Habits of Judgement: Emotions, Ethics, and Social Critique on the Border

One Family, Two Responses

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In the brutally hot summer of 2021, I served as a volunteer at the Kino Border Initiative in Nogales, Mexico. Widely known for advocating for border justice, Kino is a Jesuit organization that cares for migrants on the U.S.-Mexico border by offering shelter, meals, and accompaniment. My job, mostly, was to conduct intake interviews with the migrants who arrived at our center. Although I remember many of these conversations, particularly impactful was an interview that I conducted with a woman I will call Elena, who arrived to Kino with her daughter in July. She had, she told me, just been released from detention in the United States after having crossed the border on foot in an attempt to claim asylum. She and her little child had walked for several days in the Sonora Desert. Tired, dirty, and dehydrated, Elena told me that they were both relieved and afraid when the U.S. Border Patrol found them. As it turned out, fear was the more justified emotion. 

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Although Elena had the right to ask for asylum, the officer who arrested her made it clear that he had no intention of respecting that right. Officer Pérez (also a pseudonym) first pulled his gun on Elena and her daughter, then arrested her in front of her child and denied their requests for water. Against her tears and pleas to exercise her right to asylum, Pérez swore at them: “pinche viejas greñudas,” he yelled. Which translates roughly to “fucking old, shaggy messes.” Even days later, she kept repeating Pérez’s vile insult over and over to me, asking why he had treated her so terribly. I had no answer. He told them that it was his job to keep dirty greñudas like them out of his country. He did not want to hear their story, he said, and neither did anyone else. They had no business asking for help; no business polluting his country. 

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By the end of the interview we were both in tears. We sat for a while after the speaking was over. I gave her daughter something to draw with. Then we made appointments with the lawyers, doctors, and mental health counselors who work at Kino and I introduced her to the people who would get her new clothes, provide her a shower, and prepare her a meal. After writing her report, I went to sit in the shelter’s makeshift chapel, to pray and to cry.

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As I sat in the silence it was Elena’s voice that rang in my ears, her voice as she repeated Pérez’s insult over and over like a bewildered refrain: “pinche vieja greñuda.”  In the repetition it dawned on me that, despite the gravity of her situation, it was not her expulsion from the U.S. that wounded her most. It was Officer Pérez’s contempt. It was his manifest disgust at Elena’s presence, her physical dirtiness after days in the desert, that wounded her most deeply. It was that he simply did not perceive Elena as a person – even one suspect of having broken the law. Instead, he encountered her as an object of disgust and then used that disgust to wound her.  

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The salience of Elena’s emotions raises, it seems to me, important questions for ethics. As I will argue, Pérez’s actions, his treatment of Elena, seems straightforwardly blameworthy. But can we say the same for his emotions? Can he be blamed for the strength of his emotional response? Can he be held to account for them? Did he “choose” them? Can his disgust be judged ethically, and if so, should it? Drawing on Martha Nussbaum’s work on the social and psychological nature of emotions as well as Aristotle’s virtue ethics, I will argue in this essay that emotions such as disgust and compassion fall firmly within the field of ethics’ attention. In particular, Nussbaum’s important book Political Emotions (Harvard University Press: 2013) offers a vision of the formation of emotions that breaks open areas for ethical critique at a social and political level, evaluating structures with respect to the emotions they cultivate or constrain. Applied to Elena’s context, this framework offers grounds for a social-emotional critique of border enforcement policy – it will allow us to see how border policy constrains compassion, encourages disgust, and contributes to the abuse and mistreatment of migrants. Ultimately, I argue that we bear an ethical responsibility at the social level for our emotions.

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Hope and Critique on the Border

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In the first issue of Nexus, addressing the life of the Catholic university, Naomi Fisher offered us a compelling case against a vision of academia grounded solely in the “critical stance.” Instead of helping our students become more capable of building a just society, our focus on critique has left them resigned to its overwhelming injustice. Breaking out of this stance, scholars and teachers in Catholic universities must help our students develop “a sense of the good and the possibility of its attainment; that is, we must give our students hope.” 

