I know very little about Christian hospitality as it stands as a tradition in the Church. I know that around Hyaets we would read Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001) if we wanted to learn more about such things. I don't have time to read this book while I'm here, but by examining the back cover I found that it is focused on hospitality's roots in Scripture and traditional Christian practice. I'm more interested in providing an effective argument for hospitality as a moral good. The hospitality I'm about to describe is simple, but rare in this day and age.
What is hospitality? At Hyaets, hospitality takes the form of welcoming the stranger into our lives, broadly construed. It can mean opening up our houses, our backyard Clubhouse, our bathrooms, dining room table, use of our telephones, etc. It can also mean letting our guard down and making ourselves intentionally uncomfortable in order to connect with and welcome a person.
Here is the outline of a preliminary theory of hospitality:
1) Hospitality, the virtue that has as its object the welcoming of the stranger, can be viewed as a means of reconciling distributive injustices in an imperfectly compliant society. I borrow the term "imperfectly compliant" from John Rawls, who wrote an influential book on perfect compliance justice, which describes (counterfactually) a perfectly just world. Imperfect compliance justice concerns how we ought to deal with injustice (e.g. punishment, just war, etc.) I will elaborate on this view in (4).
2) Unlike sharing (refer to yesterday's post), hospitality is disinterested. We do not welcome the stranger because we love the stranger, or have an interest in her. Rather, we welcome the stranger because (I'm assuming) we are morally required to do so. I won't go into the argument behind this, as my point here is to contrast hospitality with sharing, which does not fall under the requirements of morality to the extent that hospitality does.
3) By welcoming the stranger, we attend to them, and open ourselves up to relations with them, and hence possibility. Disinterested hospitality can pave the way for interested sharing.
4) Injustice creates opportunities for hospitality in the sense I am talking about. The times when we need to show hospitality to a person would correspond to the times when they have unmet needs that the moral agent can meet. I cannot think of a situation where we would welcome a STRANGER into our life if that person did not have a need that could not have been met elsewhere. I assume that a perfectly just world would, within reason, meet all human needs. Therefore, for an act of hospitality to have moral content, it would have to occur in an imperfectly just world. This makes much sense if one considers the Aristotelian view of injustice as stemming from pleonexia, or acquisitiveness; desiring more than one's share. If there was no pleonexia in the world and goods were distributed justly, there would be no opportunity for hospitality.
5) We need a definition of stranger! A STRANGER is someone you do not know personally nor have any usual interest to know personally. To go off on a tangent, at the beginning of the summer Helms and Greg very graciously welcomed me into their home, despite believing with good reason that I may be (1) a Republican and (2) an EVANGELICAL. Helms and Greg are truly excellent hosts. However, I do not qualify as a stranger because they did indeed have an interest in getting to know me personally (namely, I was assigned to live and work with them for a 10-week period).
6) Any Kantian worth her saltpetre would stand behind the virtue of hospitality. As the virtue of welcoming the stranger, hospitality maximizes actions which treat others as ends in and of themselves. All that it requires of us is that we attend to other people, but specifically those people with whom we have no interest in being in relation. Since we have no interest in being in relation with these people, we have no reason to treat them as means to our various ends.
To close: I started this blog as a way to focus myself over the last two weeks of my ministry in Charlotte. I didn't really know where it was going at first, but now I know that it will be very focused on topics in ethics as they relate to my experience at Hyaets this summer. Until August 9th it will serves as a springboard for half-baked academic ideas, a place to practice writing for the sake of writing, and less so a mode of reflection on life in Enderly Park. I will continue using the 12 Marks as a framework for my postings. Along that line, I'm changing the title of my blog. Thanks to Greg for suggesting this new title and for all the other funny things he says.
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