I cannot take care of all my mother’s needs. Am I a monster?

welcome Your mileage may varyMy new bi-monthly advice column offers you a framework for thinking through your ethical dilemmas and philosophical questions.

Your mileage may vary It’s not like other advice columns, which usually aim to give you a single answer – the underlying premise is that there is An objective “right” answer to the complex moral questions that life throws at us. I don’t buy that premise.

So I’m reimagining the genre. My advice is based on the column Value pluralismThe idea — developed by philosophers such as Isaiah Berlin and Bernard Williams — that each person has multiple values ​​that are equally valid but sometimes conflict with each other. When values ​​clash, dilemmas arise.

What if you value authenticity, for example, but want to use ChatGPT to write your wedding speech because it will be more effective? Or when you value fighting climate change but desperately want to have children?

When you write in doubt, I will not give you my answer; I’ll show you how to find your own. First, I’ll tease out the different values ​​in the question. Then I will show how wise people—from ancient philosophers to spiritual thinkers to modern scientists—have thought about these values ​​and the conflicts between them. Ultimately, I’ll let you decide which value you want to put more weight on. Only you can decide that; This is why columns are called Your mileage may vary.

Here, I answer the first Vox reader’s question, condensed and edited for clarity.

My mother is retired, disabled and poor. I help him with his medical care by arranging appointments, talking to his doctors, and finding the medical resources he needs for his many ailments. I was even able to find a home health aide to come to her house six days a week to help her with daily cleaning, cooking and other tasks.

But as he gets older, I know he will need more help than I can remotely provide. And I know that I cannot take on the real tasks of caring for an elderly person with his many problems. … Am I a monster for accepting the fact that he will probably end up in a state-run retirement community?

Dear Certainly-Not-A-Monster,

This is not a traditional advice column, where someone writes a question and comes up with a simple answer. In your case, though, there’s one question I can answer pretty easily right off the bat: “Am I a monster?” The answer is no. The world is not divided into good people and bad people (despite what fairy tales and superhero movies tell us). We’re all just human, trying to live up to our values ​​as best we can under the conditions we’re given.

It is clear that you hold more than one value at the same time. You want your mother to be well taken care of. You also want to be taken care of.

What could be more natural than this? I imagine that every animal on earth feels this hesitation in their courage. And, demographically, it’s a fact that more and more people are going to find themselves in exactly this position as the baby boomers age. But I also know from personal experience that realizing how common a dilemma is doesn’t make the internal tug-of-war any less confusing or painful.

Humans have wrestled with this painful confusion for thousands of years. They come up with different ways of navigating the trade-offs between these competing values, depending on the social characteristics of the time. We can learn from the insights they reveal along the way.

Historically, even ancient traditions that take filial piety very seriously recognize that there will always be a tension between taking care of your parents and taking care of yourself. In Judaism, “Honor your father and your mother” is one of the Ten Commandments – not all 10! In fact, Bible commentators have understood another commandment from Deuteronomy, “Guard yourselves and guard your souls very carefully,” to mean that you are obligated to take care of your own body and soul.

In the Chinese moral tradition ConfucianismYour body is considered a gift from your parents, so harming its health (for example, by making yourself too thin) would be disrespecting them. That means taking care of your parents can’t be the best and last price without being self-defeating.

So to ask the question “How should my mother care?” Granules are asking questions at the wrong level. A better question might be “How should my mother’s care be, considering everyone involved?”

To answer that, you’ll want to think about your mom’s growing needs, but you’ll also want to consider: How much bandwidth do you have when it comes to your physical and mental health? Who else is depending on you – a partner, a child, a dear friend? Do you value any other commitments?

You say directly, “I know I can’t take on the real work of caring for an elderly person with so many problems.” This actually makes things quite easy in your case. Even Immanuel Kant—the 18th-century German philosopher whom I think of as Mr. Duty— said that “should” “Can” means that if you really think through the situation and come to the conclusion that you cannot take care of your mother, then you are not morally obligated.

But there’s another fundamental point to internalize: Even if we imagine a scenario where you can Just because your mom takes on all these tasks, doesn’t mean you should. Being able to do something is necessary but not sufficient to have an obligation to do it. Even if, for example, you could take your mother with you, it does not automatically follow that this is a wise idea. It depends on the effect it will have on everyone involved — yourself included.

If you think that the consequences of doing something, even something “good,” is forbidden, that’s not an indictment of your morality as a person. Modern life does not make caregiving easy.

Surgeon Atul Gawande explains in his book to be mortalChildren lived closer to their parents and parents died earlier. It was more possible for children to care for their parents. Now, we live in a globalized world where young people often migrate to get an education or a job, and living into old age is much more common. (For someone born in 1900, Global average life expectancy was 32 years old; Now that we have more medical knowledge and less poverty, it’s 71 years, and considerably higher in high-income countries.)

Plus, today’s parents are having children after In life than in the past, so when parents reach old age, their children become their chiefs. This means that young people are trying to establish their careers and raise their children at the same time that their parents’ health is deteriorating and calling for help – often from afar.

Our society is not set up to handle this. And that’s one reason why retirement communities became a widespread fixture of American life in the 1960s.

These communities vary greatly in quality. You can try to find a quality that appeals to your mother, but you also have to accept the fact that her living conditions may not be ideal. He may have had an unhappy time there. This is a social failure that you cannot single-handedly fix. If you’re in a position to improve the system — if you work in public policy, say — great! Consider pulling those levers. Perhaps, though, you’ll want to focus on what you can do right now for the system you live in and given all your other commitments.

The existence of a retirement community does not mean that you should completely free yourself from caring for your mother. That has implications for how you approach caring, but it also has implications for your own moral development.

Philosopher Shannon Valor arguing Experiences of caring help build our moral character, allowing us to develop qualities such as compassion, patience and understanding. So outsourcing that job doesn’t just mean giving up the responsibility of nurturing others; It would mean cheating ourselves out of a precious opportunity to grow. Valor calls this “moral competence”.

Still, he notes that caring for someone else doesn’t automatically make you a better person. If you don’t have enough resources and support, you may end up feeling burned out, bitter, and perhaps even less compassionate than you were before.

As Valor says, there is a big difference between freedom from care and freedom from care. We don’t want the former, because caring can actually help us grow as moral beings. But we want the latter, and if a retirement community gives us that by making caregiving more sustainable, that’s a win.

Bonus: What I’m Reading

• The ancient Greeks – they are just like us! Aware that we often work against one of our core values, they gave the phenomenon a name: akrasia Shayla Love works great That explains it In The Guardian.
• Isaiah Berlin, the grandfather of value pluralism, emphasized that this is not the same as moral relativism. Creates his tongue-in-cheek writing style This is a small piece A fun read.
• I love when I stumble across a philosophical idea that actually helps me a lot in real life. Bernard Williams first introduced me to the concept of “moral fate”. This is the composition of AeonDid it for me.

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