Tag: Department of Philosophy and Religion

(Director’s note: Brookes Brown, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Program in Law, Liberty and Justice, writes on civic obligation, corporate ethics, and is beginning a book project on the ethics of loneliness.  This is Clemson Humanities Now.)

Like many of you, I have not interacted socially in person with anybody outside of my household since early March—no barbeques, no dinner parties, no weddings, no coffee-dates, no board-game nights. I expect I will not do so for many months. I am fortunate—my quarantine household includes three adults and a child. Even if the number of people with whom I can engage are greatly reduced, I can have an in-person conversation, trade household duties, receive a hug. For millions of people, this is not an option. An estimated 35.7 million Americans reside in single person living arrangements (28% of households.) For such persons, quarantine often entails severe social isolation. For the rest of us, the consequences of Covid-19—the need to stay at home, tele-working, unemployment, mean far lower levels of social interaction. This increased physical isolation is likely to be accompanied by an increase in loneliness. Loneliness is not the same thing as social isolation. As great literature often reminds us, it is possible to be alone without being lonely, and to be deeply lonely without being physically alone. Yet there is certainly a correlation. The less we interact with others, lonelier we are likely to feel.

Philosophers do not typically treat the sensation of loneliness as relevant to justice. Instead, it is viewed as a matter of personal concern. I might want more friends, just like I might want to go on vacation in Tahiti, have twins, become a dermatologist, or learn to Salsa. But unlike food or shelter or healthcare or money the fact that I do not have these desires is not a moral concern.

In a project at which I am currently at work, I argue that this common way of thinking about loneliness is a mistake. Loneliness is concerning for the exact same reason that lack of access to healthcare or money are concerning, and thus should be equally considered a concern of justice. In many ways, the argument is simple. Resources like wealth or healthcare are especially important because they underlie our ability to achieve all of our different personal aims, whatever they might be. You cannot start a judo company, succeed as a trucker, or become an artist if you are dying of cancer, or cannot afford mats, brushes, or a driver’s license.

Unlike failing to make it to the South Pacific, loneliness has consequences every bit as devastating to our general ability to pursue our personal projects as lack of access to healthcare or income. Lonely people are twice as likely to develop dementia or suffer losses in executive function.^[1] Lonely individuals have higher blood-pressure, poorer sleep quality,^[2] more harmful stress hormones,^[3] and experience greater bodily pain.^[4] Women who require breast biopsies are at nine times the risk of developing breast cancer if they lack social support.^[5] Social connectedness is important for genomic expression and immune-regulation.^[6] Caring relationships give us other people that we can rely on for help in everything from moving to paying for college. Our relationships to others are even an important part of how we maintain ourselves as people who care about justice. lack of social connections has been shown to heighten self-centeredness and makes it more difficult to envision the challenges faced by others.^[7] If we are sick, have fewer people we can count on, or have trouble maintaining our dispositions we will find it harder to succeed at our aims, just as we would if we lacked money or healthcare.

This suggests that in thinking about who we as a society need to help in the coming months and years, we will not only need to consider those who will lose income, or who find themselves infected. We will also need to think about what we owe to those who are facing a loss of social connection in our global quest to survive this pandemic.

(Director’s Note: Todd May teaches in the Department of Philosophy and Religion.  This is Clemson Humanities Now.)

“the prison, apparently ‘failing’, does not miss its target; on the contrary, it reaches it, in so far as it gives rise to one particular form of illegality in the midst of others, which it is able to isolate, to place in full light and to organize as a relatively enclosed, but penetrable milieu.”  Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 276.

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault notes that the history of critiques of the prison is co-extensive with the history of the prisons themselves.  They are always failing and thus always in need of reform.  But perhaps, he wonders, we’re asking the wrong question.  Instead of asking why the prisons are constantly failing, perhaps we should ask a different question:  what are they succeeding at?

That, I believe, is the question—the first of two questions—we should be asking about the police.  Year in and year out, decade in and decade out, police behavior cries out for reform.  The calls are as predictable as they are painful.  So, instead of asking ourselves why the police constantly fail, perhaps we should ask another question:  what are they succeeding at?

Once we ask this question, and do so without the blinders of a superficial and easily disproven ideology (“they’re here to prevent crime”; “they’re here to protect the citizens”), we are free to recognize their social role.  And to recognize it, we need only look.  Look at the murders of countless African Americans.  Look at the increasing militarization of the police.  Look at the city budgets that neglect social services in order to fund police activities.  Look at the wider and wider set of activities that the police, while regularly failing, are constantly required to perform.

The police have a role to play in this deeply inegalitarian society.  That role is to preserve the social order and the hierarchies it involves.  It is to ensure that the privileged are protected and that those without privilege don’t get any fancy ideas, individually or collectively.

The police may seem to perform a necessary role in any society.  After all, somebody needs to ensure that people aren’t robbed or raped or murdered.  And this is the peculiar genius of the setup.  There are roles that police play that in any society would need to be played.  But those roles are folded into the larger one of keeping the social hierarchy intact.  If there is to be a social order that preserves the privilege of the few, it must also ensure that there aren’t robbers and rapists and murderers running around.  And it can do that while at the same time ensuring that, for instance, enough fear is instilled in poor and African American communities that things won’t get out of hand, that African American mothers and fathers won’t forget to have those “talks” with their sons and daughters.  These roles are inseparable from one another in the current structure of policing.

That is why asking whether particular police officers are racist misses the larger issue.  The police is (singular verb) racist.  It is an inescapable aspect of the role of the police is to be racist.  That is because it is an inescapable aspect of their role to preserve a social order that privileges the wealthy and (for the most part) the white.

At the outset, I said there were two questions that needed to be asked.  We have answered the first one.  The second one is this:  what is a better way to approach the question of robbery and rape and beatings?  And here I ratify something that has been said before but recently with increasing urgency.  The question is not how to reform the police.  The question lies further back.  How do we build safe and healthy communities for people?

We know the outlines to the answer to that question:  education, jobs with living wages, universal health care, community fellow feeling.  The question of violence should be addressed within that context.  Whether, at the end of that questioning, anything that we might want to call “the police” emerges, it should be a result of the answers to those previous questions, not an answer presupposed at the outset.