From goodness and care to respect and mutuality

1. From goodness and care to respect and mutuality Eivind Meland, Rosendal 05

2. The power of goodness • Sets the scene • Sets the limits of what is true • Persons, institutions and initiatives with this label are indisputable

3. Hannah Arendt and the “luminous samaritanism” • “How to be good” - Kindness open for public recognition corrupts • Asymmetric relation: The good/ the victim • Both productive and destructive • Charity/ dependence: a threat against self-respect. Grandpa’ teaching Little Tree • Modern paradox: The destructive power of goodness undermines social welfare – the victims support the market liberals

4. Imbalance of power • Lack of an opposing viewpoint • Critiques of goodness are cynical, self-sufficient or indifferent to the enemies of mankind: cancer, stroke etc etc • Healthism and medicalisation - unopposed • Arendt’s solution: Care and help without compassion. Formal and institutionalized rights (social democratic welfare)

5. Respect in a world of inequality – Richard Sennet’s view-points • Arendt’s solutions: dependence more respectable but without autonomy and respect • Welfare as automatic rights (linked to disease or illness) may jeopardize self-respect and prognosis • We and our pain: seen by one who cares • How do we provide autonomy and mutual respect within dependency (and asymmetric relations)? • Mutuality: we must ask something in return – reciprocity is the cornerstone!

6. Respect in a world of inequality – Richard Sennet’s views cont.. • Poverty as lack of connection to others • Mutual does not mean equal • Rituals (give-away-rituals) permit exchange of respect in a world of inequality – the dialogue • Malignant and self destructive inequality: absence of return • Shared & mutual participation innarratives

7. Autonomy revisited • The confusion between autonomy and independence • Autonomous, dependent and interdependent • Dependence as a fundamental human condition (Dostojevsky: We are all resp..) • Knud Løgstrup: holding something of your fellow human being in your hands

8. Autonomy revisited contin... • Autonomy as a relational concept (Sennet) • The mutual respect confronted with what you do not understand in your fellow being • Løgstrup: respect towards the solitude of cognition (the zone of nearness) • Shall not intrude this zone with suspicion towards other’s motives

9. Other threats towards Løgstrup’s ethics for mutuality • Pseudo-friendships (idealisation and seduction) • Exaggerations of patient centredness (I-and-You-sentimentality) • Over-identification and contagionism • Under-identification and group-stereotypes

10. Løgstrup’s ethics for mutual participation in narratives • Without frankness of speach – human relations will stiffen in unbreakable norms • Complementarity: spontaneous/ respectful • The subject matter must be visible/ hearable – you, I and the subject we discuss (Aristotle) • Nameless – belong to souvereign utterances of life (The prophet: goodness with name will soon change into a curse) • Løgstrup - a theologist with a strong warning against ”christian ethics”

11. Løgstrup’s ethics for mutual participation in narratives, contin.. • The primacy of trust • The interdependent condition (empirical) • Life as a gift – gratefulness (moral choice)