Graphic Novels as Philosophy

Jeff McLaughlin

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781496813282
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria di fumetti e graphic novel

Contributions by Eric Bain-Selbo, Jeremy Barris, Maria Botero, Manuel "Mandel" Cabrera Jr., David J. Leichter, Ian MacRae, Jeff McLaughlin, Alfonso Muñoz-Corcuera, Corry Shores, and Jarkko TuusvuoriIn a follow-up to Comics as Philosophy, international contributors address two questions: Which philosophical insights, concepts, and tools can shed light on the graphic novel? And how can the graphic novel cast light on the concerns of philosophy? Each contributor ponders a well-known graphic novel to illuminate ways in which philosophy can untangle particular combinations of image and written word for deeper understanding.Jeff McLaughlin collects a range of essays to examine notable graphic novels within the framework posited by these two questions. One essay discusses how a philosopher discovered that the panels in Jeff Lemire's Essex County do not just replicate a philosophical argument, but they actually give evidence to an argument that could not have existed otherwise. Another essay reveals how Chris Ware's manipulation of the medium demonstrates an important sense of time and experience. Still another describes why Maus tends to be more profound than later works that address the Holocaust because of, not in spite of, the fact that the characters are cartoon animals rather than human.Other works contemplated include Will Eisner's A Contract with God, Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta, Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, and Joe Sacco's Footnotes in Gaza. Mainly, each essay, contributor, graphic novelist, and artist is doing the same thing: trying to tell us how the world is—at least from their point of view.

Autonomy in Children: Accessing the Inaccessible Space in Essex County Vol. 1: Tales from the Farm

Maria Botero

We make ourselves in our father’s sunshine
but also in his shadow:
what he beams down we bend away from.

—Adam Gopnik, “The Driver’s Seat”

In Jeff Lemire’s Essex County Vol. 1: Tales from the Farm, we find the portrait of Lester, a recently orphaned ten-year-old living on his uncle’s farm in southwestern Ontario. Ever since his mom died, Lester has been wearing a mask and cape and disappearing into a solitary dream world of comic books where no one else is allowed, especially not his uncle Ken who has full custody of him. Buying comics, Lester meets Jimmy Lebeuf, a former hockey star and local gas-station attendant who suffered a head injury in his first and only professional game. Through this unlikely friendship, Lester finds more than a companion for his imaginary adventures; this new relationship changes the ways in which Lester relates to others and understands himself and ultimately helps him to decide who he wants to be.

Lemire’s portrait of Lester offers a depiction of a child who is able to be autonomous. Traditionally, because they are not fully developed rational agents, children are not considered autonomous. Thus, Lemire’s portrait of autonomy is in opposition to traditional theories of autonomy (Kant 1785; Rawls 1971) where autonomous agents are able to choose by themselves who they want to be and how they want to act; where autonomous agents are rational agents who are free to make decisions about the moral law and justice and to provide reasons to justify their choices, choices that are not the result of any force outside of themselves. Given that traditionally autonomy is one of the requirements for a moral agent to be held responsible for his or her actions, granting children autonomy is in defiance of tradition and forces us to understand both autonomy and children in a different light.

To understand this departure from tradition, Lemire’s work can be read from the perspective of Amy Mullin’s work (2007, 2014). As part of a new area of philosophy called Philosophy of Childhood, Mullin argues for granting children minimal or local autonomy. Philosophy of Childhood compromises a diversity of philosophical questions about children and about the relationship between adults and children. Within this realm Mullin argues that children’s attachments to those they love can be a source of autonomy in a minimal sense. She claims that it is in the relationship with those whom the child loves that the child is able to find meaningful activities and is able to care for someone or something. Rather than merely relying on pure reason, it is in the way that the child is caring for someone or something, that allows the child to be able to exercise autonomous decisions as a moral agent. Accepting Mullin’s perspective means understanding autonomy as a capacity no longer exclusive to fully rational agents but available to individuals capable of love. Moreover, it invites us to consider children as moral agents whose voices need to be included in moral and legal decisions. This is where Essex County comes in.

