Narrative Construction of Individuals and Groups

Again, one assumption of the debate over group responsibility has been that the individual is the paradigmatic moral agent, which a group must mimic if it is to qualify as a moral agent.

Individuals are often referred to with the terms “persons,” “subjects,” “selves,” or “agents,” and I use these terms interchangeably here. According to Diana Tietjens Meyers, there are five “widely espoused and widely debated conceptions” of the individual moral subject (2004: 290). They are: the Kantian unitary self, the communitarian social self, the psychodynamic divided self, the feminist relational self, and the embodied self (293). We do not have space here to explore all the details of these five common views. What Meyers points out in her discussion is that each view highlights an important aspect of human experience; however, no single view can fully explain our experience. She asserts that we cannot properly acknowledge the essential complexity of moral subjects if we adopt one view and exclude all others. A narrative view of individuals, according to Meyers, has the potential to accommodate aspects of all five common views and in that way better represents our complexity (293).

In the group responsibility debate, the Kantian and communitarian views have been prom­inent. The Kantian view emphasizes universal reason in moral decision making and denies that group membership would impact such reasoning. In his discussion of group responsibility Jan Narveson (2002) adopts a Kantian view. In contrast, when adopting communitarian views, we may emphasize relationships, including group memberships, in the process of moral decision making. Larry May’s (1992) view of individuals is broadly communitarian. It is no great surprise, then, that Narveson is opposed to group responsibility while May is in favor of it. It appears that embracing any one view of the individual can bias our perspective on group responsibility. If, as Meyers suggests, the narrative view can incorporate the sometimes conflicting concerns of all five moral subjects, then it has the potential to balance out the biases inherent in adopting any one view and may enable greater impartiality in our judgments of group responsibility. Therefore, it is to the narrative conception of subjects we now turn.

The notion that narrative is central to our experience as moral subjects arises in the con­text of the issue of personal identity, that is, how one remains the same self over time and despite change. It also arises more directly in ethics proper as a feature which contributes to one’s counting as an intentional agent. The narrative conception of subjects I rely upon was initially developed by Marya Schechtman (1996) in relation to personal identity, and it has been extended in various directions by Diana Tietjens Meyers (2004), Hilde Lindemann Nelson (2001), and others. The basic idea behind a narrative conception of subjects is that subjects are fundamentally story-telling beings; our stories, even if they contain misperceptions and contradictions, enable us to explain and make sense of our actions across time. Schechtmans “narrative self-constitution view” proposes that

individuals constitute themselves as persons by coming to think of themselves as persisting subjects who have had experience in the past and will continue to have experiences in the future, taking certain experiences as theirs.

(1996: 94)

Schechtman holds that narratives, including past experiences and future hopes, are the means by which an individual generates a personal identity, a unique and enduring self. She recognizes that while narratives cannot supply the ontological basis of personhood (otherwise fictional characters would count as persons), they do enable us to interpret and to weave together the characteristics (beliefs, values, experiences) that make us who we are across time. The process of interpretation results in a standard image of the self against which we can measure the consist­ency of our beliefs and actions.

Importantly for our purposes, the narrative process does more than define and establish a self. It also provides the background for our moral deliberations. Schechtman clarifies that

creating an autobiographical narrative is not simply composing a story of one’s life—it is organizing and processing one’s experience in a way that presupposes an implicit understanding of oneself as an evolving protagonist. A large part of what that entails is that the remembered past and the anticipated future exert an influence on the present—that they serve as its interpretive context, the lens through which it is experienced.

(142)

Our practical and moral deliberations, and subsequent actions, are influenced by the narrative understanding of ourselves that we have created. It is in light of our past actions and future hopes that we consider our present options. We generate intentions and take actions that are sometimes inconsistent with our narrative understandings, of course, but the baseline narrative is there as a kind of standard measure. In addition, Meyers has argued that as we weave together a narrative with moral overtones, we can choose whether to emphasize Kantian, communitarian, psychodynamic, feminist, or embodied considerations; indeed, we can emphasize them all in our narrative, even when they contradict, making the narrative conception of selves more complex and in some sense more realistic than any one view alone (2004: 293).

Thus, if we accept the interpretations of Schechtman and Meyers, the benefits of adopting a narrative conception of individual moral subjects when considering group responsibility are twofold. First, we can embrace our essential complexity and temper the biases of the different standard conceptions of the moral subject. Second, we can readily see how narrative is a necessary feature of moral agency. Note that from a metaphysical perspective, one may have a narrative but no body (e.g., a fictional character), or one may have a body but no narrative (e.g., infants, those with advanced dementia). In either case, we would not assign moral agency or responsibility. It appears that, perhaps in addition to other things, both a body and a narrative are required for moral agency and responsibility. To demonstrate that something lacks a narrative may be a method for showing that it cannot be responsible.

