Hierarchy of Exclusion

I was just listening to an episode of the public radio program Speaking of Faith about Abraham Joshua Heschel, a prominent theologian during the civil rights era. They got to talking about moral relativism, and made a distinction between relativism and pluralism. We might not agree about Jesus, and that's OK if we're committed to pluralism. But we can agree that killing each other is just plain wrong: rejecting relativism doesn't mean rejecting pluralism.

Which begs the question: why do we agree that killing each other is wrong? The answer "because God says so" isn't very satisfying, in my mind, even if you believe in a personal God, which I don't, because you have to have some reason for believing that (a) God really does say so and that (b) you should agree with him/her/it/them. If you need faith to accept one or both of those things, you might as well just have faith that killing people is bad and save yourself some time.

Of course, we don't really need faith to tell us that killing is bad, since the members of any society that disagreed would soon kill each other off, and we wouldn't be here to disagree with the premise. This led me to connect some interesting dots.

I recently (re)read Orson Scott Card's "Speaker for the Dead," which includes the idea of a "hierarchy of exclusion" for intelligent beings:

• utlanning: a stranger of one's own species from another part of the same world
• framling: a stranger of one's own species but from another world
• raman: a stranger of another species, but still recognizable as intelligent, and with whom we can communicate and coexist
• varelse: a stranger of a species with which we cannot reach an understanding, either because we cannot recognize it as intelligent or because communication is impossible
• djur (mentioned obliquely only once): "the dire beast, that comes in the night with slavering jaws"

The relation to alien species is critical for the book, of course, but it occurred to me that the principles of the hierarchy could be applied to our fellow human beings as well. Here's my best shot:

• utlanning: a stranger with our own values and culture but from another place
• framling: a stranger with our same values but a different culture
• raman: a stranger of a different culture and somewhat different values, but with whom accord and coexistence is possible
• varelse: a stranger whose values are incompatible with our own, with whom no accord or coexistence is possible
• djur: one whose values call for our utter destruction, with whom only violence is possible

Note that my definitions are at the level of "values." They are not about interests, priorities, choices, or actions. If you and I are to coexist, it's not enough that neither of us has killed the other yet; we need to have confidence that neither of us will kill the other. Because we are (most of us) emotional and moral beings, a moral commitment to the sanctity of life helps to build confidence in that probability. (Of course, there's always the issue of trustworthiness, and of what happens when values and interests are misaligned, but that's a topic for another time.)

Card's framework may come in handy in this upcoming election cycle, when a lot of careless words are likely to be bandied about about who our enemies are and what communications and relations we ought to have with them. Before one society can form a relationship with another, its leaders ought to consider the nature of the relationship they wish to have. A key component of that decision, it seems to be, ought to be the degree of shared values and moral commitments between the parties. If I can recognize that you share my values, regardless of your present course of action, that recognition cannot but transform the nature of our interactions. And the very heartening thing is that individuals -- and indeed whole societies -- can change over time, so that those who were enemies may become neighbors, or even friends.