I would offer that this issue – the absence of hope in the critical stance – extends beyond our classrooms. It sometimes seems that our political movements are far more capable of demonstrating what is wrong with the other side than of offering compelling visions of the good they themselves seek. As such, it is not only the academic critique we teach our students that needs to be linked to broader goods, but also the forms of critique that make their way into our public work as scholars, practitioners, and Church leaders. Our critique must always be paired with hope and an attention to the good.

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This is not always easy. 

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Unlike Elena, when the summer finished I was able to leave the desert behind, returning to Chicago to continue my Jesuit training. But Elena’s story – the total bewilderment in her voice – was not so easy for me to leave behind. Which is just to say that, for me, the summer of encountering migrants had worked. I had encountered others in their sufferings and joys, felt with them, and been converted by them. Something had happened to me in these encounters at the border that plainly had not happened for Officer Pérez. In his day to day working with Border Patrol, he was not moved by his encounters with people like Elena – or perhaps it is more accurate to say that he was moved, but in a very different direction.

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 When I returned to Chicago to continue my academic work, I found myself lingering on the gap between our experiences, unsure of what to make of it. I turned first to ethics, trying to understand what had gone wrong. But as I did so I began to feel something I am not used to feeling in the course of doing ethics: despair. 

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As heirs to the Catholic intellectual traditions, we boast a long history in ethics. We engage compelling visions of the good and rely on well-developed faculties of critique to point to the places in the world where we fail to live up to them. And in some respects, that tradition was easy to apply to this encounter. I did not have to work hard to find something in Catholic ethics capable of holding Officer Pérez to account for his actions. But none of it worked. None of it addressed the despair I felt. Even the minimal ethical policies on the Border Patrol books, flawed as they might be, failed to keep Pérez from acting how he did. Which told me that I needed more than just a better ethical theory about what he should have done. What is good is our tradition then, when centuries of ethical reflection seem to speak into the void, when all our knowledge seems like so much straw? Confronted with the inefficacy of knowledge in the face of violence, the field began to feel like an exercise in despair – a critique without hope. 

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Why then, am I arguing for what seems like expanding the critical field? Adding yet one more aspect of the human person – our emotions – to the scope of critique seems like just another widening of the critical stance. I will argue however, that while the aim of this article is to nudge yet another aspect our human lives into the reach of critique, it is still a work in the service of hope. 

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My hope for hopefulness stems from the possibilities I see embedded in the kind of critique I am doing here. There is a long tradition of social critique that focuses on the emotional aspects of bordering, the ways our policies shape our affective selves and interpersonal relationships. But this is not what I am trying to do. I am not arguing only that emotions are worthy of critique, but that they are the appropriate subject of ethical critique. And this is where the hope comes in, because we do not practice ethics just to write books or publish articles. Rather, we engage ethically because we hope that things might be different, that we might yet become the people we yearn to be. Ethics is grounded in the hope that by gaining knowledge – by clarifying complex situations, discerning our obligations, mapping out new paths of action – we might live better than before. Ethics is a practice of hope. 

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That is, this critique carries the integration Fisher calls for, locating it within a broader hope for good even amidst evil. If this follows, it may mean that when ethical thought sparks despair it is because our critique has not yet gone deep enough, that it has failed to arrive at the level at which change is possible. My goal in arguing for the ethical judge-ability of emotions and their social formation – for the necessity of social-emotional critique, in other words – is to insist that even our emotions belong to the field of hope. 

 

Ethics and Principle – Why Pay Attention to Emotions?

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Multiple ethical frameworks can make the unacceptability of Officer Pérez’s actions clear. But simply applying basic normative frameworks to his actions misses something important. Both at Kino and in the desert, there was more at play than just principle. Indeed, my experience in the moment, with Elena in tears in front of me, had little do with “human rights,” or with “virtues,” or with “autonomy and dignity” as ethical concepts. Her story, her appearance, and her distress elicited an emotional response from me which was deeply motivating – a painful and tender mixture of sorrow, empathy, and anger. And Officer Pérez’s words suggest a similarly powerful response – a visceral repugnance and anger at her dirtiness, a contempt not just of her presence but of her very self, as if she were nothing more than a dirty, shaggy, mess worthy only of disgust. Emotions, in other words, were in the middle of the action right from the beginning. 

