The Stranger of My Flesh—an Existential Phenomenological Ethics
An existential-phenomenological ethics is written from the perspective of an incarnate consciousness that is born in proximity to others and radical distinction from them. From this point of view, we find that intersubjective existence is a living contradiction. Our connections to others are profound and visceral; we share intimate space, intersect in embodiment, and coestablish the world’s meaning, dimensions, and veracity. Our freedom and our life’s unique meaning are dependent on our responsiveness to others. We need each other’s generosity and collaboration; we are their facticity, and they are ours. Nevertheless, we suffer the abyss of our divergent bodies and perspectives. Although our bodies overlap and interpenetrate, we still remain within our own skin. Even though the other is integral to who I am, she also exceeds my comprehension. We can be drawn into the outlook of another, but we are never in her place. Her alterity is insurmountable. Even the child born of one’s own body is estranged flesh.
The other threatens any enjoyment of self-sameness that I might experience; she undermines the complacent familiarity I may temporarily have with myself. And it is this interruption that is the opening for ethics. It is motivated by the needs of others, by their vulnerability, and thus it originates with them, not me. Since I am entangled with others before I have the opportunity to will or deny it, I am drawn to care for them before I can consider whether or not it is in my own interests. In this respect my ethical involvement is passive. Yet full responsivity also requires an active concern and effort. This becomes apparent because the neediness of others can also invite aggression or neglect. The phenomenon of maternal ambivalence vividly demonstrates that the desire to commit violence can occur even when there is a feeling of sympathy and connection with the other. In fact, intense intimacy can lead to feelings of claustrophobia and an oppressive level of responsibility and thus instigate hostility. Acting on impulse alone can harm as well as hurt. Passive responsiveness is insufficient; intelligence, strategy, and resourcefulness are needed to navigate these difficulties.
In all cases there are practical limitations on what one can do for another. Caring for others threatens one’s own well-being, even as it is absolutely integral to it, because their needs and desires sometimes clash with one’s own. There is no easy way out of this problem; devotion, detachment, and self-centeredness are all flawed orientations. The ambiguous nature of our intersubjective life undermines the purity of either egoism or altruism. Such an either/or attitude disregards the ways in which we are integral to one another—that one’s own well-being and freedom depends on that of others. Yet the preservation of independence is also integral to ethical responsiveness.
Conducting a phenomenology of ethics, I aim to describe ethical life as it is experienced. Ethics involves an orientation toward others and oneself, and, with its careful attention to lived experience, phenomenology can reveal the structure of these relations. Yet this orientation cannot simply be assumed; there are many obstacles to fulfilling one’s duties to oneself and others. To be ethical is something toward which we must strive. And we may often find that ethical success and failure are intertwined.
Like everyone else, mothers are capable of the basest crimes—murder, rape, criminal neglect, and so on. Yet when a mother commits such crimes against her child our horror is exponentially greater. It is not just anyone who is expected to care for a child, to be the person who makes their basic trust in the world possible. Of course, other people can care for a child and help that child to thrive, but the fact of our current situation is that, if a mother is ignorant, insane, overwhelmed, indifferent, or malicious, that child’s chances of flourishing (or even surviving) are dramatically reduced. Ultimately, it should come as no surprise that we romanticize this relationship; we do not want to dwell on the gruesome acts committed against the most vulnerable and innocent. Nevertheless, filicide may simply be one extreme result of a fairly normal state.
Conflicts of interest are an unavoidable fact of human existence exacerbated by living in a society that privileges some and exploits others. Thus an active ethical response requires the deliberation of someone who can, with limited resources, balance other-care with self-care. Not every mother is capable of this. And, even in the best of circumstances, and in spite of our best efforts, the needs of everyone cannot always be met; every life may not be sustainable. Love, even maternal love, does not conquer all. But this failure should invite both outrage and action. We must struggle against inequalities and fight for the liberation and care of every human being for our own sake as well as theirs. Of course, it is beyond the ability of a single individual to redress this alone; individual moral responsibility can only be part of the solution. The fight for justice must be a collective human effort.
