Feminist Ethics in Film

Reconfiguring Care through Cinema

Joseph H. Kupfer

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781841504063
• eBook ISBN: 9781841506821
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Popular films can do more than merely entertain us; they can contribute to our understanding of human nature and the ethical theory that informs it. Feminist Ethics in Film explores a varied group of cinematic narratives from the perspective of care-based ethics. The interpersonal relationships they portray disclose important dimensions of care that have been overlooked in less contextualized discussions. In particular, the book examines the relationships between care and community, autonomy, family and self transformation. Interpreting films from the perspective of the feminist ethics of care both expands our knowledge of this burgeoning area of philosophy and adds depth to our appreciation of the films.

Chapter 6

Gandhi: The Ethics of Care in the Nation-State

I. Care, justice and the public realm

Early in Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi (1982), we see Mohandas K. Gandhi (Ben Kingsley) as a young barrister riding first-class on a train in South Africa. Dapper in proper British attire, he is ordered to get back to third-class where people of color ride. Gandhi protests that he has a first-class ticket, infuriating the British rail officials with his impudence in flouting the rules of segregation. When they rudely toss him from the train, the British authorities have unwittingly set Gandhi on his life’s work of liberating Indians from oppression—by the British and their own countrymen.

More specifically, the film portrays Gandhi dealing with Indian independence from Britain, the subjugation of women and Untouchables, and strife between Hindus and Muslims. Gandhi responds to each of these issues from the perspective of an ethics of care. The film thereby expands and deepens our understanding of how the virtue of care can function in the public sphere of national politics. In the process, we see how narratives, and film stories in particular, can elaborate, clarify, and sharpen our understanding of philosophical theory. Before examining just how the film accomplishes what I claim for it, a brief characterization of the care ethics and its main rival would be helpful.

Some of what follows was sketched in the Introduction, but interpreting the film demands a more developed discussion of the relationship between care and justice. As articulated by such feminists as Nel Noddings and Carol Gilligan, the ethics of care provides an alternative to what may be described as the justice approach to moral issues.¹ An ethics of justice takes the isolated individual as its theoretical starting point; hence, it begins in separation.² The individual is the bearer of rights against others and these rights safeguard his or her person. The social cornerstone of the ethics of justice is negative rights that protect the individual’s autonomy and property from interference by other people. Positive rights and obligations arise, then, from the unencumbered exercise of autonomy. The agreements or contracts that individuals enter into create these positive rights and their corresponding duties. Justice involves an abstracted conception of individuals and their rights, and proceeds by applying abstract principles and rules that function universally, regardless of individual history or relationships that have not been freely chosen.

In contrast, the ethics of care takes as its point of departure the social self. The individual is most fully understood in terms of his or her relationships with other people. As constitutive of one’s identity, connectedness rather than separation is basic. Relationships carry with them responsibilities and serve the needs of the people in them. Central in an ethics of care are responsibility and need rather than autonomy and rights.³ Care understands inter-dependence as basic and not the independence that characterizes justice. As we saw in the discussion of Monster’s Ball, autonomy is itself conditioned by relationships, and its exercise is subordinate to the responsibilities entailed by them.

Many of these relationships are not the result of arrangements into which the parties have freely entered. For example, relationships involving family, neighbors, and community arise from the particular history of the individuals, which creates contexts of dependence and need. Because it deals with individuals in their particular relationships with their distinctive histories, considerations of care operate at the level of concreteness and narrative context rather than in terms of abstract principles (of justice, rights, and equity). Proponents of care argue that we lose crucial moral aspects of a situation when we follow the justice model and attempt to apply universal principles in abstraction from the concrete situation in which people find themselves. This is obviously a rough summary of a complex debate involving a variety of positions, but I think it will be serviceable for our purposes.

During its early phase, care theorists tended to view ethics based on justice or autonomy as germane to the public sphere of life, confining the perspective of care to our private lives. Nel Noddings, for instance, found care suitable only to the private sphere because she believed it required the intimacy of face-to-face interaction.⁴ On this separation of function approach, the abstract, universal principles of justice that focus on rights and equality seemed more suited to public issues of civil society, government, the law, and international politics. On the other hand, an ethics that begins with human connectedness (the social self) and works at the level of concreteness and narrative context was thought to function more fruitfully in personal domains. The care perspective initially struck many of its advocates as best suited to the intimate give and take of friendship and family.

