Class 15.1: Moral Solidarity

For our final reading of the semester, we’re going to return closed circle to the question of whether we should uncritically accept our loved ones wherever they are. Barrett Emerick is going to argue that we should neither uncritically accept people where they are nor give up on them if where they are is morally problematic, but engage with them in a lifelong project of what he calls “moral solidarity”, trying to help them become the best versions of themselves.

Barrett Emerick

Welcome back to Barrett Emerick, who was one of the co-authors of our reading from week 13 about apology.

Comparisons

Emerick argues in this piece that love requires sticking with someone despite their flaws, but not giving up on helping them to overcome their moral imperfections, even when it is difficult, takes time, and may despite great effort never ultimately succeed. He thinks that this is what love requires.

So Emerick’s view contrasts with two other more extreme views. According to the first, we may or should dissociated ourselves from relatives and friends who are morally problematic - either to avoid being implicated in what they do, or to avoid being shaped in morally problematic ways by their influence, or because it is simply too difficult to live with and relate to them. Against this view, Emerick says that love requires sticking with someone despite their flaws.

The second contrast to Emerick’s view is one according to which we need to take our loved ones at face value and respect who they are. According to this view, sometimes our loved ones simply are different than we might hope they would be, and love requires acceptance rather than constantly trying to change them. Rima Basu’s article from the first week of class might be thought to articulate a version of this idea. Against this view, Emerick says that love requires holding out for our loved ones to become better versions of themselves, even when they don’t yet see it themselves.

Political Slant

It will be obvious as you read Emerick’s article that he is imagining that his audience shares his perspective that environmental, racial, and gender justice require overcoming default systems of participation in factory farming and racialized and gendered social systems. He is imagining, in short, that he is writing for his broadly speaking “lefty” colleagues or students who share a certain perspective on what justice requires, and a certain imagination about who their loved one is whose moral attitudes are imperfectly shaped by ideology, and what that loved one thinks.

But as you read the article, I want you to try to separate everything that Emerick says that sounds morally or politically loaded, and try to re-phrase it to yourself from the opposite moral or political point of view. I want you to imagine the thought that it is instead people with “lefty” moral and political leanings that are being said to be imperfectly shaped by ideology, and the more conservative moral or political viewpoint that is being asked to stick with their “lefty” loved one to help them think through the consequences of their ideology. Ask yourself whether anything in his arguments about love, commitment, and moral improvement depend on what we think about moral vegetarianism or about the current level of progress on racial justice.