Morality as nurturance

Nurturance presupposes empathy. A child is helpless, it cannot care for itself. It requires someone to care for it, and to care for a child adequately, you have to care about a child. You have to project your capacity for feeling onto a child accurately enough to have a sense of what that child needs. This not only requires empathy, it requires constant empathy. It also requires, to a significant extent, putting the child's needs before your own, making sacrifices for your child – though not so much that it prevents one from nurturing adequately.

We have just seen that there are a number of forms of empathy – absolute, egocentric, and affordable. Any particular occurrence of empathy may be a pure form of one of these, but it may also be a mixture, with each form incorporated in various degrees. Empathy is rarely simple or straightforward or pure. Since empathy plays a role in nurturance, each of the many forms of empathy defines a corresponding form of nurturance. Thus, there are complexities of nurturance that mirror the complexities of empathy.

Nurturance also involves rights and duties; it inherently involves morality. A child has a right to nurturance and a parent has a responsibility to provide it. A parent who does not adequately nurture a child is thus metaphorically robbing that child of something it has a right to. For a parent to fail to nurture a child is immoral.

In conceiving of morality as nurturance, this notion of family-based morality is projected onto society in general. The conception of morality as nurturance can be stated as the following conceptual metaphor:

• The Community Is a Family.

• Moral Agents Are Nurturing Parents.

• People Needing Help Are Children Needing Nurturance.

• Moral Action Is Nurturance.

This metaphor has the following entailments, based on what one knows about being nurturant toward children:

• To nurture children, one must have absolute and regular empathy with them.

• To act morally toward people needing help to survive, one must have absolute and regular empathy with them.

• Nurturance may require making sacrifices to care for children.

• Moral action may require making sacrifices to help truly needy people.

If one's community is, further, conceptualized as a family, a further entailment follows from this metaphor:

• Family members have a responsibility to see that children in their family are nurtured.

• Community members have a responsibility to see that people needing help in their community are helped.

These entailments are widespread among Americans. In times of disaster, help pours forth for community members who need help to survive. What limits it is the form of empathy people have and the issue of who counts as a community member. Those with egocentric empathy will help only those who share their values. Those who define certain needy people as outside their metaphoric family, that is, their community, will feel no responsibility for helping them. Consequently, many Americans see enormous differences between neighbors subject to disasters (who share their values and are clearly community members) and homeless people (who are not perceived as sharing their values and who are, for the most part, not seen as community members).