WHAT WE CHOOSE: ETHICS FOR UNITARIAN UNIVERSALISTS
A Tapestry of Faith Program for Adults
WORKSHOP 7: RELATIONAL ETHICS
BY AMBER BELAND AND MANISH MISHRA-MARZETTI DEVELOPMENTAL EDITOR, GAIL FORSYTH-VAIL
© Copyright 2012 Unitarian Universalist Association.
Published to the Web on 9/29/2014 11:36:16 PM PST.
This program and additional resources are available on the UUA.org web site at
www.uua.org/religiouseducation/curricula/tapestryfaith.
WORKSHOP OVERVIEW
INTRODUCTION
Much of the insensibility and hardness of the world is due to the lack of imagination which prevents a realization of the experiences of other people. — Jane Addams, from Democracy and Social Ethics (1907)
Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind. — Kurt Vonnegut, 20th-century writer and Unitarian Universalist,from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
If we believe our ethical/moral code, and by extension our behavioral choices, derives solely from a conceptual framework that helps us determine right and wrong, we overlook a fundamental influence in our ethical decision making: our relationships with others. As we live our day-to-day lives, we don't always ground our decisions in neatly framed logic, but instead respond from the heart—with compassion, empathy, or a sense of shared humanity. This reality provides the foundation for relational ethics, a framework that speaks to our relationships with one another and how those relationships influence our decisions.
In our culture, an ethic based on relationship and compassion has, at times, been denigrated as a primarily female perspective. Most Unitarian Universalists reject such a notion and understand compassion as a moral guidepost of use to people of all genders. Our second Unitarian Universalist Principle speaks of justice, equity, and compassion in human relations, while our seventh Principle speaks of our interconnectedness one with another.
This workshop explores how relational ethics does or can inform our personal moral decisions. How do relational ethics guide us to social justice work? How do, or might, relational ethics guide the way we do that work? Participants discover the relational ethics frameworks in the work of Jane Addams in the turn-of-the-20th-century Settlement movement; the work of Carol Gilligan, a late 20th-century feminist ethicist; and the recently launched Community Capacity Building initiative of the Unitarian Universalist Partner Church Council. Participants reflect on the role of compassion and relationship in ethical decision making.
Before leading this workshop, review Accessibility Guidelines for Workshop Presenters found in the Introduction.
GOALS
This workshop will:
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
Participants will:
WORKSHOP-AT-A-GLANCE
Activity | Minutes |
Welcoming and Entering | 0 |
Opening | 2 |
Activity 1: Opening Scenario | 10 |
Activity 2: Reflection and Conversation | 15 |
Activity 3: In a Different Voice | 20 |
Activity 4: Relational Ethics at Hull House | 15 |
Activity 5: Partner Church Relationships | 15 |
Faith in Action: Begin or Deepen a Church Partnership | |
Closing | 13 |
Alternate Activity 1: Community Capacity Building — UUCPP Video | 45 |
SPIRITUAL PREPARATION
Set aside time for journaling, reflection, prayer, and/or meditation, using these focus questions:
WORKSHOP PLAN
WELCOMING AND ENTERING
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Welcome all participants and draw their attention to the workshop agenda.
OPENING (2 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Light the chalice and share Reading 468 in Singing the Living Tradition, "We Need One Another" by George E. Odell.
ACTIVITY 1: OPENING SCENARIO (10 MINUTES)
Description of Activity
Share this scenario:
Your congregation has an ongoing relationship with a local organization serving at-risk youth. The relationship includes advocacy financial support. As a result of budget cuts, the organization will soon be defunct and the youth it serves cut off from vital services. Your congregation immediately organizes to contact government officials, write letters to the editor, and raise a public voice to try and save the funding for the organization.
Ask: "What moral arguments do you use to make your case?"