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Some rationalist approaches to ethics eschew emotions, worrying that they muddy the waters of motivation and make intention harder to judge. As a paradigmatic example, Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals is notable for its suspicion of even emotions that lead towards good actions. Kant sets out to unravel the concept of the good will – that which alone is “to be highly esteemed in itself and good apart from any further purpose.”    For Kant it is vital that, at the most basic level, the will act in line with duty if it is to be good. Problems emerge however, at the level of motivation. Kant can safely set aside anything that might lead a will to act contrary to duty. But determining the goodness of the will gets harder when actions seem to comply with duty. Kant is not willing to say that a will is good if it only fulfills its duty out of self-interest or another non-rational inclination. The problem is ultimately that the will can act “in conformity with duty, but not from duty.”    For Kant, the will can only be deemed good if it acts only from duty – rationally acknowledging obligation and acting in accordance with it. Mixed motivations are simply not enough to establish moral worth. 

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Of course, emotions are a clear source of mixed motivations. Take compassion as an example, an emotion that Kant, in a way, addresses himself. Although it is one’s duty “to be beneficent where one can,” he says, those who “relish the contentment of others” are not to be esteemed for their moral worth.    Kant identifies these feelings as an “inclination,” like the inclination to honor, as a sort of tendency that has motivational power within a person. If these inclinations lead to good that is fine (if a bit suspect), but inclinations are not to be praised or cultivated in themselves. For Kant, rational duty and emotional motivation must be kept separate. 

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From the perspectives of psychological research and recent philosophy of emotion, however, Kant’s understanding is overly simplistic and one-dimensional. Martha Nussbaum’s writings on emotions and their roles in moral and political life offer a more complex and useful account because they highlight something Kant misses: the cognitive content of emotions. In particular, she argues that emotions embody a sort of evaluative thought because all emotions involve “intentional thought or perception directed at an object, and some type of evaluative appraisal of that object made from the agent’s own viewpoint.”    That is, emotions make an evaluation of the value of the object “in terms of the agents scheme of goals and ends.”    Of course, the experience of emotion is almost always more salient than its cognitive process. Nussbaum highlights that they are “visceral and profoundly agitating,” often psychologically motivating, and yet also ephemeral. 

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This understanding of emotions helps us to understand part of their moral relevance because, in this framework, emotions are not simply inclinations to act but also involve evaluation, the appraisal of objects in terms of their relationship to the agent. What Nussbaum shows is that emotions involve a habit of judgment. 

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Further, for we human beings, the evaluative component of a given emotion is felt to be linked with its motivational aspects. Evaluation and motivation part of a package. This is important because motivation concerns the psychological conditions that facilitate action and, in so doing, help make ethical choices possible or impossible. Together with the judgements they make, the motivational power of emotions contours the field of action in a real and important way. The disgust Officer Pérez felt when he came upon Elena not only aided him evaluating the situation, it provided the motivation he needed to do the job of bordering in the violent way he saw fit.

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In this way Nussbaum’s theory of emotion helps nuance our understanding of them, but it nevertheless fails to defeat Kant’s argument that emotions have nothing to do with ethics. This is because Kant’s concern is emotions make it hard to judge true moral character precisely because they seem to be involuntary – because they exert effects on our actions before these actions have been directed by our wills. The problem with Kant lies more in his failure to consider that we might be able to judge inclination itself. Using Nussbaum’s understanding, we can consider emotions as an admixture of habits of perception, ethical reasonings, and motivational responses. That is, emotions embody an inclination both to perceive in a certain way, and to arouse motivations that encourage persons to respond in light of that perception. 

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Still, Kant’s worry is well placed. Because there is a spontaneous quality to emotion that can, in the moment, make them seem involuntary, and it is makes sense, given this involuntariness, that Kantian ethics seeks to evaluate only the will. The challenge we are facing in our consideration of Elena and Officer Pérez is that, because emotions reflect processes of perception, reason, and motivation, they throw into question the independence of the will. If the will relies on abilities that emotions can so easily sway, it is hard to say that we can judge it ethically at all. 

 

Virtuous Habits of Perception

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It is Aristotle who, in his work on the ethics of habits, can offer a way through this dilemma. This is in large part because Aristotle takes basic human agency, the power to act or not act, as the fundamental requirement for responsibility.    What this adds is an attention to how repeated actions shape our tendencies towards further action – how, in other words, repetition shapes our habits.

