Family Values and Naughty Acts
John Bacon
University of Sydney
Ever since I was a student myself, people on university campuses have talked about sex all the time and, presumably, with luck engaged in it some of the time. For the last 10–15 years, there has been increasing talk of family values, whether in actual families or in political harangues. Naughty acts are, of course, nothing at all new, but they are frequently held to involve sex or to flout family values. This patent intensification of concern with values and with vice has, unfortunately, not brought with it much insight or even much virtue. My aim tonight is to wave my arms in the moral fog a little, hoping to point the way to some possible clarity.
What is a value? Most students, parents, politicians and wowsers in general seem to think they know. For example, virginity and honesty are values, while duplicity and sloth are the opposite. But these threaten to turn out culturally relative. Some peoples value duplicity, while some have contempt for virginity. I suggest that a so-called value is a thing valued by an individual, a society or a social group. Thus the expression ‘value’ is incomplete: implicitly one should indicate whose value is meant: a value of X is a thing valued by X. By the verb ‘to value’ here is meant ‘to esteem, admire, advocate, set store by’. So to say that sex is a value of students, or that students value sex, is to assert that they advocate and set store by it. In our society or social group, profanity is not a value: it is not admired or in general advocated, notwithstanding the fact that it too has long been all the go amongst students. Thus we can pursue something even though it is not one of our values. We can do something even though we consider it wrong.
Several year ago our department was visited by John Casey, a vigorous conservative young Cambridge moral philosopher. Casey belonged to the right-wing political society that centred on Peterhouse, Cambridge. One evening his group played host to Margaret Thatcher, then Prime Minister. According to the usual drill, they ate a good dinner, got a little warmed up with good wine, and then Mrs. Thatcher favored the group with some of her political insights. One of the things she declared was, “We must defend values!” In the question period, Enoch Powell raised his hand. [Do you all know who Enoch Powell is?] He said, “Beg to differ Madam Prime Minister, but you cannot defend values!” Mrs. Thatcher spluttered back loudly, “Wh- Whddya mean, you can’t defend values; of course you can defend values, and we must. The future of England depends on it.” Powell: “No, beg to differ, Prime Minister, but you cannot defend values. Values have eternal, unchanging being like the other Platonic forms!” Whereupon Maggie was silenced, or anyway non-plussed.
In the anecdote, Thatcher sounds reasonable and Powell ridiculous. She was right if relative values, such as family values, are meant. We can defend the holding of something as a value by our family or our nation. But Powell was right about the values themselves: they are what they are, whatever anybody thinks or advocates. Values in that sense are not so popular nowadays, particularly amongst my students.
This has brought us to family values. They are presumably things valued by the family, general principles or modes of conduct, not particular things. The trouble is that there are many different families, many different kinds of families. The family I grew up in, for example, valued handicraft, doing things with your hands, but not all families have such a value. It also valued a high level of education, so my brother and I were both bundled off to graduate school. Another family might value keeping the daughters’ heads covered after puberty; nothing of the sort would ever have been admired in my sister.
If values vary from family to family, what then, really, are family values, so-called. They must be the imaginary values of an ideal family, held up to the rest of us as a pattern we ought to emulate, a sort of Platonic form. I will spare you the tedious exercise of listing all these real ideal family values: you can do it as well as I. Among them will be fairly straightforward values endorsed by the members of almost any upper-middle-class family in an Anglophone or European democracy. For example, it is a value of theirs to be well-groomed except on very informal or recreational occasions. Another value is to pay one’s accounts regularly at local merchants’ whom they frequent.
Now, what about smoking pot? I take it that this is emphatically not a value amongst the class in question, despite the fact that many of the youth have tried it. So X can be a member of family F, and family F can subscribe to value V, even though X does not uphold V and perhaps does not even accept it. Family values are often honored in the breach and still retain their importance. As with any other principle, the violator of a family value may be jubilant or repentant. Jamie in Eugene O’Neill’s abysmally moving play A Long Day’s Journal into Night is sick with remorse after he gets drunk and has a tart in the train bearing his father’s body to the grave. He’s probably not even capable of upholding the family values, partly on account of the upbringing he received from that very father, but he is certainly in thrall to those values. Alexander Portnoy in Phillip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) finds himself unable to perform with the uneducated shikse he would bed. In his frustration he cries out pitifully: ‘Are you satisfied, Mama?’ Again, family values he espouses get in the way of sex.