ACTIVITY 2: REFLECTION AND CONVERSATION (15 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Invite participants to consider an ethical or moral choice they made that concerned someone with whom they had some kind of relationship. Invite them to describe in their journals with writing or drawing the situation and the factors they weighed in their decision making. Allow five minutes for journaling. Then, ask participants to think of an ethical or moral choice they made that concerned someone they did not know at all. Ask them to describe that situation and the factors they weighed in their decision making. Allow five minutes for writing or drawing.
Invite participants to examine differences and similarities between the two decisions. Ask them to share their reflections in pairs, using the posted questions to guide the conversation.
ACTIVITY 3: IN A DIFFERENT VOICE (20 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Distribute Handout 1 and invite participants to read it. Say:
Gilligan argued that there are different ways of framing moral issues and that her contemporaries were leaving out or undervaluing the moral perspectives of women.
Lead a discussion with these questions:
Including All Participants
Create a large-print handout that includes the discussion questions, to assist those who are visually impaired.
ACTIVITY 4: RELATIONAL ETHICS AT HULL HOUSE (15 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Present the story, "Jane Addams."
Call attention to the posted quote, from Addams's book Democracy and Social Ethic, and lead a discussion using the posted questions.
Including All Participants
Create a large-print handout that includes the discussion questions to assist those who are visually impaired.
ACTIVITY 5: PARTNER CHURCH RELATIONSHIPS (15 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Invite participants to consider how the Unitarian Universalist Association's partner church program embodies the work of building authentic relationship. Share the story, and then lead a conversation using these questions:
CLOSING (13 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Lead a conversation using these questions:
Invite participants to share a word or phrase indicating a feeling or thought they are taking away from the workshop. Distribute Taking It Home. Share Reading 601 in Singing the Living Tradition, "When All the People," by Mo-Tse, as you extinguish the chalice.
FAITH IN ACTION: BEGIN OR DEEPEN A CHURCH PARTNERSHIP
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Share resources from the UUPCC website and explore them together. If you do not already have a partner church, consider what steps your congregation would take to become involved in the program. Ask: "How might relational ethics guide the establishment of such a partnership?"
If you have invited a guest who is knowledgeable about your relationship with your partner church, invite them to share their experiences. Here are some questions to get started:
LEADER REFLECTION AND PLANNING
Consider these questions as you review the workshop with your co-leader:
Save the covenant newsprint to post at each workshop. Review and assign tasks for the next workshop.
TAKING IT HOME
Much of the insensibility and hardness of the world is due to the lack of imagination which prevents a realization of the experiences of other people. — Jane Addams, from Democracy and Social Ethics, 1907
Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind. — Kurt Vonnegut, 20th-century writer and Unitarian Universalist, from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
Are there ways in which you can bring relational ethics into your life? Could focusing on relationship and compassion as you make decisions change the way you interact with others? Pay attention to how you treat people with whom you have a relationship, as well as strangers.
Investigate if groups you support—with money, with time, or by distributing information—ground their work in relationship with those whom they serve. Do these groups invite you to put yourself in another's shoes? Might you want to open a conversation about how the work could be done differently?
ALTERNATE ACTIVITY 1: COMMUNITY CAPACITY BUILDING — UUPCC VIDEO (45 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Invite participants to consider how the Unitarian Universalist partner church program embodies the work of building authentic relationship. Show the video, then lead a conversation using these questions:
WHAT WE CHOOSE: ETHICS FOR UNITARIAN UNIVERSALISTS: WORKSHOP 7:
STORY: COMMUNITY CAPACITY BUILDING IN ARKOS, TRANSYLVANIA
Background Information
Since 1993, the Unitarian Universalist Partner Church Council (UUPCC (at www.uupcc.org/)) has encouraged and supported partnerships between United States and Canadian Unitarian and Unitarian Universalist congregations and Unitarian and Universalist congregations in other parts of the world. Originally founded to focus and coordinate partnerships between North American Unitarian Universalist congregations and Unitarian churches in Central Europe following the collapse of communism in December 1989, the UUPCC now supports almost 200 partnerships between North American congregations and congregations in Transylvania, Hungary, the Czech Republic, the Khasi Hills of India, the Philippines, Poland, and Nigeria.
