On Abuse
Benjamin GayedI find the concept of abuse fascinating. I find the term is also used with very little discretion. Originally, it was my intention to consider the concept of abuse, to explore its meaning and implications without any particular end in mind. In my open-ended consideration, the only conclusion I have reached (so far) is that abuse is substantiated by the presence of mutually held expectations and moral norms.
While defining “abuse” denotatively may seem like an exercise in mere semantics, it has important application. We, as a society, increasingly define relationships as either “healthy” or “abusive.” Unless the word is defined with some reasonable degree of specificity, and tied to particular moral concepts, it is liable to become a meaningless, unboundaried, undefined slur, like “intolerant,” or even “racist” has become.
The concept of abuse implies the existence of a relationship. You cannot be abused if you do not have any form of interaction with the abuser. This interaction might be direct and personal, such as that between a man and wife living in the same home, or indirect and impersonal such as the decision of a state representative to misrepresent the desires of the voters who have elected him.
Abuse must be based on expectations. For example, if you do not come to my house tonight or buy groceries for my wife and kids, you have not abused my family. If I do not go home tomorrow night, or fail to provide food for my wife and kids, I have succeeded in abusing them. It is because I have agreed to support them with my presence and other resources that they have any right to expect them. Similarly, you may think it abusive for me to slice you open with a knife, to knock you out and cut out your heart, unless I am the surgeon performing your life-saving heart transplant. Again, this pro-active mutual agreement has defined the boundaries of which actions are allowed and which are abusive. Also, there is an implied element of power. The ability to abuse is affected by having some form of influence over another being. I cannot abuse the sun, because I am incapable of any act which would affect it. (This begs the interesting though perhaps trivial question of whether it is possible to abuse God. The answer would seem to be no).
Violating mutually held expectations is not by itself enough to constitute abuse. For example, if I agree (implicitly) not to hit my wife, but then hit her, I have abused her. But if I agree explicitly to take her to the movies, and am unable to because I’m stuck in traffic, I have violated a mutually held expectation, but have not abused her. The difference between the two examples, and the other element required for abuse to occur, is the violation of a moral norm that stands independently of the parties in relationship, and to which both parties look, explicitly or implicitly. Abuse occurs only when both expectation and norm are violated.
So what happens when two people have shared expectations which violate a moral norm? Consider the example of sado-masochistic sexual practice. There is a mutually held expectation permitting acts which would be considered abusive in other contexts (ie outside of sex, even within the same relationship). Moral objections to sado-masochism include degeneracy and a responsibility not to inflict injury on another person (for the sake of discussion, we will assume these are adequate basis to consider this an immoral act). Though it may be immoral (and possibly illegal) sado-masochism does not constitute abuse because just as expectations alone are not enough to define abuse without moral norms, neither are morals sufficient to define abuse without expectations.
So what is the appropriate use of the term abuse? Abuse refers to an action which violates both mutually held expectations and moral norms. Abuse is really a subjective term as expectations are subjective. As a side note, this would seem to make it difficult to claim abuse on another person’s behalf as you cannot know his or her expectations. Offensive acts can be separated into abusive (violating both norms and expectations), immoral only (violating norms and not expectations), and I will call the final category of actions simply irritating (violating expectations, but not morals).
This discussion begs the very interesting question of who gets to decide what constitutes truth and morality (and by extension what things may be abusive instead of just irritating) and perhaps more importantly, who gets to enforce that view? For example, animal abuse is not a widely-accepted practice (see: Michael Vick). Truth is a subject traditionally left to the church and other religious authorities, and in the Judeo-Christian, there is a responsibility to be good stewards of creation including proper treatment of animals as part of creation. This would seem to preclude senseless injury to animals. But what about for the atheist or agnostic? I did not wish to consider this question within the body of this essay, but I wanted to at least pose it for discussion.
November 20th, 2007 at 3:22 pm
Ben’s insightful distinction between ‘mutual expectations’ and ‘moral norms’ corresponds with a Thomistic moral analysis of actions, with some overlap. For actions to be moral or immoral, their object, circumstance, and intent must each be good. I think ‘abuse’ is a exceedingly complicated moral term, because it is intrinsically both subjective, (asteroids do not abuse each other) and contractual (open war is not necessarily abuse).
The overlap yields the following distribution: (Articles 2,3,4: http://www.newadvent.org/summa/2018.htm)
Abuse = mutual expectations + moral norms.
1. Mutual Expectations = intent + circumstance
2. Moral Norms = intent + object
A. Intent ~ Aristotle’s ‘final cause’ of events
B. Circumstance ~ Aristotle’s ‘efficient cause’ of events
C. Object ~ Aristotle’s ‘formal cause’ of events. This is an action’s moral species. An action’s moral genus is derived from its material composition. (Aristotle’s ‘material cause’ of events.) All ‘being’ is derived from God and therefore good, so material causation doesn’t factor in too much. That is, unless you are a Gnostic, and believe Satan is a source of being, or conversely, a Calvinist, and believe that God has created evil wills.
Let’s just consider ‘mutual expectations’: Moral subjectivists such as Kant, and people with borderline personality disorder, (who confuse their ego with their surroundings) tend to overemphasize ‘intent’ criteria and read too far into actions, not taking circumstance into account. Clearly, ‘intent’ enjoys a sort of primacy over other criteria, as is evident by its above overlap, and by Jesus’s own demonstrations: Mt 5:8, Mk 7:1-23, Lk 6:45.
