THE ETHICAL AND SPIRITUAL DIMENSIONS OF THE POOR

John F. Kavanaugh S.J.*
Professor of Philosophy, Director of Ethics Across the Curriculum
Saint Louis University

This lecture was delivered at the Moral Dimensions of Poverty Conference sponsored by the Vincentian Chair of Social Justice on October 16, 1999.Father Kavanaugh offered this keynote address during the segment of the conference entitled "Poverty and the Moral Imperative." Fr. Kavanaugh identifies our "culture of choice" as being the antithesis of a "moral imperative." He calls us to become Prophets who will promote our personhood, which as the basis of our human dignity and ethical import, exacts certain moral requirements.Fr. Kavanaugh assures us our shared human personhood is the heart of our solidarity with the poor.+

While I am truly grateful to be invited to St. John's University, an occasion to visit with so many old friends from my short tenure here a few years ago, I am a bit reluctant to undertake the topic at hand. In fact, I cannot think of any topic more unfashionable to speak about than poverty and the poor. You see, they just do not exist. And if they do, it's their own fault. And since it is their fault, any talk of them is just a guilt trip. At least, that is the account that much of our culture offers about the poor.

THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE ETHICAL WORLD

Our discomfort with the poor is not the only difficulty with such a topic. Just look at two of the themes involved in the title of this Conference: "Moral Imperative," "Spirituality and Poverty." In the eyes of many, especially in this culture, both phrases boggle the imagination: Imperatives? Duties? Oughts? I thought we got rid of those long ago? "Spirituality?"--supposedly, that has nothing to do with either poverty or the poor.
Isn't spirituality a matter of "finding our bliss," and "getting in touch," "being happy with ourselves?" Why bring the poor into it?

In the first matter of moral imperatives, there are some people, some philosophers as well, to be sure, who say, who think, who judge, who advise us that there are indeed no oughts, no duties, no higher law before which our egos or our desires must yield. We live in a culture which celebrates choices, not the kind of choices, not the moral quality of our choices, but only the fact that we make them. It is choice, not moral imperative, which is the great trump card of moral discourse, whether it is in matters sexual, financial, or national interest. Indeed, we do put some restraint on choices, but only in the name of other choosers who have their right to choose--especially if they are vociferous enough in their demands--and, even more especially, if our choices impinge upon the property they have amassed as their own.1

Skepticism over anything but the primacy of choice ranges over the entire cultural terrain. In our university classrooms, one could make a safe wager that the most common refrain offered to questions of right and wrong is, "Who's to say?" As a few students invariably write in my own courses, at least at the beginning, "No one has any right to tell anyone else how or what to choose." This sublime sovereignty of choice is constantly confirmed by national and international policy. "It is my money, I can do with it what I want to." "It is our war to declare: it is our prerogative to declare it so in our national interest." To somehow raise the issue of constraints on our use of money or exercise of power is, for many, an intimation of communism or anti-Americanism. What is more distressing, even our celebrated philosophers balk at the possibility that there is a higher law, a greater imperative to which we must all be faithful if we are to be ethical. Richard Rorty, for example, (possibly the most famous philosopher in America) has almost taken as his personal vocation the task of eliminating any foundational morality from our consciences. One of his more striking formulations is: "When the secret police come, when the torturers violate the innocent, there is nothing to be said to them of the form: ‘There is something within you that you are betraying.'"2


Is it really true that there is nothing deep within us which we betray when we repress the claim that others make upon us? Are there no imperatives, which might restrict our individualist choices, no duties which command us to act against our style or preference, no standards which might restrain our liberties? If this is not settled, all talk concerning rights of or duties to the poor are fatuous.

A more troubling question is this: what, if anything, is the foundation of morality, especially in a pluralistic society? Our academic theories are marked by what is called "anti-foundationalism;" our public discourse is marked by a selective amorality, which musters outrage only at the most trendy of causes; our personal commitments are marked by a pervasive relativism. This may be wonderful for those who have it made in this culture. But it is a nightmare for those who are neither fashionable nor powerful.3 It was only a powerful, objective moral foundation, the intrinsic dignity of persons, which could motivate and justify the great voices raised, in this century, on behalf of the disenfranchised, whether Gandhi, Martin Luther King, or Dorothy Day.

