Looking Each Other in the Eye: Interpersonal Morality and Social Justice within a Common Moral Universe

Stephen Chilton

[6,000 words]

Looking Each Other in the Eye: Interpersonal Morality and Social Justice within a Common Moral Universe

Abstract

This work introduces and discusses two moral tropes: “looking each other in the eye” and “living in a common moral universe”. It further distinguishes the immediate, face-to-face agreements of morality from the mediated agreements of social justice, arguing that both tropes apply to the latter, though they need to be understood there in a slightly different way. Finally, the tropes are used to disentangle some of the complex normative issues surrounding homelessness.

Looking Each Other in the Eye: Interpersonal Morality and Social Justice within a Common Moral Universe

In this work I discuss two tropes that have helped me organize my thoughts about justice: “looking each other in the eye” and “living in a common moral universe”. I use these tropes to understand both the nature of interpersonal morality and social justice and the difference between them.

I take as my primary example the issue of responding to the homeless people we encounter on the streets of any major U.S. city. For occasional visitors not inured to their presence, the homeless call up a welter of emotions: sympathy, nobility, obligation, grief, suspicion, fear, disapproval, helplessness, self-protection, penuriousness, self-condemnation, ... and anger at them for occasioning these confused feelings. I intend the concepts and distinctions made herein to help us disentangle these feelings and respond in useful ways.

Interpersonal Morality and Social Justice

In this work, the terms “morality” and “justice” are separate concepts. Although both refer to normatively binding ways by which people coordinate their behavior, and although the two are often confused with each other, I believe that a careful distinction between them is important. Here, “morality” (or, more descriptively, “interpersonal morality”) refers to ways of relating that are negotiated and grounded within a network of face-to-face relations. For simplicity I will write as if the moral norms are between two specific people, but in their largest sense they refer to norms that arise in any group small enough to create, maintain, and renegotiate these norms face-to-face. “Justice” (or “social justice”), on the other hand, refers to the claim on which laws base their normative bindingness — “laws” being understood as general norms by which we coordinate our behavior with each other when we are incapable of doing so face-to-face. Constitutions, laws, administrative regulations, formal institutions, shared cultural practices — all assert their claims on one’s behavior on the grounds that they are just. To phrase the distinction directly, morality contemplates the agreements two people make between themselves face-to-face, agreements that do not impact others; justice contemplates the agreements that we make with each other (or take to be made with each other) even though we are unable to negotiate or even agree to them face-to-face.