But since ‘mutual expectations’ are also relative to the earthly, material context in which they are made, ‘circumstance’ is a necessary criteria of any human (voluntary) abusive action. Who overemphasizes this? Materialist evolutionists, who wish to defend consensual sado-masochism as moral. “You and me baby we ain’t nothin’ but mammals, so let’s do it like they do it on the discovery channel.” Mammalian circumstance does not justify fornication. Fornication is only moral acceptable (as a voluntary human action) if it meets all four criteria, not just one.
Ben’s analysis is like a photo-negative. It is interesting, and useful, because it shows that ‘abuse’ is actually a technical subgroup of ‘immoral actions’. For an action to be just ‘immoral’ it must fail to meet ONLY one of four criteria. Thus, each criteria is morally necessary, but not morally SUFFICIENT. By contrast, for an action to qualify as ‘abuse’, it must fail by at least TWO criteria. Since there’s some overlap, there are actually four combinations for abuse: failing by intent and object, by object and circumstance, by intent and circumstance, or… by intentx2 regarding both norms and expectations! (? i don’t know if it’s possible to fail by intent alone, b/c of its moral primacy.)
e.g:
If Ben is stuck in traffic (entirely accidentally), and fails to take his wife to the movies, his absence cannot even be classified as moral or immoral, (and much less, abuse) because one criteria is entirely missing.
e.g:
If, conversely, all criteria are met except for the ‘circumstance’, this action is not abusive, but is definitely immoral; e.g. if a foolish pastor were to preach a hell-fire brimstone sermon at a questionable funeral. If this action were truly spontaneous, it would not be ‘abusive’, because it does not fail by intent or object, but would be definitely ‘irritating’ and, I believe, most definitely immoral.
e.g:
Actions towards animals may be ‘abusive’ if they fail by, say, object and intent. If I hit my dog in the face, instead of the butt, or with a hammer, instead of the back of my hand, and because I want to hear him yelp, instead of training him not to growl at babies, then I am abusive. I could also be abusive by object and circumstance, if I inject viruses into dogs for the sake of research, but if I do so in the presence of little girls watching me, which will scar them for life.
November 20th, 2007 at 6:03 pm
The distinction is extremely insightful. I have reservations about whether it accomplishes the goal of tethering the word “abuse” to a defined range of meaning. While “mutual expectation” is fairly static, the concept of “moral norms” isn’t. While moral norms may in truth be objective and unchanging, it’s not those moral norms that society will apply to defining abuse. Society will apply its through-a-glass-darkly conception of moral norms, which history has shown can vary wildly, and often represent perversions of previous conceptions of immorality. While the expectation + norm model is sterling in theory, in practice the model is bound to become expectation + “societal norm posing as moral norm.” The latter component is necessarily variable, and often volatile, and destines this approach to “abuse” to be the same.
That being said, I’m not sure what workable approach wouldn’t suffer that problem. The only possibility that comes to mind is a statutory listing of ‘abusive’ behavior. In other words, asking the government to set the relevant moral norms and to set acceptable relational expectations. I don’t find the idea attractive in the least, but for a term with the social and legal consequences of ‘abuse,’ certainty imposed from above might be preferable to a more socially integrated, but also more variable, definition.
November 27th, 2007 at 6:50 pm
I don’t know that man’s ability to rightly define moral norms is completely unreliable. I agree that things can and have gone pretty far wrong in certain times for certain beliefs, but that does not mean our determinations are completely inaccurate. The Bible supports an innate ability of man’s to determine what is right and what is wrong, e.g. Romans 12:14-16, “For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.” It seems that the ability is there. Often entire generations have deficiencies in certain areas because of the context and cultural tendencies. But I think an agreed upon set of norms would work well as long as it was possible to change but had to change very slowly. They would have to have enough inertia to resist generational fluctuations like prohibition (…maybe?) and yet be malleable enough to allow for real corrections like women’s right to vote and the abolition of slavery.
November 28th, 2007 at 11:17 pm
It’s interesting that civilization has always placed enormous value on relationships of mutual trust and expectation. The family is older than government, and is quite an anarchical place in comparison. For instance, spanking your children according to the dictates of your own conscience, or getting into family arguments, a teenager throwing something at a sibling or parent. People can decide how much to feed their dogs. When should police/social services get involved? How strictly should we define that boudnary? Our legal system seems to shy away from encouraging litigation or intrusion into abuse. Why might this be a good idea for society? Maybe to encourage the benefits come from a society based on private contracts, covenants, etc?
It’s true that abuse involves breaking moral codes which exist outside of private relationship. And norms are defined by legal systems, which are partly arbitrary. But those legal systems, and those who vote them into being, are answerable to a higher power, and so are individuals. So it’s all okeydokey in the end, right?
‘Conscience is nothing else than the application of knowledge to some action. Now knowledge is in the reason. Therefore when the will is at variance with erring reason, it is against conscience. But every such will is evil; for it is written Rom 14:23 “all that is not of faith-i.e. all that is against conscience- is sin”. Therefore the will is evil when it is at variance with erring reason.’
Summa Theologica I-II, Q 19, Article 5
Whether the will is Evil When It is at Variance with Erring Reason?
November 30th, 2007 at 10:05 am
It’s important to define why this issue is important. Abuse–improper behavior in a relationship–is what it is regardless of how we define it. How we define it, however, determines the scope of social and legal acceptability. So the real question isn’t “What is right?” or even “What is wrong?”, but rather “What should be punished?”