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As with emotions, in the moment our habits seem almost involuntary; they happen before the will has been engaged in that particular instant. But, for Aristotle, that doesn’t mean habits are not subject to judgement. Instead, Aristotle holds people accountable both for their habits and for the total character to which they add up. He argues that, in so far as it is within the agent’s power to act, it is also in their power to form habits.    It is because they are responsible for their actions that agents are responsible for the character and habits that develop from those actions.

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Importantly, for Aristotle this applies not only to our habits of actions but also to our habits of perception. And this means that he refuses to absolve those who pursue wrong ends because they appears to them as good. As he puts it in the Nicomachean Ethics, it is because “each man is somehow responsible for the state he is in [that] he will also be himself responsible for how things appear.”    Altogether, Aristotle insists on a broad-ranging responsibility for forming the self, a responsibility that ranges from perception to action and covers the motivations that lie in between.  

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It is this way of understanding of our responsibility for both our actions and our perceptions that opens up theoretical space for thinking about the moral responsibility we hold for our emotions. Aristotle, in other words, allows us to hold the individual accountable for their own emotions because he shows how both our perceptions and our motivations – the core components of emotion – can be shaped by repeated actions. 

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Shifting the focus from individual to society, Nussbaum makes a case for attending ethically not only to persons’ emotions but to the social world that forms our emotional repertoire. She points to the ways in which the cognitive content of emotions’ evaluations are “shaped by social norms and specific societal circumstances.”    Throughout Political Emotions she cites the ways that children are raised, public arts, and both religious and political ritual as contexts in which emotions are shaped by processes that involve decision and intention. In so doing Nussbaum makes it clear that not just we as individual persons but a society itself can be held to ethical account for the emotions it fosters in its members.

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Nussbaum and Aristotle show us that emotional motivation and evaluation are dialogically related with social and personal life. Like habits, emotions both shape actions and are shaped by them. Contra Kant, emotions are neither totally involuntary nor ethically neutral. Instead, they reflect the contributions of both individuals’ repeated actions and orientations and the social structures around them. Because they can be changed by willful processes, both personal and social, emotions are subject to ethical critique. 

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In short, it is reasonable to consider the disgust involved in Officer Pérez’s response to Elena and her daughter from an ethical perspective. It is reasonable to ask, in other words, whether his personal disgust is ethically wrong. But it also reasonable to ask about the social and contextual factors that shaped his emotions. Not only can Officer Pérez be held to account, so can the social, professional, and political contexts that formed him.

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In this line of thinking Martha Nussbaum’s work on compassion and disgust continues to serve as a helpful guide. Her project focuses on the political utility of certain emotions, exploring the ways that their cultivation across society can support the normative values that society claims to hold. Just as her work on disgust offers a helpful framework to begin investigating the evaluations and motivations at play in the desert, so can her exploration of compassion provide useful tools for understanding my own experience doing intake interviews. That is, in order to understand what happened in the desert, it helps to understand what happened in the shelter. 

 

Compassion

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My experience with Elena and her daughter began with their story. In our intake interview, she started with the violence and poverty that had led to their departure, continued by describing the danger of their journey and the hope that sustained them, and ended with their arrest and removal from the United States. Even catching only what details we needed for abuse documentation and asylum referrals, the story was beyond painful to hear. I continued to worry about them in the days that followed, checking up on their reporting process and keeping them in my prayers. 

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Notably, each of these details capture key parts of Nussbaum’s understanding of compassion a political emotion. First and foremost, she describes it as a “painful emotion directed at the serious suffering of another creature.”     Compassion rests, then, on an evaluation that appraises several key elements: the seriousness of the sufferer’s pain, their “nonfault,” and the thought of similar possibilities for the subject.     It is this last point that is central to our purposes here, because for Nussbaum compassion is a political emotion that explicitly places the sufferer within a subject’s “circle of concern” – those for whom we feel compassion are those who matter for our own essential goals, their suffering gets right in the way of our concept of a good life.     That is certainly what happened to me. 