THE DIMINISHMENT OF PERSONHOOD

Relativism and selective morality are usually functions of cultural bias or national interest combined with an absence of ethics grounded in personal dignity. Thus we frequently witness outrage, for example, at the treatment of animals while at the same time there is a deafening silence about similar or worse treatment to human fetuses-- who at least merit as much protection as our lab animals. Yet, if I were to announce that tomorrow, I will do to a kitten what is, as a matter of practice, done to second trimester unborn humans, who could still the protests? Or from a national policy perspective, why is it that we select the people of Havana, Belgrade or Baghdad for our punitive military and economic practices, while at the same time we bestow most favored nation status to China or Indonesia?

We are not only witnessing a confusion over standards of ethical right and wrong. What is more dangerous is the fact that there now seems to be a willingness to exclude certain classes of humans from the privileged status of making moral claims on us. This is a question of who we are even willing to count as persons part of our moral community. Those people at the margins of our communal life are the first candidates 14 15 for exclusion. Thus, very young and undeveloped persons as well as very old and diminished ones are increasingly categorized as non-persons, whether it be by those in academia or in our courts. Mary Ann Warren as well as Peter Singer are theoreticians who have publicly made a case for infanticide.4 This is mirrored in a president who is unwilling to put serious restraints on a procedure called partial-birth abortion, as indubitably close to infanticide as anything can be. Similarly, at the other margin of life, two circuit courts have argued, without refutation from our Supreme Court, that at the end of life, when one has as much as "lost" one's dignity, the choice to commit selfdestruction should be under-written by the state.5

The poor as well are easily pushed beyond the margins of our moral community. Whether it be by their distance from us or the hopelessness of their condition, they are easily rendered abstract numbers rather than living, breathing human persons. If we actually saw the poor of Havana or Baghdad as real persons making moral claims on us, how could we tolerate the sanctions upon their countries which damage and punish them the most. The poor, as our twenty-year policy in East Timor illustrates, function as little more than an instrument of our geopolitics.

The poor of our own country, as well, are easily marginalized, not only when we build our highways to bypass their neighborhoods, but also when we characterize them as unmotivated, undisciplined and unworthy. Even the working poor fail to count in a media and money world which takes advantage of their labors and services but refuses to compensate them as deserving members of our "community." The people who clean our streets, provide our transportation, wash our chronic infirm, care for our nursing home relatives, serve our meals at fast food drive-ins, dispose of our trash, maintain our buildings and public monuments are treated as little more than economic functions, not as persons, men and women who must care for their families, who aspire to beauty, who deserve leisure time, who ambition education and housing for their young.

Thus, in the summer of 1999, when our Congress deliberated to dispose of a massive surplus, it was not the working poor who were candidates for benefits of our prosperity or who were rewarded for their contributions to our social structures. It was only the rich. As for the poor, the National Review spoke for many who have "made it" in North America by commenting, "No the poor do not get an income-tax break in this bill. Poor people don't pay federal taxes."6 Never questioned is why they do not pay income taxes: they do not make enough money even to support their families. Since the late sixties, when minimum wage workers earned 90% of what was needed to raise a family of four at the poverty level, the take-home pay, in real dollars has steadily declined to the present rate of only 70% of the "living wage" requirement. Rather than recognize the moral claim that the working poor have upon the community at large, the tax plan is a "Boon for Corporate America," as a Wall Street Journal headline put it.7 The top twenty percent in income will receive 78% of the tax cut. We should keep in mind that the actual income of corporate executives is now 419 times the income of the average worker (up from 42 times the average rate in 1980). If the minimum wage had multiplied by the same factor as the CEO rate, the minimum wage would now be over $20 an hour. But the power brokers of our culture have continually resisted raising the minimum wage, even though it cannot provide a decent living.8 You can entertain such hardness of heart only if you have successfully repressed the humanity of the poor. It is a hardness, moreover, abetted by an ideology of individualistic capitalism which ignores the common good of civil society and denies the moral claims that our common humanity makes upon us. It is this repression of our shared human personhood and the ethical imperatives it carries, which is at the heart of our moral crisis as well as our social injustice.