With that the cat is out of the bag. Where does sex stand with regard to family values? Well, first, there’s the well-nigh universal incest tabu. Over all of human history, it has apparently been relaxed only a few times. The Egyptian pharaohs married their sisters. I know of no society in which brother-sister incest has been acceptable. Then there’s heterosexuality: a family value if there ever was one; this despite the widespread acceptance of homosexuality in our time. A boy or girl growing up gay in our society is virtually condemned to violate this family value. Since many families love their gay children, however, they reject this family value. This is the real source of the hue and cry about family values: the fear that those values may come unstuck.
A traditional value in our society (though not in all European democracies: see Germaine Greer’s Sex and Destiny, Secker & Warburg, 1984) has been virginity before marriage. I dare say it is still one of our family values. Nowadays it is so widely honored in the breach, frequently with parental cooperation, that one would have to say that it is not a value at all of many middle-class families. Again, the wowsers would like to shame such families into submission if they only could.
A final important family value, although not exactly sexual per se, is the stricture against abortion. Again, there are many violators, and hence many families that have relinquished this so-called “family value”.
The term ‘value’ in the phrase ‘family value’ is thus coercive. Pretending to erect such values and stridently advocating them is supposed to intimidate the rest of us into returning to traditional virtue. Yet, as I have characterised them, so-called “family values” are not absolute or universal, but relative to particular societies and social groups.
It is an assumption of mine in this paper that in order for moral values or rules to be truly binding on us as individuals in a particular society, they must be universal or absolute. A moral principle by definition applies to all people equally, nay, as Kant would have it, to all rational beings equally. So now I put the question, are there any moral values as such — not things valued by this or that society or group, but things of value to people as such? I take it that honesty is such a value (even if we can readily think of exceptions). I take it that human life is a value, with the well known exceptions (e.g. self-defense, defending a companion, perhaps abortion, perhaps killing in a just war). Education is a value: it is good for virtrually everyone, and its denial can be a severe handicap. (This despite the fact that pernicious education is possible.) Some other values are politeness, urbanity, helpfulness, industry, good-naturedness...
Now that we’ve moved from family values to moral values per se, where does sex stand? Well, first of all, I take it that celibacy, often admired, is not really a sexual state that most people can value. What about incest: it has never lost its daring lip-smacking quality despite being a purely harmless and private act. What about sex before marriage? This is now widely practiced in the Anglophone and European democracies, and a great many people seem to like it; some don’t. There are always the risks, such as pregnancy and venereal disease. Should we recognize a universal moral value prohibiting premarital intercourse? The mere fact that there are many happy violators is not decisive. Nevertheless, I think it has to be recognized that having sex is something that almost all people value, even if they may have their special reasons for abstaining. Sex is a universal human value. Interestingly, as long ago as the Reformation, Luther felt himself impelled to defend “the true chastity” of marriage. He was, of course, opposing celibacy, which the Church had come to equate with chastity. In a similar, secular spirit, we might nowadays advocate as the true chastity a permissive but responsible approach to sex.
What will worry many family-values advocates when they hear this part of my talk is that sex as our teens pactice it appears to be shot through with abuse and exploitation. These are not what we value in valuing sex. The boy who unfairly pressures his girl to have sex, who brags vulgarly to his mates afterward, the young couple who forget about safe sex because it supposedly feels better to the boy, the boy who pretends love just to get sex and abandons the girl afterward, the boy who slanders his girl behind her back — these and other abuses are wrong, selfish, and irresponsible. But the same is true of most of the good things in life: they can be cheapened and abused by the callous.
When ethics is based upon values, or a conception of the good, as we have done here so far, it is called axiology (value theory) or teleology (espousal of an end). But many of our value terms are just grammatically disguised rules. The value of “honesty” corresponds to the rule “Don’t lie!” or “Tell the truth!” (with certain familiar exceptions). The universal value placed on human life corresponds to the rule “Don’t kill!” (again with familiar exceptions). Thus our apparent axiology can just as well be read as a deontology in the Kantian spirit. Kant held that I am obligated to do X if the principle underlying my doing X can be willed as a universal law. His notion of “can be willed” is admittedly obscure. I prefer an allied formulation: I am forbidden to do X if universalizing my motive for doing X would tend to impede or gum up action generally. To oversimplify, we are to refrain from anti-social acts. I leave it open for now whether this paraphrase of Kant is actually adedquate.