Jeff Lemire’s portrait of Lester in Essex County Vol. 1: Tales from the Farm embodies the opposite of the traditional view of children and autonomy. Lester’s actions and decisions toward his uncle and toward gas station worker Jimmy Lebeuf reveal a fully autonomous agent who is capable of self-governance when he decides how to conduct his own life in service of the people he loves and for whom he cares. Moreover, Lemire’s graphic novel as an example of art, provides us with a more complex understanding of the child’s mind (as opposed to purely theoretical accounts of the mind) and this understanding through art supports the argument of autonomy in children. I will argue that through the use of images as a language, Lemire is able to take our understanding of autonomy in children a step further and bridge the gap between being and adult and being a child. He provides adult readers with a qualitative insight into the mind of the autonomous child; an insight into “what it is like” to be an autonomous child in the context of their love for others.

Children’s Autonomy: Why Does It Matter?

Defining autonomy is not an easy task. There are several definitions that emphasize different aspects of autonomy (see Arpaly 2002 for a review of different approaches). Following Mullin, I will focus on personal autonomy as opposed to global autonomy (Dworkin 1988). Personal autonomy focuses on the person’s ability to use her desires, considerations, beliefs or characteristics to guide her behavior and thoughts. This kind of autonomy is exercised when a person confronts the choice of what to do in a specific situation, asks her/himself what s/he can do, and takes a course of action in accordance with her/his personal desires, consideration beliefs, etc. For example, someone deciding whether she should cheat in an exam and then refraining from cheating, in accordance with her personal beliefs and desires, is an example of someone who is exercising their personal autonomy. The desires, considerations, beliefs, and characteristics that guide personal autonomy do not come from an external source but are chosen by the person herself because she believes that they best define her. Continuing with this example, she would chose not to cheat on her exam because she is guided by her personal beliefs on honesty rather than by an external force such as the threat of failing the class if she cheats on an exam. Since personal autonomy refers to the way personal desires, considerations, beliefs, and characteristics guide an agent’s behavior, it is necessary to distinguish it from global autonomy, a form of autonomy that must be assessed over a person’s entire life and way of living. For example, global autonomy is what has guided a lawyer to conduct his lifetime of professional practice with compassion and honesty.

The concept of autonomy plays an important role in helping us define what or who a person is, understand responsibility, understand moral responsibility, and determine social policies and political theories. Thus, it is important to determine whether we can grant children autonomy since acknowledgment of their autonomy entails allowing them (or not) to have a voice in difficult and important contexts such as child-custody cases or cases of terminal illness. For example, if it were recognized that children have autonomy, then judges, rather than attempting to determine the best interests of a child without the child’s input, should start including the child’s preferences in their deliberations. Supporters of voluntary euthanasia typically argue in favor of mercy killing on the grounds that the person making the decision of terminating his/her life is an autonomous person (Brock 1992). Despite many people denying autonomy in children, in 2014 the parliament in Belgium passed a measure that as of 2015 grants, with written consent of the parents, the choice of euthanasia to children who are terminally ill, close to death, experiencing “constant and unbearable suffering” and able to demonstrate they understand the consequences of such a choice (Bilefsky). Thus, because of cases such as the ones just described, it is clearly important to consider whether we should grant autonomy to children and allow them to make important life-altering decisions.

Denial of Autonomy in Children

Authors who provide theories of morality and justice that deny autonomy to children describe children as lacking well-developed cognitive capacities such as those found in fully able adult humans. This view of children is found in some conceptions of justice and society; for example, Rawls (1971) argues that society is composed of members who are rational. For that reason he argues that children, because “their powers are undeveloped and they cannot rationally advance their interests” (249) should be subjected to paternalism, that is, adults making decisions on the behalf of children. Rawls states “Those who care for others must choose for them in the light of what they will want whatever else they want once they reach maturity” (207–208).

