Q&A: On the Moral Value of Caring for One’s Family
On the Moral Value of Caring for One’s Family
Question
Hello and blessings, dear Rabbi Michi. I watched one of the podcasts you took part in recently (I think that by 5785 it can already be officially declared that you’ve become the world champion of debates in Israel. You deserve it… you really are an intellectual personality who is exceptional in our generation), and I heard you argue that in your view there is no value in a state.
The host, for his part, replied that the Greeks claimed there is value in caring for one’s family, and from there it expanded into a value in caring for one’s tribe—and from there he wanted to infer that there is a normative value in a state (of the Jews; interestingly, he was secular, by the way). You dodged the conclusion by uprooting the axiom and saying that there is no value at all in a person caring for his family. It’s simply in a person’s interest to care for his family, but it does not stem from a normative value. In this issue you came across as a bit utilitarian.
I’m asking whether you stand by the claim that there is no value in a person caring for his own private family. If we measure by Kant’s categorical imperative, the conclusion would certainly be the opposite, and I think that as a Kantian you should also accept the conclusions of the categorical imperative.
Take, for example, the question of whether a person has an obligation to care for his son. I once had an argument with someone about this; he claimed that in fact caring for another child is no less moral than caring for your own son.
I answered him that the reason I think I have responsibility and a moral obligation to act for my son more than for the son of a stranger is twofold, based on essential and pure considerations. First, Kant’s categorical imperative holds: act only according to that which, in your acting on it, you would want to become a universal law—that is, the criterion for which action is inherently proper is to look from a bird’s-eye view at what would happen if everyone behaved that way: would the world be more repaired or more bleak? Once the equation is resolved, it becomes clear with certainty which action is moral and which is not. Again, not from utilitarian considerations, but only as a method for calculating a moral formula. And for our matter, regarding the moral obligation of a person to care first and foremost for his own son more than for others: if all the people of the world neglected their responsibility to care devotedly for their sons, what would happen to humanity? Oh yes, exactly—a particularly tragic result. In the pessimistic scenario, the babies would not survive infancy at all, and humanity would wipe itself out within a few generations. And in the optimistic scenario, even if the babies did survive, there is certainly no doubt that their upbringing would be flawed and negligent, and those little ones, when they grew into adults, would create a generation of corrupted and miserable people, damaged, with mental disorders and enormous childhood deprivation—and even in this optimistic scenario I wouldn’t recommend that anyone live in such a cursed world. You understand on your own what the conclusion of the deontic categorical imperative is, right? Exactly this—it is a moral obligation for a father to be responsible primarily for his own son, and there is no other person who can fill the role of the parents. That’s one point.
I think this argument is very strong within Kantian deontic methodology, and you do belong to that camp. And just as the categorical imperative obligates a person to care for his son, so too it obligates him to care for his wife and also for his parents. So in my view the unequivocal conclusion is that the conservatives are right when they claim that there is value in caring for one’s private family.
As for the move from the private family to the tribe, that is a more analogical inference and less necessary. But I think that is a valid inference too. Do you agree?
Answer
I don’t think I said there that there is no value in caring for family. On the contrary, I argued that there is also value in caring for the people and for the community. What I said is that the existence of a family or a people has no value. That is an interest. But once a group has an interest in its own existence, then there is a moral value for each person to care for the group. Like caring to provide food for a poor person: the food in the poor person’s possession is not a value but an interest. But when someone has an interest, there is value in helping him with it. If you listen again, you’ll see that I made that distinction there.
As for the categorical imperative and the consequentialist question, I completely agree. I’ve written this here more than once against universalism.
Discussion on Answer
I understood you, and I thank you for sharpening your position for me.
But in my opinion the very existence of a family is also a normative value derived a priori from the categorical imperative in the same way: for if it were turned into a universal law not to maintain a family, the world would be destroyed within a single generation—hence it follows that there is a deontic value in the existence of the family (not only an a posteriori value, after the family already exists, to care for it, but an a priori norm to establish such a family).
According to what I’m saying, there is already considerable room to discuss an inductive generalization to a normative value for the existence of tribes and communities.
I don’t see why the existence of a family is a moral value. A world without families might be less efficient, but not less moral/good.
And even regarding efficiency, that’s only if you support having the maximum number of children. If the whole world were made up of single people, they would die and humanity would become extinct. That’s all. Is there something bad about that?
Especially since there are different models of families, kibbutzim, groups, various kinds of new families.
The point is that there wouldn’t be a world without families, because humanity would become extinct. If you think there is nothing bad about that, only then can one argue that there is no value in creating families. But to me that sounds like a strange argument, because I define a moral world as one in which there is moral choice and moral decision. If humanity disappeared from the map, the world would become entirely devoid of morality—not moral and not amoral; the whole ethical equation would be erased. The world would revert to an age in which only animals and living creatures without choice ruled. It seems to me that this is a very problematic result through the lens of Kantian ethics. So yes, I return to claiming that the existence of a family has deontological moral value.
And as for efficiency, I did not argue that a large family has more benefit than a small family. That certainly isn’t necessary, because a greater number of human beings does not necessarily entail a better world. But I did argue that there needs to be some basic family structure (since no utopian structure occurs to me right now, let’s say for the sake of discussion two parents and 3 children), so that humanity will not be in a state of long-term decline to the point of extinction.
See columns 188 and 266.