THE PERSONALIST ETHIC

The central and most strategic fact about all talks of rights, autonomy, and freedom of choice which mark not only ethical discourse, but any social, political or justice controversy is the reality most assiduously ignored. None of these words would make sense if they were not grounded in the kind of beings we are, embodied persons. There could be no rights if there were not persons who are capacitated by their nature to claim and exercise them. Autonomy and freedom are made possible only because there are beings in the world who are endowed in such a way that they can exercise such portentous gifts.

Taken at its most basic and foundational level, the very impulse to be ethical, to claim rights, to exercise freedom of choice requires an implicit affirmation of personhood--not because it is mine, but because I am gifted with this reality I share with other persons. This personhood is the shared basis of our human dignity and our ethical import. Consequently, any morally authentic choice must carry with it an affirmation of personal reality, if it is to be truly ethical. Any choice, which degrades, destroys or represses personhood, is ultimately, a degradation of ethics, a destruction of its ontological foundation. This is similar to the logic of Kant's formulation of the second categorical imperative: only act in such a way that you never treat a person, whether oneself or others, as a non-person. The problem here, of course, is our tendency to exclude certain people from the community of persons. Thus the enemy is demonized. Its civilians are collateral damage. Capital criminals are brutes. Other races are animalistic or primitive. Unborn humans are blobs of protoplasm. Profoundly wounded humans are "vegetables." The poor, not only of our country, but of the world, are abstractions or, at best, caricatures.

Any honest understanding of the "human person" however, forces us to abandon all of those strategies which might exclude others, especially those we force to the margins from our common humanity. To be a person is not to be a functioning mind, a male, a healthy youth, a white, an American, an autonomous chooser, or a self-made man or woman. It is to be, rather, an embodied career, endowed with the uniquely personal capacities to unfold, given time, support, and nourishment, as men and women capable of commitment and self-determinism. It is not our choices that give us value as persons; it is our personhood that makes possible the exercise of choice.

The same might be said of our "dignity" and our value. These are not a function of internal attitudes we may have of ourselves, or the extrinsic approval of others. Nor are they, as the ideology of our culture would have it, functions of our "external" importance, so often measured in money and possessions, as we might see in the expressions, "what are you worth?" and "getting good value." Dignity and value are intrinsic to our personhood itself. If others or we do not see it, it is a problem with our vision. Personal dignity and worth are not something we construct or concoct; they are something we recognize, honor and respect. That respect and honor is our fundamental duty to ourselves and to others. It is that dignity and worth which places constraints upon our autonomy and individualism, both of which can be ethical only if they serve our human dignity.

Once one sees this personalist foundation to ethics, there are, of course, strategic applications to the cases of how we deal with our most dependent, vulnerable, impoverished or diminished members of our human community. That discussion is for another time.9

But in the context of poverty and the poor, a personalist ethic suggests a striking but nuanced approach that we may not automatically consider. Poverty is not only a phenomenon that touches those who are materially deprived. It touches those who are materially blessed.

THE MIRROR FACES OF POVERTY

Poverty is a strange, multi-faceted word. There are what we normally call "the poor"--those who have little or nothing to survive on. At the same time, there is the allusion to the "poor little rich kid," a not entirely inaccurate description of those who have everything but what counts most. As Mother Teresa has been known to often say, "the greatest poverty is the lack of love." There is also a kind of material poverty, often linked with the traditional notion of evangelical poverty, which can be liberating and joyful. This kind of "poverty" may range from Saint Francis of Assisi's spirituality, to something as ordinary as simplicity of life. One might even speak of sin as impoverishment, a loss of what is our most basic need and nourishment.

