"My place": Ethical differences between shelter, housing and home

Feminist philosopher Nel Noddings points out that answering the question "Where do you live?" can be accompanied by pride, contentment, ambivalence, apology or embarrassment. Underlying this range of reactions are often-overlooked ethical differences between shelter, housing and home.

To seek or offer shelter typically involves protection from harsh or dangerous forces, whether they are human (e.g., violence within intimate relationships) or climatic or environmental (e.g., the recent aluminum factory spill in Hungary). The goal is to help meet fundamental needs for physical or psychological safety. "Shelter" usually denotes rescue because it relates to urgent, unexpected situations. Since "rescuers" bear all or most of the costs, it has been acceptable if the amount of help is more minimal than maximal.

There isn't a legal duty for you to rescue me, someone you don't know. But do you have a moral duty? Obviously, those who shelter strangers think so. Shelter also tends to last only until the immediate danger passes or an alternative is arranged. In recent decades, however, publicly and philanthropically funded shelters have become larger and longer lasting because more and more people face barriers to sustainably meeting their needs for safety, food and warmth.

When a community wants to offer living spaces for long-term or permanent occupancy, "housing" is the commonly used word. Rather than just meeting basic needs, more activities of daily living happen under one roof. Housing units make it possible to sleep, eat, bathe, do laundry, store belongings and entertain friends. Being housed also provides a person with an address, which facilitates activities of communal membership, for example, voting. The shelter's traditional moral duty of rescue is replaced by housing's reciprocal moral and legal (usually contractual) responsibilities between landlord and paying resident. Reciprocity means that power is shared more equally, which in turn means that dependence is replaced by interdependence. And interdependence is part of our inescapable human condition.

This excerpt from Robert Frost's poem "The Death of the Hired Man" portrays how home means more than shelter or housing; it includes place as an ethical concept:

"Home," he mocked gently.

"Yes, what else but home?
It all depends on what you mean by home.
Of course he's nothing to us, any more
Than was the hound that came a stranger to us
Out of the woods, worn out upon the trail."

"Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in."

"I should have called it
Something you somehow haven't to deserve.

In their 1999 book The Ethics of Homelessness, Patricia Ann Murphy and David Schrader use this ethical concept of place. Although people and objects take up space, this is not the same as having a particularized space. Murphy describes place as "a space ... invested with human significance and understanding." If a person or object isn't in its place, they are missed or considered lost. When we create a place at our dinner table, we are expecting a particular person to join us. Designating a place for something or someone acknowledges having value.

Using one of Murphy's examples, recall the last time you walked up to a crowded elevator and the occupants reconfigured the space by standing more closely together. They created a place for you with them and to help serve your purpose. Feeling "out of place" is uncomfortable and we try to leave as soon as possible to go where we do belong.

Belonging isn't emphasized enough in our discussions about assisting people with mental health and addiction issues. Murphy worries that not having a place diminishes personhood because so much of our shared lives and conversations involve particular spaces, that is, places. Noddings is similarly concerned because home is "a place in which and from which one claims an identity."

Schrader emphasizes autonomy and privacy vis-à-vis home. In terms of autonomy, not having a home undermines development and exercise of our moral personality and civic personality. Homes and deep relationships typically go hand in hand, and home is a place where one influences who is permitted to enter, when, and what happens there. Having a place within a community carries mutual responsibilities: neighbourliness and participation in community-centred decisions. Yet membership also includes opportunities to withdraw from the communal sphere into the (relative) solitude and particularity of one's home. Privacy laws help guard this special space from others' unwanted, unilateral or excessive intervention.

Sheltering will always be needed because emergencies occur. Housing will always be needed because people need unified, more-than-minimal, long-term spaces for living. Having a place, rather than just a space, is not a solitary or independent activity. Instead, having a home is a shared activity. It involves the person, as well as other people who implicitly or explicitly acknowledge, honour and help preserve the meaning, value and possession of "my place."

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Barbara Russell, bioethicist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, answers ethics questions that arise in the mental health and addiction fields. She is connected with the University of Toronto's Joint Centre for Bioethics and heads the neuroethics interest group of the Canadian Bioethics Society. She is also a contributing editor to the Journal of Ethics in Mental Health.

Do you have an ethics question for Dr. Russell? Submit questions to be considered for this column to CrossCurrents editor Hema Zbogar at hema_zbogar@camh.net. Please omit personally identifiable health-related information in order to respect people's privacy and follow privacy legislation.