Consider the case of Angela McAnulty. On February 24, 2011, McAnulty, a mother from Eugene, Oregon was sentenced to death by a jury for murdering her fifteen-year-old daughter, Jeanette Maples. McAnulty admitted to having tortured the girl for several years. Testimony revealed that the mother denied her daughter food (placing locks on the cupboards) and water (so that she had to drink water from the toilet in order to survive). The girl had been starved to such an extent that she weighed only fifty pounds when she collapsed from cardiac arrest. Her brain was bleeding from massive head injuries, she had flesh torn from her body with belts and sticks, and suffered hundreds of other injuries, some of them infected all the way to the bone.1 According to McAnulty’s husband, the mother would turn up the television in the living room or the vacuum cleaner to cover the sounds of her daughter’s screaming and then she would strip the girl naked and whip her. In his opening statement, Lane County Deputy District Attorney Erik Hasselman stated: “The one woman who could have saved her was the very person who was responsible for her torture, her mother.”2
Clearly, in the eyes of the judge and jury, McAnulty did something unforgivable and irredeemable; she is the first woman to be sentenced to execution since the death penalty was reinstated in Oregon in 1984 and she will be only the second woman to be executed by the state in history. McAnulty’s abuse of her daughter is undeniably horrific, and she should be held responsible for what she did. However, when we remove the assumption that mothers alone are responsible for the well-being of their children, we must challenge the prosecutor’s argument that only her mother could have saved her. Many other people could have saved Jeanette Maples: her father, her stepfather, her step-grandmother, state officials in Oregon and California, teachers and peers at Jeanette’s school. Every one of these people had some indication that the girl could be in trouble. Anthony Maples, Jeanette’s father, hadn’t seen or talked to his daughter in nearly a decade.3 McAnulty and Maples’s two sons had been removed from their care and placed in foster care by the state of California, yet Jeanette was left with McAnulty.4 Lynn McAnulty, the girl’s step-grandmother, said that she anonymously called Oregon state child welfare officials several times because she suspected that the girl was being abused.5 The Seattle Weekly reported that “friends and administrators at Cascade Middle School in Eugene remember seeing Maples coming to school in torn clothes—sometimes they’d catch glimpses of terrible bruises.”6 Worst of all, Richard McAnulty, the condemned woman’s husband, was fully aware that Jeanette was being severely beaten and starved. He also pleaded guilty to murder by abuse for his role in the girl’s death, but was sentenced to twenty-five years’ imprisonment (instead of receiving the death penalty), though the prosecutor stated that Mr. McAnulty was just as responsible for the girl’s death as her mother. All these people could have done more to help Jeanette. Indeed, it takes a village to raise a child, but it also takes a village to allow one to be so severely abused. To merely blame the mother, to pass her off as pathological, is grossly insufficient. It is not enough to ask the question “Why did she do it?” We must also ask: how did we let this happen in our community (this community of Eugene, Oregon where I myself was a graduate student at the time)? What might have been done to McAnulty herself that might have contributed to the rage she vented on her daughter? As Meyer and Oberman state: “these cases often leave one with the sense that there is blood on more than one pair of hands.”7
We need to take collective responsibility for the lives of children, not rely on the resources of a single individual, often largely on her own, because our cultural myths say that she is naturally suited to the job. It is urgent that we overcome our denial and realize that the impulses moving women to kill their children are surprisingly commonplace. Our society constantly proclaims the importance of caring for children, and yet we can find children without food, proper clothing, education, health care, and basic safety everywhere. We need to channel our outrage and blame into something more productive, into finding, protecting, and caring for those children who are, right now, suffering.
Philosophers can make a unique contribution to clarifying the complexities of the maternal situation, but in order to do so they must listen carefully to the experiences of mothers to understand their material and social conditions. Generally speaking, the philosophical canon is guilty of either ignoring or mistreating mothers. If philosophy is to have concrete relevance, then it must go beyond the metaphorical and romanticized perspective. The metaphors we use are not neutral; they advocate an interpretation of the phenomenon in question. Thus it is only right to check these metaphorical understandings against the lives they intend to invoke. When we take seriously the true complexity of motherhood, we find that the mother-child relationship is philosophically rich indeed.
At the beginning of this book I said that I would demonstrate that it is because of, not in spite of, the tensions inherent to mothering that it is an instructive case for ethics. And, indeed, these discoveries extend beyond the mother-child relationship. We have found that caring for others, though it is something that one sometimes feels compelled to do, does not come naturally. Romanticizing any type of relationship or setting up impossible ideals is counterproductive. Mothers dealing with their ambivalence demonstrate how important it is to recognize one’s limitations. The acknowledgment of hostility toward someone in need is central to being able to respond more appropriately to her call. Emotion can be thought provoking, but it is also thoughtful and reflective in itself; it reveals its own understanding of a situation before it is fully reflected upon.
Conflicted mothers teach us that deliberative agency is part of what enables one to resist violence and to nurture another. Empathy and connection are a minute aspect of what is necessary for ethical responsiveness. It is usually more tedious than transcendent. Thus there must be a continually renewed commitment or adoption; one must repeatedly choose to care for another. Even in genuine mutuality the insurmountable alterity of the other cannot be overcome. While a sense of unanimity with someone may motivate an ethical response, dispute forces recognition of interpersonal divergence. When taken together, these attitudes entreat us to expand and practice self-knowledge, sound judgment, and problem-solving abilities in order to respond fittingly to one another.
The ethical successes and failures of mothers demonstrate that although our circumstances do not dictate our behaviors, they highly constrain what is possible. Ethical responsiveness requires skills, intelligence, resources, and emotional support. If an ethical response is asymmetrical (as it typically is in the mother-child relation), then this must be balanced by other factors in a person’s life. This is why meeting our responsibilities depends on the familial, political, cultural, and material context. An individualistic model of ethical responsibility is both inaccurate and destructive. It has enabled and encouraged the denial of the need for care and thereby made care work needlessly exploitative.
Acknowledging both our dependence and dependents is critical to becoming ethical and fully realizing our capacities. Children are the primal parasites that make the necessity of caregiving undeniably visible. Yet their dependency has something even greater to offer. They invite a fuller expression of our freedom. This view of freedom is not just the ability to do whatever we want. Rather, by making use of our freedom (in order to write a book, for instance) we become entangled in the lives and needs of others. This freedom is articulated not only in overt acts but also in restraint, in permitting the interruption of our enjoyment and self-possession. This generosity is not at odds with personal liberty; it is precisely the recognition of our mutual value and freedom.
Maternal experience also demonstrates that the likelihood of failure must be a part of any ethical theory. Being generous is not always prudent, beautiful, or fun. The coercive vulnerability of others can incite hostility, resentment, and even violence. But acknowledging this can lead us to consider how to reasonably meet competing demands. Recognizing the prevalence of ethical ambivalence means we cannot so easily dismiss, pathologize, or demonize those who fail. The necessity of adoption means that no one is absolved of responsibility if someone is neglected, abused, or murdered. Nietzsche wrote: “All evil do I accredit to thee: therefore do I desire of thee the good.”8 Mothers have opportunity for great crimes and great heroism. Maternal ethics are illustrative precisely because both these options are possible; we are capable of being both better and worse than we typically imagine.