At the moment, we have in hand a narrative conception of individual moral subjects. What I want to show next, by drawing on Nelson, is one process for how narrative individuals and narrative groups are constructed. In her work, Nelson connects narrative to identity politics and sees narrative construction and reconstruction of identities as central to the process of recog­nition for members of marginalized groups. She discusses individual moral subjects in terms of their personal identities. For Nelson, “identities are the understandings we have of ourselves and others” (2001: 6). Nelson argues that our identities, as conceived by ourselves and by others, can impact agency tremendously. To illustrate, she offers the example of having the identity of a doctor or surgeon. If one has such an identity, then one is trained for and allowed to cut into live human beings—otherwise, that action is prohibited. Thus, identity clearly affects moral agency and responsibility. Moreover, our identities require some confirmation from people and records outside ourselves; we cannot simply choose any identity.⁷

On Nelson’s view, we use narrative to craft our personal identities; however, the process is not entirely under our control.

personal identities consist of a connective tissue of narratives—some constant, others shifting over time—which we weave around the features of ourselves and our lives that matter most to us. The significant things I’ve done and experienced, my more important characteristics, the roles and relationships I care about most, the values that matter most to me—these form the relatively stable points around which I construct the narratives that constitute the sense I make of myself. The (backward-looking) stories of my connection to these things over time are explanatory: they explain to me who I am and it’s this that is my own contribution to my personal identity. But my identity is also constituted by the stories other people construct around the things about me that seem most important to them. From neither the first nor the third- person perspective are the stories that constitute an identity entirely original; many contain stock plots and character types borrowed from narratives that circulate widely in the culture.

(72)

Nelson elaborates on this description by offering three processes that are used to construct personal identities, what she calls first-person narrative activity, third-person narrative activity, and a drawing on master narratives. First-person narrative is the process over which the indi­vidual has the most control. It involves emphasizing what I take to be most important about me, especially the choices and actions that I feel reflect my deepest values. Third-person narrative activity happens when others tell stories (true or not) about us. In relation to groups, third- person narrative activity can come from others inside our groups, what I call “internal” narrative activity, or from others outside our groups, what I call “external” narrative activity. Internal narrative activity, especially for powerful groups, tends toward the positive (e.g., glowing family or national histories) while external narrative activity tends toward the negative (e.g., stereo­types).

The third process for constructing personal identities involves drawing on master narratives and is done at both the first and third-person levels. According to Nelson, master narratives are “the stories found lying about in our culture that serve as summaries of socially shared understanding” (6). Some obvious examples include classic literature and film, fairy tales, famous court cases and news stories, mythology, religious stories, and so on. These master narratives function as “repositories of common norms” and as such “exercise a certain authority over our moral imaginations and play a role in informing our moral intuitions” (6). They are publicly available and serve as a kind of shorthand for describing and judging ourselves and others. As Nelson points out, there are implicit and sometimes explicit norms in the master narratives that “tell us how we are supposed to understand the people (including ourselves) to whom we apply them” (85).

Master narratives characterize types, not tokens, so they apply to individuals as members of certain groups. The norms within a master narrative apply to me as an individual because I somehow fit a particular type or belong in a particular group (e.g., as a “woman” I cannot wear a tuxedo to a formal event without violating a norm). Certain behaviors are expected of individuals because they are members of certain groups. I can belong to a group according to my own estimation, or perhaps only in the estimation of others. I can act in ways that comply with established group norms (further endorsing and shaping them) or I can act in ways that disrupt those norms (questioning and altering them). In any event, the norms contained within narratives are group based, portraying whole groups and their members in specific ways. Given this, Nelson observes that social groups have identities which “are themselves narra­tively constructed” (71).⁸ Although Nelson does not detail how the identity of a social group is constructed, we may use the individual case as a guideline. First-person, internal narrative activity would be contributed by group members themselves. When non-group members make contributions, that would constitute third-person or external narrative activity. All parties would rely on publicly available master narratives and the norms within.

Up to this point, I have attempted to show how racial groups, gender groups, ethnic groups, religious groups, and the like are composed of members (who have their own narratives), plus a group narrative, to which many people, both inside and outside the group, contribute. Within that group narrative are norms, which are shaped by and apply to group members, and which figure in the practical reasoning process of members as they consider their actions. As I describe shortly, the group narrative, and the norms within it, may provide a link between many members of large social groups and those members who actively perpetrate harm.

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