"enabling," deontological ethics, and "spirituality" as apology for privilege

[sophiaserpentia]

In response to my post this morning about Shel Silverstein's book The Giving Tree, bifemmefatale and legolastn pointed me towards this page with a variety of different interpretations. The first author mirrored my comments about the book as a satirical commentary on anthropocentrism and male privilege. The second gave the "mainstream" interpretation of the book as an ode to motherhood, to selfless giving and to unconditional love.

Then about a third of the way down, there's this:

On a philosophical level we can use the relationship of the tree and the boy as a way to remind ourselves of the very different judgments produced by utilitarian and deontological ethical systems. Judged by the results of her actions, the tree is culpable before the bar of utilitarian judgment because she produced a spoiled little snot. Judged by her motives, however, the tree remains deontologically pristine.

In talking about ethics before i've mentioned the distinction between utilitarian and deontological ethics.

From the respective Wikipedia articles:
Deontology posits the existence of a priori moral obligations; it suggests that people ought to live by a set of permanently defined principles that do not change merely as a result of a change in circumstances.
Utilitarianism is a theory of ethics based on quantitative maximization of some good for a population.

In the past i've made it clear that i fall strongly on the utilitarian side; in fact i implied this quite recently when i defined the common political good to be maximized as personal empowerment.

From this perspective the tree's giving crosses over into the realm of unhealthy when she offers to let the boy chop off her branches. Without her branches, she is no longer an individual, able to flourish; her personal empowerment has become hobbled.

But let me take a different tack than the view i quoted above. I do not believe the tree is culpable, as Rabbi Gellman wrote. There's a common perception that exploitation within a relationship is a problem for which both participants are equally culpable. The person who is being used is nowadays called an "enabler," never mind that frequently her (most commonly) free will has been weakened and co-opted by emotional or physical abuse. From my perspective, "enabling" is more properly referred to as "survival."

Think: who is served by the idea of "enabling abuse"? This whole idea is an apologetic favoring the perpetuation of privilege. It allows the privileged to say, "But i'm a victim too! She let me take whatever i wanted, and never even tried to stop me!"

However, the Rabbi is right that the situation is "deontologically pristine." Many of our traditions about unconditional love promote selflessness, with the expectation that it will be mutual. But even when it is not mutual, it is something that is still praised, still asked and expected of us (especially, oddly enough, if we are female). Deontology makes moral absolutism possible; and moral absolutism is the root cause of ideological divisiveness.

The Rabbi continues,

In the end I am convinced that the tree was a well-meaning but foolish giver, and yet I am strangely in awe of that foolishness- perhaps because it is so Buddha-like, so profoundly indifferent to the demands of keeping and protecting assets in this selfish and wounded world. The Buddhists call this virtue tanhakaya and they mean by it the release from attachment to the things of the world. It is the third of the four-fold noble truth that stands at the heart of Buddhist dharma. The cause of suffering is attachment, and its cure is release, a simultaneous release from both the world and all need. In that final liberation-perhaps come to sitting upon the tree stump- both the tree and the man are free.

The tree is not an example of someone who is "released from attachment." This interpretation is an example of what i've said before about the development of religious doctrine as a cultural misappropriation of radical mysticism by the upper classes, whereby the apologists of privilege promote the idea of "spirituality," which is radical mysticism safely divested of its threat to the status quo and turned into a sanitized diversion to keep the masses in their place. Do the rich get and stay that way because of their unconditional love and their release from attachment? But with a sanitized version of "spirituality" at hand, even the rich can appear to be pious and righteous, even while beggars starve to death on their doorsteps.

Comments

deontology and utilitarianism

[jnanacandra.livejournal.com]

By your definitions, it would seem that utilitarianism is simply a form of deontology - namely, acting according to the a priori principle that quantitative maximization of good for the individuals in a society will lead to the betterment of the society, and the principle of whatever that good is (in your example, that personal empowerment is good for both the individual and the society - a principle that many people would argue with.)

Note that I consider myself a utilitarian - but defining what is "good" for a person or a society depends, on some level, on moral judgements, even if it's as vague as that a longer life is better. (Better for whom? The person? The society? The planet? The universe? Does it take into account quality of life, and the drain of that life on its environment? Are these questions truly answerable?)

[pretzelsalt.livejournal.com]

You are one of my favorite invisible people (folk who live in a box on my desk).

I am so glad i stumbled on you long ago - I am adding this to memories.

[akycha.livejournal.com]

I found this discussion fascinating, although I am afraid that my analysis is more literary then philosophical.

When considering the tree's acts within a context of "contributing to the greater good," the book can be interpreted as presenting this good as inherently unevenly distributed. That is, the distribution of good is a form of doxa, unquestioned, and thus the application of it falls "naturally" more to the boy than the tree. (I am using doxa here to refer to the unspoken cultural assumptions that make the order of the world seem "natural." If you can articulate it, it becomes orthodoxy, and only articulated orthodoxy can give rise to heterodoxy. The usage is from Pierre Bourdieu.)

This is because of the choice of literary characters. Take for example the incident which you pinpointed as when the giving becomes unhealthy. The tree gives the boy her branches, which he sells (or builds a house of? I cannot remember)-- an action which a tree is fundamentally incapable of. In fact, because the tree is a tree, she does not need money (or a house) at all. The next incident (I cannot believe I can remember this-- I haven't read the book for at least twenty years) involves giving the boy her trunk so he can make a boat. Again, trees are incapable of travel-- that's practically one of their defining aspects. So the gifts the tree gives provide goods the tree cannot make use of-- although one could make a convincing argument that the tree could, herself, have made good use of apples, branches, and trunk. Yet in the story those things are not seen as goods (in the philosophical rather than the commercial sense) when they belong to the tree. They are merely attributes of a tree.

To a certain extent, then, the "good" in the story can only be made use of by the boy. It is not possible to equalize the good, because existence as a whole being is not acknowledged as a "good" the same way money and travel are.

It is also important to note that the story makes it difficult if not impossible to equalize the act of giving. What, after all, can one "give" a tree? The boy does not come with buckets of manure to feed the tree, and it is difficult to think of other things a tree is capable of "receiving."

By making one of the characters a tree, therefore, the story slants who "gets"-- promotes an invisible hierarchy of who deserves/can make use of a particular good.

The tree, therefore has to give in order to a) create and maintain a relationship between herself and the boy, b) in order to make the goods usable, since she is not permitted to make use of them for herself. In fact, as I said before, she is seen as congenitally incapable of using those goods.

Whether you view the tree as the natural world, or as a female being, this slant is quite troubling. To me, at least.

What gets me, I confess, is that despite the fact that the narrative sets the tree up to be the giver, the story remains so disturbing.