Over time, the UUPCC observed that money created tension between some North American congregations and their partners. A blue-ribbon panel researched the question, interviewing partner congregations in North America and abroad. They concluded that giving money as part of a partnership almost always leads to problems, because donations are sometimes inappropriate for the recipient congregation's or village's needs and because the gift can set an unhealthy dynamic between the donor congregation and recipient congregation which impedes reciprocal learning and sharing, the mark of true partnership.
In 2004, the UUPCC launched a new model of partnership patterned on a model developed by Dr. Richard Ford at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Billed as "capacity, not charity," the model aims to provide partnership support that gives each community the power to forge its own future and to leverage its own resources to alleviate poverty. A key element of the program includes trained guidance that helps a community organize information, identify community problems and potential solutions, identify and mobilize resources, and create and complete action plans.
There are wonderful success stories in this new relationship-based approach. One comes from Arkos, Transylvania, a village whose Unitarian congregation is partnered with the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, Texas.
Story
Curious, but wary, the villagers or Arkos came to a facilitated meeting arranged by Rev. Szekely Janos, the minister of the Unitarian church. An outsider trained by the congregation's North American partner was going to facilitate a conversation about the town's problems and possible solutions. Coming together for such a meeting was an extraordinary act for the people of Arkos. Under the communist government that ruled their country for more than four decades, voluntary association was discouraged. Fear of being reported by a neighbor squashed all thoughts of working together for the betterment of the village community. This gathering proved a brand new beginning for all.
Villagers sat on benches as the meeting began, prepared to listen to someone else tell them what the problems were and what could be done. Quickly they learned that no one was going to tell them what they needed. It was up to them to identify the most pressing problems in their community, to explore possible solutions, and to create and follow through on action plans.
It did not take long for villagers to agree that clean water—water delivery and a sanitation system—was their most pressing need. They worked together to create a plan to tap into the water and sanitation systems of a nearby city. When they sought outside help, leaders in the newly formed water committee were equipped with a solid, village-created plan, broad community agreement, and the moral support of their partner congregation in Houston, Texas. The leaders succeeded in securing nearly $1 million in grants from European Union sources to build excellent water and sanitations systems. The cost to the Houston partner church for its support of Arkos' effort was under $1,000.
The partnership model did more than help Arkos acquire needed water systems. It built local leaders' capacity to help themselves. When young adults in the village wanted a shorter term, more manageable way to contribute to solving the village's problems, they empowered themselves to organize an annual clean-up of the local streams. Removing old tires and other trash from the streams immediately made the water cleaner, even while the grant process for the larger project was underway. In addition, people in the village reactivated a local festival that had not been held in many years, and used the festival to showcase local arts and traditions. They improved space for their school and for a day care facility. They are solving the problem of how to conduct a traditional funeral while still honoring modern health codes by building a funeral house in the center of town near the Unitarian church. Arkos is a village alive and empowered, a village with the capacity to help itself—and the Unitarians of Arkos are credited by their village with making the transformation possible. The partnership between the Unitarians of Arkos, Transylvania, and the Unitarian Universalists of Houston, Texas, grounded in respectful partnership, is bearing wonderful fruit.
WHAT WE CHOOSE: ETHICS FOR UNITARIAN UNIVERSALISTS: WORKSHOP 7:
STORY: JANE ADDAMS
In January 1889, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr searched for a location for a settlement house in Chicago that would serve as a place for young women of means to live cooperatively with recent immigrants and migrants whose living and working conditions were horrible. Addams' idea was that although recent immigrants needed a lot of help to ameliorate deplorable living and working conditions, there was also much that they could teach others about social relations and caring community. She wrote: "Hull-House was soberly opened on the theory that the dependence of classes on each other is reciprocal; and that as social relation is essentially a reciprocal relation, it gives a form of expression that has particular value." She believed firmly that the health of American democracy required that each member of the society be allowed to fully develop themselves, and Hull House was to be a center for the development of all who lived, visited, and engaged in its communal life.