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Elena’s well-being mattered to me; she was included in what Nussbaum calls my “eudaimonistic thought.” Part of this happened through my job – the social context at Kino encouraged me in my humanitarian response – but it also happened because Elena’s story touched on my core values, the religious and ethical commitments I had built up through years of prayer and time spent with those on the margins. These contexts certainly made my circle of concern more porous, but even so the narrative itself remains central.     Being at Kino was insufficient, in other words; I needed to hear Elena’s story, to hear it in her words; and to hear it with her accent. It was not only the context but Elena’s gift of her story that invited me into her life, drew my imagination into her particularities and her into my circle of concern. It was when she began to matter to me personally that her injury began to hurt me, too.

 

Projective Disgust

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Whereas compassion focuses on the suffering of others, disgust focuses directly on the body. Taking up Frans De Waal’s concept of anthropo-denial, Nussbaum describes disgust as an aversion to signs of our animal nature (disease, sweat, urine, feces, and the like) motivated by anxieties around helplessness, mortality and our efforts to protect ourselves against them.     Although this basic aversion can be healthy, moral problems arise when disgust begins to extend to other persons. And these problems deepen when members of dominant groups are socialized to see, even to feel, others as objects of disgust and to use these emotions to justify the exclusion and separation of the abject.

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Just as compassion entails placing others within our circle of concern, then, disgust involves keeping them out. This kind of emotion-laden boundary maintenance Nussbaum calls “segmenting,” and she links it with the demonstrated tendency of persons to maintain smaller circles of concern. Although compassion can push back against segmenting, when it is linked with anthropo-denial it can enable a projective disgust that serves as the psychological bases of humanity’s basic “tendencies to bad behavior.”     Of course this is not to say that this psychology tendency is the root of all social evils. It is to insist that it facilitates the kind of social segmentation that all oppressions, regardless of their roots, rely on.

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When Officer Pérez stopped Elena and her daughter in the desert he met her as an object of disgust. Focusing on her dirtiness, her disheveled appearance, her sweat and fatigue, he reduced her to the signs of her animality. He signaled his revulsion at her presence in his country – as if a pathogen had infected the social body in which he made his home. While the reductions to animality of projective disgust might be irrational, the feelings they produce are real; they motivate real harms. After all, it was his disgust that equipped him to violate both his agency’s policies and broad sets of ethical principles in his interactions with Elena. 

 

Moral Emotion and Social Critique

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Returning to Aristotle, we can see that if Officer Pérez can be held responsible for the “state he is in,” he himself can be held responsible for the profound damage that his emotions led him to inflict on Elena and her daughter.     But this reaction did not occur in a vacuum. Taking Aristotle and Nussbaum together reminds us that if we are to treat emotions ethically, we must treat them in their totality, analyzing them at the intersection of personal habit and the social forces that shaped them. That is, treating emotions ethically means treating them both individually and socially. It is not only Officer Pérez, but all of the forces that our society brings to bear on migrants and those who engage with them that ought to be critiqued.

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U.S. migration prevention and enforcement practices are full of tactics which both encourage disgust and inhibit compassion. First, the policies which funnel undocumented migrants attempting to cross the border through the Sonora Desert forces migrants into a situation that foregrounds the animal body. Travelling through the desert is sweaty and fatiguing, it leaves the body scratched and pierced, the hair matted, and there is no clean disposal of waste. It forces the animal body to the fore. Because disgust distances itself from that animal body, the desert itself can be understood as a process for producing disgustingness in migrants. This is coupled with the fact that undocumented migration is both legally and rhetorically linked with criminality and transgression. Links between criminal punishment and the infliction of shame provide a quick pathway for the corporeality foregrounded by the desert to flourish into the political emotion of disgust.     Finally, at a broad level, Peréz’s reactions track with rhetoric linking migrants with infection; a rhetoric that is sadly common both in the U.S. and around the world.     In short, migrants are made to be disgusting.

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Not only does the border system produce disgust, it forecloses pathways through which persons might feel compassion. The fact that illegal entry is considered a crime, for example, makes it much harder to see the non-fault in Elena’s experience. Additionally, Border Patrol is often empowered to expel asylum seekers like Elena without giving them the chance to share how their stories might qualify them for asylum. And as we saw above, this elimination of a space for narrative in turn eliminates a central conduit through which a marginalized person can be drawn into a larger circle of concern. Cutting off the chance to hear her story means refusing to be exposed the painful and poetic spirit that might foster the political emotion of compassion.