Most basically, however, the word "poverty" usually refers to all of those conditions, whether caused by the force of nature or the choice of humans, which degrade and diminish our personhood such as earthquakes and tidal waves as well as human violence and human greed. Our response to such poverty, it seems to me, must be an enactment of our commitment to the dignity of persons. Thus, we are called, as a matter of ethical integrity, (and even more intensely, from the Christian perspective) in some way to alleviate and respond to such personal hardship.

But there is at least another kind of basic poverty, which diminishes us in our personal dignity and which is related not to humans as the victims of violence and greed, but as the perpetrators--or at least unknowing collaborators. In this context, we might speak of a depersonalizing "poverty" which is associated, not with the lack of material things, but with the surfeit of them. Two recent works, written from polar perspectives, illuminate this basic paradox of poverty. Robert Frank, a professor of Economics, Ethics and Public Policy at Cornell has written Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess.10 While it initially seems to be a straightforward account of the excesses of the 1990s spending boom on luxury items, at a deeper level, it is an analysis of the diminishing returns on excessive personal spending. Not only does the individualistic model of spending ignore the environmental enhancement provided by the commonly shared commitment to social betterment. But what is more, the purchase of goods themselves does not deliver on the promises of fulfillment and self-enhancement that are used to hawk them. While financial well being is an important contribution to a sense of security and fulfillment, "Our concern here is how differences in consumption affect citizens' well-being in countries that have already achieved a measure of affluence. For such countries, average satisfaction levels are not significantly correlated over time with income."11 As the 75th anniversary issue of Forbes magazine, almost prophetically put it in 1992: "Why we feel so bad, when we have it so good."12 With increases in income, needs only constantly grow; satisfactions diminish. What, after all, can $2,000 pillows, $20,000 watches, and $2 million dollar automobiles do for the hungers of the human heart?13 Frank ultimately recommends a progressive consumption tax which will not only provide billions for enhancing the quality of our civic and communal lives, but also provide lower ceilings to the delusory possessions which supposedly will fulfill us but never do.

Ironically, it is another work, one celebrating conspicuous consumption, which dramatically illustrates the poverty of possessions. James Twitchell's Lead Us Into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism is in many ways a hilarious rejoinder to the simplicity of life movement as well as critics of consumerism.14 His approach is not to refute the critics of crass materialism or to suggest that wealthy Americans as a matter of fact are well adjusted or happy. It is, rather, to affirm that materialism is all we have, and we love it. Consumption of "stuff" has become the source of meaning, which was once identified with traditional religious transcendence.15

"In consuming we become omophagic--creating ourselves by eating ourselves up. Not by happenstance did the disease that decimated so much of the Victorian world become known as consumption. Tuberculosis, the AIDS of our grandparents, carried the cultural censure of exactly what high-Victorian critics like Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin claimed was occurring in the marketplace. We were going to be consumed by consumption."16 Purchasing has become our new sacramental ritual "Buy this, you'll be saved. You deserve a break today. You, you're the one. You're in good hands. We care. Trust in us...We have grown not weaker but stronger by accepting these self-evidently ridiculous myths that sacralize mass-produced objects; we have not wasted away but have proved inordinately powerful."17

For Twitchell, the commercial culture has become the central "register of selfhood," fulfilling the role of what was once a religion of transcendence. He acknowledges that much may have been lost in such a transformation, but the dominant conversation is now truly egalitarian, a discourse between consumers and their goods, the language of community being that of style and packaging.18 In such a symbolic world a strange paradox occurs. Those most successful in possessing and consuming are those most robbed of any interior reality. They are personally impoverished. Twitchell does not overtly acknowledge this, but he does acknowledge the cost it entails for the materially poor in a revealing passage, which suggests the personal diminishment of both rich and poor.