Laura Jane Addams was born in 1860 in Cedarville, Illinois, and grew up in a family with both status and material comfort. Her mother died while she was an infant and her inquisitive, caring, and responsible nature was nurtured by her father, a miller, businessman, and local political office holder. She later wrote of her childhood:
I recall an incident which must have occurred before I was seven years old, for the mill in which my father transacted his business that day was closed in 1867. The mill stood in the neighboring town adjacent to its poorest quarter. Before then I had always seen the little city of ten thousand people with the admiring eyes of a country child, and it had never occurred to me that all its streets were not as bewilderingly attractive as the one which contained the glittering toy shop and the confectioner. On that day I had my first sight of the poverty that implies squalor, and felt the curious distinction between the ruddy poverty of the country and that which even a small city presents in its shabbiest streets. I remember launching at my father the pertinent inquiry why people lived in such horrid little houses so close together, and that after receiving his explanation I declared with much firmness when I grew up I should, of course, have a large house, but it would not be built among other large houses, but right in the midst of horrid little houses like those.
As a young woman, Addams attended Rockford Female Seminary, where the expectation was that young women who wished to serve others would do so by becoming missionaries. Unresponsive to the appeal of evangelism, she and her small circle of friends read the ideas of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Bronson Alcott, and frequently discussed moral philosophy. When she was selected as the orator who would represent her school in the intercollegiate oratorical contest of Illinois, she found herself representing not just her school, but also the wishes and hopes of college women in general. She later recalled a portion of her speech which she called "the schoolgirl recipe that has been tested in many later experiences." She said:
Those who believe that Justice is but a poetical longing within us, the enthusiast who thinks it will come in the form of a millennium, those who see it established by the strong arm of a hero, are not those who have comprehended the vast truths of life. The actual Justice must come by trained intelligence, by broadened sympathies toward the individual man or woman who crosses our path; one item added to another is the only method by which to build up a conception lofty enough to be of use in the world.
After her father's death, Addams began to study medicine, but left her studies because of poor health. Following a major surgery, Addams traveled to Europe to consider her life's direction. While in Europe she and Ellen Starr toured Toynbee Hall, a settlement house, and formed a plan to establish a settlement house in the immigrant neighborhoods of Chicago. Returning to Chicago, Addams and Starr found the perfect house for their purposes—a large home built by Charles Hull at the corner of Halsted and Polk Streets. They leased the house and raised money "to provide a center for higher civic and social life; to institute and maintain educational and philanthropic enterprises, and to investigate and improve the conditions in the industrial districts of Chicago." The settlement house was located in a densely populated area where immigrants lived—at first, Italian, Irish, German, Greek, Bohemian, Russian, and Polish, and later Mexican immigrants and African Americans who had migrated from the American South. Hull House served as a location for people to join clubs, discussions, and activities, as well as take English and citizenship classes, and theater, music, and art classes. Hull House provided a kindergarten and day care for the children of working mothers, an employment bureau, an art gallery, a museum, and libraries. And it provided a safe place for ideas of all kinds—through lectures, discussions, organizations, and conversations. Generally, 25 people, including Addams and Starr, lived at the house. During hard economic times the community served more than 2,000 people a week with their services, assistance, and outreach. Addams paid attention to the expressed dreams and needs of the people of the neighborhood before introducing services or programs to Hull House, and was able to effectively use the stories of those who lived in the neighborhood to help with the fund-raising necessary to support the project.
As time went on, Hull House expanded to thirteen buildings, including a museum, clubs, and meeting places for trade union groups and cultural events. Addams said once, "We have learned to say that the good must be extended to all of society before it can be held secure by any one person or class; but we have not yet learned . . . that unless all men [sic] and all classes contribute to a good, we cannot even be sure that it is worth having."