More recently, however, many philosophers have begun to question, and reject, the division of moral labor that cedes the public realm to theories of justice while granting the private domain to the ethics of care. Feminists and others have urged that questions of justice do indeed arise in the private sphere and that the care perspective sheds light on public affairs. Susan Moller Okin argues that the scope of justice ought to include the intimate sphere of family life as well as more traditional public domains. She persuasively points out that male member of families will continue to subjugate and exploit women and children unless we apply principles of justice in our assessment of so-called private family interactions. Other ethicists have reversed Okin’s direction by applying the care ethics to public policy and practice. Extending the maternal thinking that animates care, Sara Ruddick articulates the implications of the care ethics for international politics, war, and the potential for peace. Grace Clement develops Ruddick’s views on political pacifism but also utilizes principles of care in her recommendations for public funding of long-term support for the elderly.⁵

What we have then is the more complex and interesting inclusive understanding that both justice and care ought to figure in both the public and private areas of life. However, we still need to distinguish two variations within this inclusive understanding. The first position sees justice and care working side by side, in a complementary manner. The two moral views are understood as radically different in nature and therefore each supplies what the other lacks. Thus does Carol Gilligan conceive care and justice as “two moral perspectives that organize thinking in different ways.”⁶ Allison Jaggar offers this summary of the theoretical landscape, “Most proponents of the ethics of care now dispute the possibility of any easy synthesis of care with justice.”⁷ When Okin argues that we must root out injustices in the family, for example, she is adopting a conventional view of justice, not one that has somehow been informed by care.

A second position is more integrative, suggesting that each moral view may, in some cases, infuse or collaborate with the other. Grace Clement brings considerations of justice into the care perspective when she claims that care demands that an individual not neglect herself in order to help others. The injustice of neglecting oneself actually undermines the would-be care with which one approaches the world. Without considerations of justice, then, care is deficient and can lead to the self-destructive sacrifice that has long characterized female care-giving.⁸

In the film, Gandhi employs such an integrative approach to care and justice. In order to institute and maintain caring communities, whether ashram or state, Gandhi promotes arrangements that are just, tending toward an egalitarian understanding of justice. For example, dirty work such as latrine cleaning is not to be left to Untouchables; everyone must pitch in. Alternatively, the justice of India’s independence from Great Britain ought to be attained through non-violent resistance, a caring approach toward one’s oppressors. Just treatment for those who hurt fellow Indians demands caring creativity instead of another dose of punitive retaliation. Gandhi addresses virtually all of the social and economic problems of India through a care perspective that includes collaboration with principles of justice. The result is a refurbishing of those principles, on the one hand, and a clear objective for care, on the other.

Running through Gandhi’s caring responses is the theme of inclusiveness and the framework of narrative. For Gandhi, the care ethics impels us toward inclusiveness. Even as Coach Jones sees the necessity of incorporating Radio into the life of the team and school, so does Gandhi perceive the importance of including women and Untouchables as equal participants in community. India is best served, he thinks, by harmonizing all religious groups instead of separating Muslims and Hindus into independent states. Odd as it may at first seem, the fidelity to non-violence also partakes of the value of inclusiveness. One of the strengths of non-violent resistance is that it includes the oppressor as a legitimate party to rational discussion of perceived injustice. Consequently, when India is finally independent of Great Britain, the former colonial power will be included as a friend or ally of postcolonial India. The theme of inclusivity operates at three levels: international (India’s relationship with Great Britain); nation-state; and personal–social. For each level of inclusiveness, Gandhi frames the direction of his care ethics with a suitable narrative.

The narrative within which Britain can be a partner to India is a transformative one. It proposes redefining a relationship of dominance and exploitation into one of cooperation and mutual benefit. Moving from the international picture to the level of the state, Gandhi constructs an emancipatory narrative for the masses of India, Untouchables, and women in particular. India is to be governed with the needs of all paramount, without regard to station or gender. Unlike his fellow leaders, Gandhi is wary of a home rule that merely supplants British oppression of the masses with Indian oppression of them. At the level of social offense and harm, Gandhi casts care within the narrative of redemption. Instead of the standard responses of punishment to wrongdoing, such as imprisonment, Gandhi proposes a narrative whereby the wrongdoer can take an active role in making restitution to the community. The proposal is especially caring because in the process the wrongdoer restores himself to wholeness and reestablishes himself within society.