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All of this means, of course, that although they encounter migrants every day, Border Patrol officers are all too often shielded from a real encounter with the migrant other. The structures within which they do their jobs are structures that cut out narrative, curtail compassion, and produce disgust. As such, they make it very hard to feel well on the border.

 

Learning to Feel Well

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Ultimately, social-emotional approaches in ethics help us to see that the real work of conversion begins at the social level – at the place where the real challenges and real possibilities for expanding compassion and minimizing disgust lie. My argument is that, while individuals must accept responsibility for the ways their emotions shape their actions, we all bear a responsibility for the moral emotions our societies induce in us and in those we already love.  

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Claiming shared responsibility for our emotions must, however, amount to more than just fixing yet another part of our lives under the despair-inducing critical gaze. Intellectually, some of the despair that follows from the critical project is produced because we sense that, despite all of our clarity around what is wrong with society, we still do not know what to do about it. And yet ethics ought to have something to say about just this, what we ought to do. Even more than teaching what to shoot for, in other words, it ought to show us how to live. Here the value of social-emotional approaches to ethics is clear. Just as ethics must be attentive to the role of emotions in moral reasoning and action, it needs a critical approach to their formation. It needs to be able to theoretically examine the social and political forces that form, enable, and constrain moral emotions. If we want to act well, we need to understand what stops us from feeling well. It is for our society to take up those critical insights, shaping our institutions with an eye towards how they train our emotions. 

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Further, such a social-emotional approach to ethics is important both for the public and for the intellectual life of the Church. In a secular democracy, many of our public ethical positions on issues like migration can seem like ideologies that have nothing to do with the thick daily practices, common life, and intimate subjective work of being a Christian. That is, it can be hard to understand what going to Mass has to do with advocacy for just border policy because it is hard to see how our prayer, our participation in liturgy, and our practices of service shape our attention, our feeling, our motivations. But if, as I have argued here, emotions are socially formations with political effects, these linkages become much more transparent. And in this transparency we can see how it is that the Church has much more to offer on issues of public ethics than simply our positions. The ways our practices and institutions shape our social emotions – our compassion and our disgust – are critical aspects of our public ethics. 

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Intellectually, this means that work on practices that shape our habits of emotion are linked inextricably with ethics. Church scholars from liturgists to sociologists and anthropologists should be aware that their work has something to say for the ethical life of the Church, and that therefore, their work is bound up with the hope that ethics entails. And practically, in the border context, these insights mean that we as Catholics need to examine how our ethics look at the level of our emotions. After all, the Church is quite clear in its public position of welcome towards migrants and refugees. But do we feel this welcome? Do migrants? Although the Church takes consistent and laudable public action at the level of policy advocacy and through organizations like Kino and Catholic Charities, our work also necessarily includes this kind of attention to ongoing emotional formation. Our churches, schools, and other institutions must actually promote compassion and minimize disgust towards our sisters and brothers at the border or we risk leaving leave our own ethics hollow. Likewise, we must aim our advocacy not only at anti-migrant policies, but at the social conditions and practices which reduce opportunities for compassion and push us towards disgust. 

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As Catholic institutions, we engage persons in their totality, attending to our intellectual and emotional, perceptual and affective capacities. Social-emotional approaches in ethics can help uncover the import of such holistic engagement by showing that emotions are ethically relevant not only in how they influence perception and action, but in their very formation. Insisting on our responsibility for that formation is to insist that, even amidst all the social and political forces that induce us to feel disgust, even amidst in the rhetorical cacophony of “invaders” and “migrant caravans,” that we can yet live, and feel, the welcome we proclaim.

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I live and work with migrants and refugees in Lebanon now, far from the U.S.-Mexico border. And yet I still think about Elena and her daughter. I still worry about them and hope they made it a place they now call hope. I still pray that the people they met on the way were filled with compassion. And I am grateful to them. Not grateful because they lived through such a horrific experience – for the Cross is always a horror – but grateful that they trusted Kino, and thereby me, to hold their story. Holding their experience in light of our ethical tradition has helped me to learn something of the vital importance of emotions for ethics. I cannot help but be grateful for such teacher, teachers who have asked me to learn how to feel well. May we not disappoint the hope that ethics, and their trust, entails.