitated. I suddenly saw the ants differently. They were tiny creatures, each one going about its life, oblivious to me, self-determining and apparently goal-oriented, yet somehow working in concert with its fellow ants. The ants were not there for me. I asked myself, Why was I ending the lives of these harmless beings? There was no reason. I was just doing it. Yet the ants clearly wanted to live.

That day I did not stomp the ants. I chose not to. And I never did it again.

In retrospect, I think part of what happened that day was that I saw the ants differently. The ants themselves were not different; their own self-directed activities did not change. But what the ants were, to me, had changed: my concept of “ant” was transformed. I saw them not just as things I could control, but as purposive beings with their own lives to live. My perception changed, and therefore so did my behavior. As Sue argued in her early work, we need to “clean or remove the lenses through which we currently view the world, because these lenses cloud our vision as to what and who counts morally” (Hendler, 1994b: 117). A perceived ontological difference can make an ethical difference, because it helps to determine who does and does not count morally. For Sue, it was very important to identify inequality and oppression and work to end them (e.g. Hendler, 1994a, 1994b, 2005). In order to do so, one must be able to recognize oppression. And one cannot recognize oppression if one does not identify and acknowledge the moral status of individuals. Both before and after my stomping activities ended, my assumptions about what the ants were determined what I did: to end their lives, or to let them go about their business.

My change in behavior is an example on a modest scale of the ways in which our moral choices depend upon what we (think we) are encountering, dealing with, and responding to. On a much larger scale, the evolution of ethical behavior reflects the history of changes in socially accepted concepts of the entities with which we interact. Consider, for example, the concept of personhood. Whether an individual counts as a person determines what political and moral rights and responsibilities s/he is allowed or required to have, the degree of moral consideration s/he is considered to deserve, and the importance s/he has relative to other individuals. That is, whether an individual counts as a person determines how we treat him/her and what our moral obligations toward him/her are.

Once upon a time, a human person was, by definition, male, of adult age, reasonably wealthy (perhaps a landowner), and a member of the dominant race. The applicability of the concept of person has gradually expanded, and now personhood is fairly consistently applied to human beings who are female. Material possessions and “noble” birth are no longer necessary conditions for the application of personhood. In many places, the use of the concept of person no longer depends upon skin color or other racialized features. In some places, though sadly not all, applying the concept of person does not exclude those who are queer, transgendered, or intersex. Infants, children, and elderly persons are no longer outside the ambit of personhood. Individuals with physical or emotional disabilities are generally recognized as persons; individuals with cognitive disabilities are sometimes accepted and sometimes not.

The point I am making about ontology partly determining ethics applies not only to individuals but also to groups of individuals. For example, consider families. Sue Hendler argues in her work that planners who are unable to recognize any kind of family other than “wife/husband/two children/minivan” will fail to see that single mothers with children, or groups of unrelated adults (as well, I would add, as partners of the same sex, grandparent/grandchild arrangements, adult children caring for elderly parents, sibling partnerships, and many other groupings), can constitute a family (Hendler, 1994a: 107). Such a limited view of family also fails to recognize variations among women in terms of life stage, marital status, and sexuality (Markovich and Hendler, 2006: 414), and this limited ontology results in unethical treatment:

Feminist planners highlight the fact that the power that municipalities have in defining concepts such as family, typically by limiting the number of unrelated individuals occupying a dwelling unit, discriminates against those persons living in nontraditional (e.g., nonnuclear) families and denies many nontraditional and more affordable living arrangements. These alternative arrangements, such as home sharing, are identified as being particularly beneficial to women because they are more likely to be economically disadvantaged. (Markovich and Hendler, 2006: 411)

Changes in what constitutes a “true” family or who counts as a “real” person are partly the result of extending and embracing new empirical information. It was important for those who define “family” in terms of heterosexual parents and one or more biological offspring to learn that a same-sex couple can raise children just as effectively. Similarly, it has been important for those with political power to learn that individuals who are female are just as intelligent as those that are male, and that individuals with disabilities have plans and ambitions and the ability to make choices, just as do those who are (temporarily) non-disabled. This new empirical information about women and persons with disabilities—basic though it now appears—was slow to be recognized and accepted; it finally demonstrated that there are no empirical barriers to extending the understanding of personhood to include those who are not male and not non-disabled.