It is possible to find a similar perspective in morality, such as in historical approaches to autonomy as being a property of rational agents (Kant 1785), and subsequently, not of children. For Kant, humans have practical reason, that is, the ability to use reason to choose their own actions, and this, in turn, presupposes that humans are able to understand themselves as free. From this, they can be held morally accountable. However, for Kant, children are not fully rational agents that possess this kind of freedom from external forces that influence their will and the ability to use the law to guide their decisions. Contemporary approaches such as that of Wilkes (1988) maintain that we should limit the term “persons” to those who are rational agents, are able to use language, and have complex forms of consciousness. Only persons in this stipulated sense can be moral objects and moral agents. In this view, children, because of their undeveloped conscious abilities, are not persons and therefore are not moral agents. Baker (2000) offers a similar position arguing that children are not self-conscious since they have not yet acquired the linguistic capability that allows them to adopt and refer to the first person perspective, “to conceive oneself as oneself” (68). Others have argued that children are not autonomous because they are unable to care stably about anything (Oshana 2005) or because they lack critical reflection (Levison 1999). It is in the context of these standard arguments that Amy Mullin presents us with a radical new idea: children as autonomous agents, more specifically as agents who have a basic form of personal autonomy.

Love as a Form of Autonomy in Children

According to Amy Mullin, most who deny autonomy in children adopt the view that children cannot be autonomous agents for two reasons. First, they lack volitional stability; that is, they do not have a series of stable desires that guides all their choices; instead, they have random desires or beliefs that guide their decisions in various and inconsistent ways. Second, they argue that children are incapable of critical self-reflection, that is, they are incapable of reflecting on their own desires or beliefs and incapable of being aware of how their desires and beliefs guide their choices. Consequently, they are incapable of reflecting whether those choices reflect who they think they are or reflect their own sense of self. Consider, for example, how children’s preferences for one type of food, a specific toy, or a friend at school may change constantly and randomly, without clear explanations for the changes¹.

Mullin agrees partially with traditional approaches to autonomy and argues that to have self-governance (to be able to guide your life in accordance with your beliefs and desires) a person must have a volitional self, that is, a part of the self that is stable and consistent and is able to govern her actions in accord with what she values and wants to accomplish. However, for Mullin, this kind of volition does not have to be something that a person is directly aware of and does not have to be guided by reason. Mullin argues that volitional stability (the stability of the desires and behaviors that an autonomous agent uses when guiding his/her life) can be provided by intimate relationships rather than self-conceptions, and, in this way, she believes that volitional stability rather than critical self-reflection is the key to autonomy.

To demonstrate this idea, Mullin first emphasizes that to understand autonomy it is necessary to understand the goals people have in terms of self-governance. In other words, to understand autonomy, it is necessary to understand how an autonomous agent chooses a goal that matters so much to her that she is willing to use it as a guide to conduct her life. However, Mullin argues that abstract-rational reasons seem insufficient for understanding what agents choose as guides. I concur. Consider the following example: Amy loves animals and has several pets. She cares for them carefully since she firmly believes they can feel pain. Amy is also a food-blogger and specializes in the type of food she loves most: cheeseburgers. One day, she watches a documentary on food that depicts factory-farming practices and shows the cruel ways in which animals that will be used for consumption are raised and killed. This same documentary also shows how small children die of starvation in some developing countries. After watching this documentary, Amy decides to stop eating meat. To understand her behavior, we may explain how she agrees with the principle of equality, where the needs of sentient creatures should be equally considered; however, her agreeing with this principle is not enough. Rather, it is necessary that we understand how Amy’s goal of quitting meat is based in something that really matters for her and how her care for animals and their welfare will guide who she wants to be from that moment on. Based on the principle of equality, she may agree that children should be helped, but since this is not something that matters as much for her, it does not guide her to conduct her life in a different way, such as donating to children’s charities.