Consumerism is wasteful, it is devoid of otherworldly concerns, it lives for today and celebrates the body. It overindulges and spoils the young with impossible promises. It encourages recklessness, living beyond one's means, gambling. Consumer culture is always new, always without a past. Like religion, which it has displaced, it afflicts the comfortable and comforts the afflicted. It is heedless of the truly poor who cannot gain access to the loop of meaningful information that is carried through its ceaseless exchanges. It is a one-dimensional world, a wafer-thin world, a world low on significance and high on glitz, a world without yesterdays. Getting and spending has been the most passionate, and often the most imaginative, endeavor of modern life. We have done more than acknowledge that the good life starts with the material life, as the ancients did. We have made stuff the dominant prerequisite of organized society. Things "R" Us. Consumption has become production. While this is dreary and depressing to some, as doubtless it should be, it is liberating and democratic to many more.19

The material impoverishment of the poor is mirrored in the spiritual impoverishment of the rich. The poor do not count because they do not have things. We do not count because it is only our things that make us count. The only things that count are things.

THE PRACTICAL IMPERATIVES

I have, thus far, only suggested what I think are the core issues in the fragmentation of our ethical world as well as the possible solution. This has been on a general level of analysis, and the particularities of our task are embodied in the practical issues, which we are to examine and discuss for the rest of our conference. I would, however, suggest that there are more concrete imperatives that address us, if we wish to live in such a way as to embody our commitment to the intrinsic dignity and value of personal existence.

Live as if Persons Mattered

In our personal lives, we are to live as if persons mattered. This not only applies to our private lives wherein we make time for each other, our children and our friends, but in our engagements with others as neighbors, as political allies, and as brothers and sisters throughout the world. Here there are indeed issues of simplicity, compassion, and just sharing of our wealth.

Focus on Election 2000

In our political world, let us look to the election of the year 2000. Is there any political figure who challenges us, who calls us to duty, who inspires us to serve the poor and heal the injuries of the wounded. If we find such a person, let us hold that candidate dear and be willing to labor and sacrifice for such a one. In concrete political issues, I propose that we insist upon a minimum wage that not only enables a family provider to insure the health, education and housing of children, but one that motivates men and women to move into the lower-middle class of aspirations for home ownership and higher education. In this arena, we should be activists on behalf of universal health care coverage, with an emphasis upon preventive health and community health promoters who are educated, subsidized and rewarded for their work.

Maintain a Global Perspective

We must push into the public consciousness and discourse the reality of other men and women in the world, especially those who suffer from debt and tyrannical regimes. 20 21

We can no longer tolerate the appeal to our baser instincts which would have us believe that our brothers and sisters are only those within our national boundaries, our class, our color or our religion. In the late summer of 1999 the columnist George Will advised the American populace and its politicians that there is no room for any prophetic witness in the political campaign which would usher in the next millennium. He wrote: "Surely there is a connection between America's commercial culture and today's "moral minimalism." Quoting two academics, he wrote, "one of Americans' strongest moral values is a reluctance to impose moral values." Quoting a third he noted that the "new" eleventh commandment is "thou shall not judge," as an expression of our solipsistic life of suburbs and free markets. He seems not to be troubled by this reality.

Let us hope, however, that you and I are troubled. Let us hope, as well, that prophets rise from our midst. They need not be of the great Hebrew heritage of Jeremiah, Amos or Isaiah. They need not be Mother Teresas or Dorothy Days or Martin Luther Kings. But let them raise their voices. Let them not be intimidated by the moral pablum that passes as wisdom in our times. Let them know what it means to be a person. Let them know what moral requirements emerge from such a splendid gift which you and I have and which we share with every mother's child. This is the foundation of any authentic spirituality and the ultimate basis for every moral claim. It is also the heart of our solidarity with the poor.