When we make ethical decisions, all we have is the empirical world around us. But persons and objects, institutions and groups, are not merely given; they are open to interpretation and interaction. Hence, what we take them to be determines what we think we should do. That does not mean we cannot be mistaken. We can. Some interpretations of our reality are better than others; the empirical data make some conceptual systems more justified than others. When we truly relate to an entity, when we recognize what kind of being it is—a being with feelings, a being that is intelligent, a being with its own needs and goals—then it is harder for us to deliberately mistreat it, for mistreatment would require denying one of those characteristics.

But changes in who counts as a person are not only the result of empirical discoveries; they are also the product of conceptual and normative evolution. In order for who counts as a person to change, the concept of person itself had to change, so that it was no longer defined in terms of sex, gender, race, ability, sexual orientation, or age. That is, the criteria of application for the concept of personhood no longer depend much, if at all, upon physical properties of individuals; they are more concerned with the mental, psychological, and volitional characteristics of individuals. The change is a normative one: it is based upon the idea that a person should not be defined in terms of her body but in terms of her cognitive and emotional needs and capacities. Thus, ontology itself incorporates value judgments.

Ontology also helps to determine ethics with respect to non-human beings. For Sue, a dog or cat, or a tortoise or a bird encountered in her beloved Galapagos Islands, or even a shrimp, are all entities that have faces; that is, they are not mere inanimate objects or inert lumps of flesh but living, sentient beings. That fact helps to determine the respect and non-violence with which they should be treated.

Ontology helps to determine ethics even for inanimate, non-sentient things. Consider, for example, a university campus. Is it a collection of separate buildings, or is it one entity with separate parts? Or think of a particular urban area. Is it home? Or just “the wrong side of the tracks”? Is it a piece of “living history”? A money-maker? A tourist area? A resort for the nouveau riche? Or simply a collection of privately held properties? Is this area separate from nature, or a part of it? Is it an inert thing, or a growing and changing organism? Is it an aesthetic project, or simply utilitarian? Is it a place of commerce, a place of work, a place of families?

Is a neighborhood a place where only what Sue called “neutral human beings” live, or is it the home of children, elderly people, mothers with babies, people who use wheelchairs and walkers? In one of her papers, Sue quotes an anonymous focus group member, a feminist planner, who “said that having children and trying to negotiate the city that she had helped to ‘plan’ made her wonder, ‘what in the hell have I been doing … to our communities?’” (Hendler, 2005: 60). A city may be conceptualized as a place of and for adults. It becomes a different place when it is conceptualized as a place where children live, learn, and move around, and where their parents must find transportation, parks, and public areas that accommodate them. Another focus group member is quoted as saying, “‘what is beginning to happen in [planning] is to see how impossible it is to deal with only one type of human being and assume that we are all equal … certainly we know that there are at least two types of people … there are men and there are women …. [In] all of our theories, everything is geared for the neutral human being’” (Hendler, 2005: 61). What a neighborhood is determines how it is treated and how it should be acted upon; being implies doing. If a municipality is a home for women and men, children and adults, temporarily able-bodied and disabled, and not merely “neutral human beings,” the way in which that municipality should be developed will be quite different. The concept of X includes values. So the most basic ethical question turns out to be how to classify something.

Ontology and relationships

So far I have argued that what a thing is (taken to be) determines how we (believe we) ought to relate to it. Although Sue herself did not express this idea in the same words, much of her work and her life indicate that she also believed that ontology helps to determine ethics.

The second main point I wish to make in this paper is that moral significance derives not only from what an entity is, as I argued in the previous section, but also from one’s relationship to it. When Sue stated that “shrimps do have faces,” she was, in effect, identifying a kind of relationship with something that she had decided not to eat. An entity that has a face is an entity that looks back at us; with that entity there is, potentially, a two-way relationship. Sue described feminist perspectives on ethics as being “rooted in the notions of relationships as the basis of ethical decisions” (Hendler, 1994b: 121).

Not all relationships are two-way, but more probably could be. What we have a two-way relationship with, we are less likely to hurt. Consider the environment in which we live. We can relate to it in a one-way fashion—using it up, consuming it, extracting minerals and harvesting trees from it, damming its water, eating all its fish and millions of animals grown for us, depositing waste in it, and expelling contamination into the air. Or we can relate to it in a two-way fashion, knowing that our environment does not only exist to serve us, but that we exist to preserve and enhance our environment, knowing that if we take from the environment, the environment will eventually take from us, but if we give back to our environment, it will continue to be able to give to us.