To understand what matters to an individual, Mullin is, first, following Frankfurt’s (1999) argument on love. Even though Frankfurt does not believe children have autonomy, he provides a definition of love that is quite useful for Mullin’s purpose. Frankfurt defines love as caring about things, ideals and persons; love, in other words is volitional as it guides and motivates the agent’s conduct and preferences.

Second, Mullin argues that the love children experience as a way of guiding their lives does not necessarily have to be a guide in a conscious/rational way. In this way, Mullin does not agree with the idea that children can only become autonomous agents once they develop rational selves capable of rational forms of self-reflection.² She argues that children are autonomous agents as soon as they are capable of a basic form of self-conception rooted in what they love.

Moreover, for Mullin, when an autonomous agent loves another person, that agent is able to care for the other person and is willing to give up momentary satisfaction to help or avoid hurting them. Children are able to act in accordance with love (such as caring for the well-being of a loved one), and avoid outcomes that are in conflict with this love. In other words, stable volitional commitments are developed in children through the love for their caregivers. This way, through love, the child gains a basic form of autonomy where s/he can use his/her desires to guide his/her decisions. For example, the love that a child has for his adoptive mother will provide him with a series of stable desires and beliefs that guides his choices conducting his life, from small choices, such as who he would like to be comforted by when he is afraid or who he wants to feed him or tuck him at night, to more significant choices such as who he would like to live with. Loving something or someone is what gives the child stable commitments that can be used to guide his/her life. And since they do have this ability, various decisions that they make based upon love can and should be respected.³

In other words, Mullin argues two things: she argues that volitional commitments (the ability to commit to decisions based on what matters to the self) are necessary for autonomy, and she argues that it is possible to grant children a basic form of personal autonomy because, through their intimate relationships, children are able to exercise that autonomy by choosing and engaging in activities that are meaningful for them.

Autonomy and Dependency

Traditionally it has been argued that an autonomous agent is able to live a good life without the need for others (Arpaly 2002). Therefore, children who are dependent on their parents or caregivers cannot be autonomous. According to Mullin, dependency, rather than being a limitation, actually helps autonomous behaviors. She believes that the person whom an autonomous agent loves (and therefore who helps the autonomous agent create goals that guide his or her life) can also provide what is needed by the child: both sustenance and an affective relationship. This way, it is through the relationship with their caregivers that children are able to express what matters for them and to shape how they relate to others. Mullin views the relationship between children and their parents as a source of autonomy because this relationship is important for children, and as such it becomes a source of self-managing activity for them. This is because it helps them create a volitional self, that is, a self that is stable and consistent and is able to govern actions in accord with what the agent values and wants to accomplish. For that reason, children’s dependency can support rather than diminish the role love can play in autonomy.

I agree with Mullin on this last point. I believe that it is the love for others that becomes a source of autonomous decisions by children. For example, imagine a child who gets a lot of pleasure from an annoying or dangerous activity. Imagine that this child also loves her grandfather. If the grandfather, as opposed to an uncle she doesn’t care for, asks her to stop this behavi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: What Is It like to Be a Graphic Novel?
• Philosophy in the Bargain: A Contract with God (1978) by Will Eisner
• Jimmy Corrigan and the Time of Crisis
• Autonomy in Children: Accessing the Inaccessible Space in Essex County Vol. 1: Tales from the Farm
• Love and Liberty: The Social Contract and V for Vendetta
• Asterix, Carnival, and the Wonder of Everyday Life
• Queering Epistemology and the Odyssey of Identity in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home
• The Minor Machinery of Animal Packs: Becoming as Survival in Spiegelman’s Maus
• Entangled Memories and Received Histories: Reading Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza
• Living in a Fictional World: Reading and Identification in Lost Girls
• Contributors
• Index