Narrative is fundamental to the ethics of care because, as we have seen, care charges itself with dealing in the particular and minimizing the role of general principles. Only narratives that afford details of relationships, their histories and interests, can be rich enough to enable considerations of care to yield definitive moral guidance. Gandhi extends the significance further, demonstrating the role of narrative within a larger story, instrumental in giving form or shape to the ways in which an individual expresses care. With Gandhi we come full circle, back to Saturday Night Fever. More so than in our other movies, narrative provides guidance and direction for the protagonists of this pair of films. In this respect, narrative is like attentiveness and responsiveness in being a constitutive element of the care ethics in practice. Whether in the personal life of Tony Manero or in the socio-political arena of Gandhi, creating narrative is shown to be a valuable resource of the practitioner of care.

II. Thrown into the public sphere

Gandhi develops our understanding of how the perspective of care can be employed in the public realm of social, economic, and political problems. In the film, care is portrayed as the basis of a coherent public stance by consistently shaping Gandhi’s political decisions and public policy. We see how the public expression of care is structured by the building blocks of the care ethics: attentiveness and responsiveness to need, relationship and mutual dependency, context and narrative.

The film opens with the assassination of Gandhi, after which we view throngs of mourners so numerous as to seem beyond counting. Gandhi’s tale, then, is told in flashback. Throughout the film, the face of the assassin haunts various scenes like a watchful, implacable angel of death. The arc of the story and Gandhi’s life is thereby established and we are encouraged to reflect on the meaning of the life rather than exercise ourselves about how it will end.

As indicated, the episode that launches Gandhi on his vocation of freeing India from British rule and furthering its social integration occurs in South Africa. British officials summarily pitch Gandhi from his train when he insists that his first-class ticket entitles him to ride where only Whites are permitted. Although Gandhi has legally obtained his ticket, he is not treated as an equal. From the perspective of justice, the abstract laws and rights that ought to protect him are being violated. His rough introduction to British discrimination rouses him to fight back by attacking the Indian Identification Pass law in his earliest display of civil disobedience.

Gandhi proclaims the peaceful means of protest and then issues a call across religious boundaries to rally Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs to burn their passes. It is civil disobedience because, as with US Selective Service cards, the passes are government property. In the face of violence by the police, Gandhi continues to burn the passes he has collected. He keeps getting hit, knocked to the dusty ground, and he keeps burning. The scene sets the tone for the entire film. Gandhi will lead his people in non-violent resistance, sometimes disobeying British law, in an attempt to end injustice.⁹ At first, the injustice is a matter of abolishing or changing particular laws, such as the Pass law. But ultimately, it extends to the British rule of India itself.

The film suggests that the perspectives of justice and care are more than compatible and that the goals of justice can be achieved (may best be achieved) by means based in the ethics of care. For Gandhi the only morally acceptable way to change the law is non-violent resistance. Non-violence alone treats the oppressor in a respectful, caring way and only non-violence keeps the protester from descending into the viciousness that violence produces.

Gandhi reads in the paper how he would have been within his rights to prosecute the police for assault since he did not resist arrest; however, he declines legalistic remedy and the ethics of justice, in favor of continued non-violent protest. From the outset, Gandhi’s strategy expresses his intention to engage the British as participants in an ongoing relationship. As with his aims with regard to different groups within India, Gandhi is intent upon inclusiveness. Even the oppressors are included—as fellow citizens in the debate over the law. The conflict intensifies as humiliating laws are passed authorizing the fingerprinting, Christian marriages, and house searches of Indians. To an aroused gathering of Indians, Gandhi says that he too is prepared to die, but not to kill. The virtue of care counsels reconciliation through communication and understanding rather than coercive response.

III. Attentiveness, responsiveness, and inclusiveness

South Africa is but prelude to India. After securing repeal of new laws that subordinate Indians, Gandhi goes home to India where he is encouraged to start a journal to disseminate his ideas and spearhead the movement for home rule. An aerial shot of a train going through the Indian countryside is accompanied by traditional sitar music. Inside the train, Gandhi observes and writes, soberly and thoughtfully. He has begun his prolonged immersion in the everyday life of ordinary Indians. From now on, Gandhi will ride (wearing homespun cloth) third-class by choice, not only to experience peasant life first-hand, but to help forge a relationship of mutual regard and trust ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Saturday Night Fever: Self-Care, Moral Growth and Narrative
• Sea Changes: Failure to Care in The Squid and the Whale
• The Bonds and Boundaries of Friendship in Friends with Money
• From Despair to Care: Self-Transformation in Monster's Ball
• Tuning into Caring Community in Radio
• Gandhi: The Ethics of Care in the Nation-State
• Conclusion
• Index
• Back Page