Consider, for example, my experience as an eight-year-old with the ants outside my house. When I decided not to kill them, I began a different relationship with them. I went from power over, to co-existence with. I recognized, inchoately, that the ants did not exist for me; they existed for themselves. I recognized the ants as “having a face” and therefore having a life that was distinct from mine, a life that was theirs to determine, however limited their abilities might be.

The problem with eating non-human animals is, in effect, that human carnivores deny the fact that the relationship is potentially two-way. The difference between a carrot and a calf is that the carrot does not and cannot look back at us. The calf is capable of perception and feeling; the carrot is not. Yet human carnivores relate to both carrot and calf in the same way: simply as something to be used, to be consumed. Sue believed that the distinction between companion animals and food animals was invidious and philosophically unsustainable.

I now want to suggest something even stronger: a relationship with X can actually make X into a different thing. What a thing is, its ontology, is partly a function of how it is related to. Seeing a shrimp as a being “with a face” or seeing a pig as an individual that “has a mother” makes the shrimp or the pig a different entity. In one sense this is obvious; the shrimp or pig becomes, for the one who sees it that way, a different entity. But I don’t just mean that it seems different; I’m arguing that in some, perhaps many cases, the relationship actually makes it be different.

This claim may seem implausible, yet there are examples that demonstrate its truth. Consider a relationship with a cat. When Sue first came to Kingston she shared her home with a tortoiseshell cat named Harlequin, or Quin for short. Around most people Quin was an unpredictable threat who would attack, claws flailing, teeth exposed, and hissing angrily, apparently without provocation. Quin would at times guard the bathroom; and woe betide you if you needed to use that bathroom. But with Sue, Quin’s extreme fear and anxiety would fade away; Quin became cooperative and calm. Sue knew how to connect with Quin in a way that no one else did; Sue related to Quin in a way that changed Quin from a homicidal maniac to a beloved feline companion.

When human beings have a relationship with them, cats are companions or “pets”; that is part of what they are. When cats are abandoned or even just misunderstood and feared, they become wild; the relationship changes what kind of entity they are. Through our relationships, we make some characteristic(s) salient. A dog can be a “thing to use” or an “agent with its own life”: an experimental object, a worker, or a family member.

Relationships can also make people into different kinds of things. We can, so to speak, expect people into different kinds of behavior. For instance, if a parent expects a child to be difficult, uncooperative, hard to handle, he will treat the child that way, and it is hardly surprising if in fact that is what the child is. If a doctor expects a patient to be helpless, ignorant, and apathetic about her own health, then it may be difficult for the patient to be anything else.

When Sue writes about the difference that feminism might make to the professions, she talks of “a more empathetic or caring notion of professionalism in which there is a proactive emphasis on equality, collaboration and a blending of matters of the ‘head and heart’.” These values contrast powerfully with “mainstream professional values of detachment, objectivity, competition, individualism and hierarchical decision making.” She says that feminists “emphasize working in partnership with clients” (Hendler, 2005: 56). Notice that the values Sue is advocating do not simply mandate different behavior; by recommending a new relationship, they also generate both a different view of what clients are and different possibilities for what the client can be and do. A client is not a person from whom the professional is distanced; not a passive being on whom the professional merely acts; not an individual who is incapable of contributing to the professional’s work outcomes. Sue’s outlook sees clients not as individuals to be acted upon or manipulated, not as individuals who are helpless and in need of help, but rather as individuals who are collaborators, the equals of the professional who is working with them. Sue stresses the values of “citizen participation, mediation, community development, and social equity” (Hendler, 1994b: 122). When citizens and community members are seen in that way, they are able to be that way. If planners see the individuals who live in communities as equals, as capable and deserving of participation in the development of their built environment, then that relationship with the client also helps to make the client a different kind of entity, one who is capable of, and engages in, the planning process, rather than just being the object or recipient of it.

Conclusion

I have argued, first, that ontology helps to determine ethics, and second, that relationships help to determine ontology. If what I have argued is correct, then in ethical deliberation, one of the most important questions one can ask is, “Who or what am I encountering, and how does my relationship affect what I am encountering?” In both her professional and personal lives Sue Hendler consistently asked these questions. She also helped me to recognize and remember their importance. I am fortunate and grateful to have known her, to have been in relationships with her as a friend and colleague.