for<\/em>. St. Aelred\u2019s emphasis on transparent honesty with one\u2019s friends may be considered an antidote to the shame we feel at exposing our own needs and weaknesses.<\/p>\nOne of the biggest tasks at the center, at least for someone with my style of counseling, is to help the woman find the sources of love and support already available to her in her own life and community. I try to help her identify and strengthen those connections. And I\u2019ve been startled by how often people will identify a friend as a possible source of desperately-needed strength, and then admit that they\u2019re ashamed to rely on that friend. \u201cWell, if she were in need, wouldn\u2019t you want<\/em> to know?\u201d I ask, and that helps a bit. But the tight old relationships\u2013not only friendship but the fictive kinship relations of godparenthood and godsisterhood, and maybe even the extended-family relationships of cousinhood\u2013seem to be weakening.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nI thought Eve\u2019s strategy of asking the woman to imagine that she and her friend\u2019s positions was a good idea. \u00a0Most moral systems (solipsism\u00a0excepted, I guess) assume that you don\u2019t occupy a special place in the moral system. \u00a0Maybe we could call this failure to universalize moral geocentricism?<\/p>\n
But since this is an error I fall into, of course I\u2019ve got a sneaky way around it. \u00a0I am<\/em> universalizing moral obligation, I\u2019ve told my friends in debate, but you\u2019ve misunderstood the nature of the universal rule I\u2019m applying. \u00a0All I\u2019m saying is: Everyone should give the actions of other people the most<\/em> charitable reading possible and their own actions the least<\/em> charitable interpretation. \u00a0After all, I don\u2019t know anyone else as well as I know myself, so I must be unaware of some mitigating factors.<\/p>\nI don\u2019t think this is a fundamentally\u00a0bad<\/em> approach, just that I tend to take it too far, and that it undersells the extent to which friends may know us better than we know ourselves.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In re the discussion of accepting gifts, a recent post by Eve Tushnet seemed apropos. \u00a0(Note, she\u2019s discussing her experiences working with women at a crisis pregnancy center, and I would prefer any discussion not be derailed by an\u00a0argument\u00a0about crisis pregnancy centers, since that\u2019s not the part of the story I\u2019m highlighting). I\u2019ve been struck […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":127,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[162,201,132],"class_list":["post-2969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-morality-in-practice","tag-accepting-gifts","tag-offering-weakness","tag-pride"],"yoast_head":"\n
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.fondazionernestoilly.org\/fondazioneEilly\/images\/offering-gift-red.jpg\" "\\"offering")
<\/p>\n