Rev. Linda Simmons
Ordinary Ethics
June 14, 2015
The online News-Herald had a report by Tracey Read about a judge who gives those who have committed crimes choices between two kind of sentencing, traditional and those he has constructed with the hope of building empathy.
It all started in the mid-1990s with a defendant who passed a school bus.
"I made them take a day off of work and ride with the school bus driver so they could see first-hand what happens when a car goes around a school bus, and what the dangers could be," Painesville Municipal Court Judge Michael A. Cicconetti recalled.[1]
That case was the accidental start to the judge's headline-making creative sentences.
"We started small," he said. "It was more out of frustration because after a year or two years, we were seeing the same people come back, with the same offenses. I thought, 'There has to be a better way to do this.'”[2]
So Cicconetti decided to start offering first-time offenders alternatives to jail.
"We try to give them a sentence that's meaningful but also provocative enough so it gets everybody's attention and deters other people from doing the same thing," he said.
(H)is most famous alternative sentence was the case of the Pig Man -- which got worldwide media attention.
In February 2002, the judge sentenced a Painesville man who shouted obscenities at police and called them pigs to stand on a busy street corner for two hours with a real swine and a sign stating, "This is not a police officer."[3]
I understand what this judge is seeking to do. He is trying to build the ethic of empathy. I wonder, if one does not live in a world where this ethic is confirmed and shaped by every day acts, are actions that are imposed likely to breed empathy? At the very least, they do seem to make a difference with recidivism.
After a woman abandoned dozens of kittens at the Lake Metroparks, Judge Cicconetti gave her the choice of an alternative sentence where she would spend the entire night alone in a remote area of the park (with rangers hidden to protect her) on a cold November night with no food, beverage (other than water) or shelter. She accepted.
The judge nervously watched the weather report that evening at home and ended up taking her out of the park when the news reported the threat of a blizzard. [4]
Who said working to change destructive behavior and instilling the ethic of compassion doesn’t have its costs?
Veena Das in her article, “Ordinary Ethics: The Perils and Pleasures of Everyday Life”[5] writes about how most discussions on ethics in academia tell us that behavior is shaped by universal ethics that exist objectively. This line of argument tells us that through reasoning, and understanding of consequences, we mold our actions to receive the least amount of pain and the most reward.
These discussions end by saying when we locate ethics within human action, morals become foggy.[6] After all, if we don't have an outside agreed upon standard that guides our actions, then our actions can devolve into narcissistic self gratification, right?
Veena Das disagrees. She tells us that ethics are not arrived at “when we stand away from our ordinary practices”[7] but rather that our everyday, ordinary lives and the actions that make them up, create us, indeed make us into moral beings.
Said differently, ethics are expressed, shaped and repeated in our everyday lives where how we live, what we say, how we do what we do in relation to all others who constitute our world, gives shape to what we believe to be worthy, good, important, necessary.
I had not considered this before. But the more I read about it, the more I realized how much sense it makes to me in my life as a Unitarian Universalist, without creeds or doctrine, without a god to show me the way, with only the immense responsibility of living ethically in interdependent, covenanted community that we form as a congregation.
Das writes, “Through the cultivating of sensibilities within everyday life”[8] comes our ethical world.
Das gives us examples of this through her research in low-income neighborhoods in Delhi, where women refrain from sweeping the floor right after a guest leaves because this might suggest that “we think the guest is just trash.”[9]
Another story is from Leela Prasad in her book Poetics of Conduct: Oral Narrative and Moral Being in a South Indian Town[10]
This story takes place in southern India when a villager is telling a story of a tragic death of someone both he and Prasad both knew. Prasad offers him a glass of milk during the telling and he says, “Let me finish this (milk) and then tell you the rest of it. It isn’t right to drink milk immediately after recounting a tragic incident.”[11]
What the speaker was saying here was, “It is disrespectful to partake in an act of enjoyment while discussing the suffering of another.”[12]
Das writes, “Words and gestures uncover the nature of the world and self- hence language becomes more than a system of communications, it expresses ethical commitments that have become completely embedded in everyday life.”[13]
And not only embedded, but which are shaped and reshaped in ordinary life, not in the fields of justice and philosophy, but right here, among us all.
Das tells us that one of the ethics these actions create is to protect what the people in the Indian villages and towns she studied, refer to as the “heart of the other person- dil rakhna in Hindi.[14]
Studying this work, I wondered where this is visible in my own life, and where it is visible in our lives together.
Recently, a member of my extended family, call her Beth, was very unkind to another member of my family, call her Sally. This is a pattern of behavior that has gone on for years. Sally is in her 80s now and Beth is in her 50s. I love them both dearly.
I told Beth that I could no longer be in relationship with her as long as she continued to demean Sally. It had been long in the coming but it was hard and Beth did not take it well, to say the least.