 

*John Francis Kavanaugh, S. J. holds a Ph.D. in Social Philosophy from Washington University in St. Louis. He has published and lectured widely on issues of consumerism, intrinsic value and the ethics of life. He is the author of Human Realization: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Man; Following Christ in a Consumer Society; Faces of Poverty, Faces of Christ; and a three book series entitled The Word Engaged. A regular columnist for America magazine, he is also an award winning syndicated columnist. In addition to receiving numerous awards for teaching excellence at St. Louis University, Fr. Kavanaugh has also pursued international apostolates, serving both with the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta and the Jean Vanier communities for the handicapped in Banglaore.

+ The particular topics of intrinsic human dignity and personalist ethics are developed in Fr. Kavanaugh's forthcoming book, Who Count As Persons: Human Identity and the Ethics of Killing (Georgetown University Press). These concepts were also presented in a lecture to the Catholic Health Association 2000, "Wounded Humanity and Catholic Health Care," to be published in Health Progress.


ENDNOTES

1 Perhaps the classical formulation of "sovereign" choice is in the introduction to Mill's "On Liberty," where we find: "In the part [of conduct] which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign." Mill, of course, did admit constraints on our liberty, especially other persons' bodies and property; and it is noteworthy that he did not extend such liberty interest to immature humans, backward societies, and barbarians, no doubt convenient exceptions for a writer who was publishing in the British Empire. There are many editions of "On Liberty." My own favorite is found in Six Great Humanistic Essays of John Stuart Mill, with Introduction by Albert William Levi (New York: Washington Square Press, 1963), p. 135.

2 Richard Rorty's "Pragmatism and Philosophy" can be found in, among other places, After Philosophy, ed. By Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), p.60.

3 Not all academicians, of course, underwrite individualistic relativism. Among Kantians, Thomists, phenomenologists, personalists and other traditions, there are strong defenses of foundational ethics. Perhaps the most noteworthy calls for an ethos grounded in our shared humanity, from a feminist perspective, have been the challenges of Martha Nussbaum, "Feminists and Philosophy," New York Review of Books, Oct. 20, 1994 and Margaret Farley's "Feminism and Universal Morality," in Prospects for a Common Morality (Princeton: 1993).

4 Mary Ann Warren wrote, "The Personhood Argument in Favor of Abortion" for The Monist (Vol.57, No.1. 1973). In response to complaints that her article served as a defense of infanticide as well, she wrote an elaboration and defense of her position in "Postscript on Infanticide" which appeared in Joel Feinberg's The Problem of Abortion (Belmont, California: Wadsworth, 1984). Singer's position, which has appeared in both academic and popular publications, is developed in Rethinking Life and Death (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995).

5 Compassion in Dying v State of Washington. United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Decision
written by Judge Stephen Reinhardt, 1995. And Quill v. Vacco. United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Decision written by Miner, 1995.

6 National Review, August 30, 1999, p.12.

7 Wall Street Journal, Monday, August 9, p.A3.

8 The data on poverty levels and estimated minimum wages are from United For a Fair Economy, "A Decade of
Executive Excess: The 1990s," September 1, 1999. Available from the Internet, www.stw.org/html/decade of executive excess.

9 Alasdair Macintyre has, from a unique perspective, reopened this question in his Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Chicago: Open Court, 1999). It is a call for understanding those virtues which are associated with our unavoidable "dependency" as human beings. It is not only an opening to understanding physically compromised persons; it also suggests our relationship to economically compromised persons as well.

10 Robert Frank, Luxury Fever (New York: Free Press, 1999).

11 ibid., p.73.

12 Forbes, September 14, 1992. Cover Story.

13 The pillow example is from the Company Store which has a spinoff catalogue called the "Pillow source
Book." The automobile is the Mercedes-Benz CLK-GTR, of which 25 will be sold and 200 customers have applied for at the cost of $1.7 million. (Newsweek, August 30, 1999) p.6.

14 James Twitchell's Lead Us Into Temptation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), is only his latest debunking of critics of capitalism, like myself.

15 ibid. p.12.

16 ibid. p.30.

17 ibid. p. 31.

18 ibid. p. 49.

19 ibid. pp. 284–6.

 

top of page or
return to index of articles for 2000-2001