Jane Addams not only created a location for people in the Hull House neighborhood to receive help and support but soon realized that the broader society needed to change in order to improve living conditions for the poor. She worked tirelessly to change the social and legal, economic and political systems that contributed to abysmal conditions for those in the Hull House neighborhood. She advocated for child labor laws, effective garbage pick-up, and better conditions for factory workers, among other causes. Although she was a regular attendee and lecturer at both the Unitarian church and the Ethical Culture society in Chicago, she retained her membership in the Presbyterian church she had joined as a young adult. In her later years, Addams wrote books and lectured all over the country, spotlighting the necessity of work like hers to ensure that all people could be part of a healthy democracy. In 1931, she received a Nobel Peace Prize for her groundbreaking work, which was a forerunner to modern social work. Following her death in 1935, a funeral service was held in the courtyard of Hull House, where she had lived and worked for 46 years.
WHAT WE CHOOSE: ETHICS FOR UNITARIAN UNIVERSALISTS: WORKSHOP 7:
HANDOUT 1: CAROL GILLIGAN AND A DIFFERENT VOICE
In A Different Voice
In 1982, developmental psychologist Carol Gilligan published a groundbreaking book, In a Different Voice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1982). In her book, Gilligan challenged the prevailing understanding of moral development, in particular the theories of the person with whom she had studied, Lawrence Kohlberg. Kohlberg had discovered that the boys he interviewed in his studies preferred a morality of rights that emphasized separation and independence, while girls of the same age preferred a morality of responsibility that emphasized relationship and interdependence. His theory posited that children move through stages of moral development much as they move through Piaget's stages of cognitive development, and he assigned a higher level of moral development to those whose moral reasoning is based on rules and moral principle than to those whose moral reasoning was based on empathy for others. Gilligan's work challenged Kohlberg's conclusion that those who based their moral reasoning on rights had reached a higher level of development than those who based their moral reasoning on responsibility. She argued that girls and boys were socialized differently and each reflected the moral reasoning that was most appropriate for their location and for the ways in which they had been taught to understand their role in the world. She further argued that the female perspective and its ethic of responsibility which put relationship first had been ignored by others in her field.
Highlighting Gender Difference
Gilligan included in her book two interviews that were part of Lawrence Kohlberg's 1973 study of individual views on the rights and responsibilities of human beings. Both of the respondents had been 25 years old when they were interviewed.
The first voice, a male person:
[What does the word morality mean to you?] Nobody in the world knows the answer. I think it is recognizing the right of the individual, the rights of other individuals, not interfering with those rights. Act as fairly as you would have them treat you. I think it is basically to preserve the human being's right to existence. I think that is the most important. Secondly, the human being's right to do as he pleases, again without interfering with somebody else's rights.
[How have your views on morality changed since the last interview?] I think I am more aware of an individual's rights now. I used to be looking at it strictly from my point of view, just for me. Now I think I am more aware of what the individual has a right to.
The second voice, a female person:
[Is there really some correct solution to moral problems, or is everybody's opinion equally right?] No, I don't think everybody's opinion is equally right. I think that in some situations there may be opinions that are equally valid, and one could conscientiously adopt one of several courses of action. But there are other situations in which I think there are right and wrong answers, that sort of inhere in the nature of existence, of all individuals here who need to live with each other to live. We need to depend on each other, and hopefully it is not only a physical need but a need of fulfillment in ourselves, that a person's life is enriched by cooperating with other people and striving to live in harmony with everybody else, and to that end, there are right and wrong, there are things which promote that end and that move away from it, and in that way it is possible to choose in certain cases among different courses of action that obviously promote or harm that goal.
FIND OUT MORE
To learn more about Jane Addams, visit the Hull House museum (at www.uic.edu/jaddams/hull/_learn/_aboutjane/aboutjane.html) website and read the biography of Jane Addams (at nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1931/addams-bio.html) at the Nobel Peace Prize website.
To learn more about the work of the Unitarian Universalist Partner Church Council and their Community Capacity Building program, visit the UUPCC (at www.uupcc.org/index.html) website.