Beth showed up at my nephew’s graduation at which Sally was present as well. Neither I nor anyone else expected to see her. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted Beth to know that I was not going back to pretending that this was not happening and yet my heart went out to her as she was on the outside. At first when she arrived, I ignored her. But after several minutes, I greeted her with a pet name I have had for her since we were children.
Both ignoring Beth and calling her a pet name when I greeted her, were ethical acts and contributed to defining an ethical landscape. My actions gave value to both the boundaries of fair play and compassion and the right of others to respond to events that cause harm. It is through actions that Veena Das tells us that we learn what ethics are.
The contested ethical terrain between Beth and I was just this, “Did I have a right to call her on something she did to someone else?” The ethic my actions evoked was that life is interdependent and that repeated actions that harm are not only the business of those involved, but of those who love and live and know themselves through this fabric of life.
“Ordinary acts, knit life together.”[15] Indeed, ordinary acts make and unmake ethical terrain.
In other words, the ethic did not encourage me to speak a pet name, the speaking of the pet name reminded me of the ethical terrain I was walking within and forming with the imprint of my life. Ethics are shaped by action and come to be named love, respect, duty, care, compassion only after collective actions are taken that are loving, respectful, dutiful, caring, compassionate.
Here is why I think this matters so much to us who name no religious creed and support no religious doctrine:
Our actions, our words, our ways of being with each other are what we have named as worthy of our love. Our coming together here and walking through so many decisions and ideas and ways of being, are grounded in the acts our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors took before us and that we are committing to taking now. These acts that extend to the 4th century, acts of courage that refused to support the dogma of the day at the cost so often of one’s life, acts of love in the short lived establishment of a town in Poland named Rakow in the late 1500, early 1600’s populated by religious radicals- Socinians who did not believe in the divinity of Christ and from whom many Unitarians would come, and other religious radicals that believed in education and the free dissemination of ideas, those that fought for toleration about faiths instead of slaughter. And those who stood centuries after these ancestors in the 1800s in our own country in the storm of slavery, inequality, mistreatment of those must vulnerable.
Interestingly, Fautus Socinus, the father of the Socinian movement argued in the late 1500s that Christ is savior, not because of his death on the cross, but because his life showed men and women the way to salvation.[16] I would argue from the renditions of the New Testament made available to us, that the salvation Jesus’ life showed was that we are all interconnected and the way the least of us is treated affects us all. Jesus taught that salvation happens through love, right here on this earth, right now. Jesus taught that this is about actions not books or words or creeds or doctrine, but about the action of love. Some say that Jesus was the first Unitarian as the trinity or the Father, Son and Holy Spirit was not created until the second century.
And here we stand my dear friends able to agree on the name of the holy as this: When we are together, something bigger than all of us rises up between us, made of us, of us and so much larger than any one of us. It is our turn to name what is good, what matters, what is worthy of our love and we name this everyday through our words and actions.
Ordinary ethics and Unitarian Universalism invites us to hear our words and see our actions and ask of ourselves, “What is my sacred contribution? How do I protect the heart of those I am speaking and acting among?” “What ethics does my life lift up and are these worthy of my life?”
We live in complex webs of relationships that require so much more from us than any one of us can give. We do not have to ask if we have in our own hearts and minds enough to make the difference the world needs right now. We do not have many answers as Unitarian Universalists but here is one we know well, It is only together that we can make the difference the world needs right now, it is only together that we have enough to live with dignity, it is only together that a vision of a world worthy of saving becomes visible.
We also know that each life, each act, each word matters, contributes to the fabric of the interdependent web of which we are part. Our actions and words are the only thing that can make the ethic of interconnection true.
We are asking what this means and how we can best step into this. We are re-birthing and birthing in a new way, the ethic of connectedness and care with our very lives. One of the important ways we are doing this is through the 7th Principle Project, something you’ll hear more about next Sunday.
I feel so grateful to be part of this religious from the word religio, to bind, this religious movement, that has no doctrinal creed or sacred text, whose creed is justice, whose text is love, whose sacraments are questions asked over and over again while we stand in the storm, knowing the only answer is in how we live our lives. AMEN.
1
[1] Tracey Read, “Most Influential: Judge Michael Cicconetti's Alternative Sentences Leave Impression” News-Herald.com http://www.news-herald.com/general-news/20121231/most-influential-judge-michael-cicconettis-alternative-sentences-leave-impression-with-video
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Veena Das, “Oridinary Ethics: The Perils and Pleasures of Everyday Life.” In A Companion to Moral Anthroplogy, Dieder Fassin, Ed. (New York: Wiley-Blackwell) 133-149.
[6] Ibid, 135.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid, 138.
[10] Leila Prasad, Poetics of Conduct: Oral Narration and Moral Being in a South Indian Town (New York: Columbia Press, 2007) 178.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Das, 139.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid, 140.
[15] Ibid, 148.
[16] Charles A. Howe, For Faith and Freedom (Boston: Skinner Books, 1997), 71.