An action is naughty when we ought not do it: we ought to abstain, it is forbidden. [Actually, our word ‘naughty’ is derived from ‘naught’, meaning “nothing”. Thus a naughty act was original a nihilistic one, so to speak.] Sometimes, to be sure, ‘naughty’ is used in a light and unserious way, as when a witty, vivacious, slightly daring woman is praised as “naughty”. It’s in the same spirit as the popular perfume called “My Sin”. I leave aside this fecetious use of the word and turn to the questions, “Is any naughty act a family value”, “Is any family value naughty?”, “Is any act that violates family values not naughty”.
I owe the following example to Alistair Cook. He pointed out in one of his Letters from America that few families got that way, i.e. to be families, without the children ever seeing a breast. When you stop to think about it, it’s obvious. Yet family values are widely held to prohibit children from seeing breasts. An interesting thing then happens at 18. The children are thenceforward legally allowed to see breasts, or pictures thereof, or indeed any pornography, yet it is still a family value that they not do so. We happen to live at a time when many young people continue to live with their parents well into their late 20’s. Suppose the stalwart son of the family manages to look at a breast when he’s 21. It’s legal, but not in accord with family values. Suppose our stalwart son marries the girl. They’d better move out. Then it will be all right for him to see her breast, at last.
Here, then, we have an example of something that most of us would view as permissible, but which violates family values.
Since I promised to talk about sex, let’s move to a more blatant as well as heartrending case. Let us suppose that in a certain family that subscribes rigidly and sincerely to family values, the daughter gets pregnant. Well, obviously she shouldn’t have done that, but accidents will happen and the adherents of an ethics don’t always succeed in living up to it. If it helps to visualize a concrete instance, take the case of Fanny in the great French classic movie trilogy Marius, by Marcel Pagnol (consisting of Marius, Fanny, and Césario). Beautiful young Fanny gets pregnant. Her boyfriend Marius, though very handsome, is too young and too poor to marry her. Since this is a Catholic country in the forties, abortion is not an option. So as a pregnant girl, Fanny is already in violation of family values. If she gets an abortion, she’ll also be acting against the version of family values supported by the Catholic Church. What to do? The solution: she marries the kindly, much older man Panisse, who anyhow has always had a thing for her. As Mrs. Panisse, Fanny can return to the moral fold. She has begun a family. Do they live happily ever after? Well, I’ll give you just one clue: Panisse dies. I think you can see that Fanny’s moral situation would be clearer if we just left family values out of it. (Pagnol later continued his film trilogy with the extremely popular Manon des Sources, which you youngsters are perhaps more likely to have seen.)
Those are nearly enough examples to show that conforming to family values and avoiding naughty behavior do not always go hand in hand. I’m sure if you stop to think about it for a few minutes, you’ll be able to think of several more counterexamples yourself. There really is such a thing as naughtiness: it is the wrong, the forbidden, the bad. But it’s not so clear that the notion of family values has much use. We resort to family values when we want to get away with hampering or disapproving of other people. Probably the most eloquent American apostle of family values is my old friend Bill Bennett, with his Book of Virtues (Simon & Schuster, New York), (Bill was a graduate student in Texas, when I had my first job there.) I know that Bennett is a sincere, careful, intelligent thinker. Probably the other American notorious for his support of family values is Newt Gingrich, whose star, alas, has fallen. Gingrich seems quite sincere too, until we learn that he’s on his second wife, having ditched the first one under rather callous circumstances. Also, some would include among family values not wooing your teacher, which Gingrich did.
I can see you all panting after sex, which I promised but haven’t had sufficient time or energy to get into. I’m sorry, I’m afraid that will just have to wait until a more opportune time, or you can roll your own.
Now I want to suggest, in conclusion, that if we ever got the trammeling of agents’ freedoms that would result from an across-the-board implementation of so-called “family values”, most of us would find our lives intolerably hampered, sexually and in every other way. So, from my broadly Kantian perspective, establishing family values (the whole package) is forbidden.
Thus I began this evening with permissiveness and I’ve ended with a prohibition. Isn’t that what family values are for?