Like most people, I do not enjoy cleaning but see living in filth unacceptable. Some years ago, I complained about cleaning and was asked why I did not hire someone to do it for me. Being a philosopher, I thought it though and concluded that I would keep doing my own cleaning. To be honest, my main reason then was financial. But now that I have more income and less time left to live, I thought it worthwhile to reconsider my past decision. In general, it is wise to do this about life choices. After all, you don’t want to be stuck living yesterday tomorrow. To lead with the spoiler, I decided to keep doing my own cleaning. Being a philosopher, I naturally have needlessly complicated reasoning about this.
Some of my reasons are psychological and probably not particularly interesting to others. Most involve the fact that my mother would have made Aristotle proud: she made sure that I had an abundance of character-building opportunities and I (as per Aristotle’s theory of moral education) find it less irksome to do these chores. I am also quite a character. As a kid, of course, I found such tasks less tolerable—but that is what habituation is all about.
Some of these factors are also due to influence of my interpretation of the (alleged) American ideals of responsibility, egalitarianism, and a classless society: no person should be so full of himself to think they are too good to clean their own toilet. But psychological reasons are not philosophically interesting. So, I now turn to the ethics of cleaning one’s own toilet.
Going back to our good, dead friend Aristotle, an excellent reason why a person should do their own cleaning is to form proper habits. There is the good habit of keeping things clean, but also the deeper impact on a person’s character. While I am sure that not everyone has been affected in the same way, doing my own cleaning (and other such work) has had two main impacts on my character. The first, to put it bluntly, is that it is hard to be too full of yourself when you are scrubbing your toilet or toweling up some dog vomit. My detractors will imagine how arrogant I would be if I did not engage in regular ego-reducing activities.
To pre-empt a likely criticism, I do not think that cleaning is a “lowly” activity that beats down the ego because it is worthy only of disdain or contempt. Rather, I think that it is doing my own cleaning that helps me not see it as something worthy of contempt. It is usually not a pleasant activity, but it is both necessary and worthy of respect. As such, it is not that the cleaning helps me remember that I am not too good to clean, it is that such work should not be held in contempt. This helps keep the ego under some degree of control.
The second is that cleaning up my own messes (and those of various pets) has taught me to be more considerate of others. Knowing how much fun it is to clean up a mess, I am not inclined to make messes for others to deal with. I do not litter and I am respectful of public places. Unfortunately, there are people who are fine with creating awful messes. I have had to clean up a few of those myself. I have, for example, cleaned up discarded diapers left by trespassers beside the homeowners’ association pool. I had no issue with their using our pool on a hot Florida day, but I did take issue with the filth they left behind for someone else to clean.
I know there are people who do not learn such lessons from cleaning—but that is true for all lessons. You can lead the person to the mop, but you cannot make him learn from mopping up dog vomit.
In addition to the character-building value of such tasks, there is also the matter of moral responsibility. When I was an infant, I was not accountable for my actions—I lacked both the knowledge and control to be responsible for the messes I produced. However, once I had both knowledge and control, I became accountable. This accountability includes taking care of the messes I create—be it mud tracked in from a run or screwing up something at work. To not clean up my own messes would be morally irresponsible and should be condemned Despite being sensible, my view does face some reasonable objections. I will focus on moral arguments aimed at showing that it is morally acceptable for a competent adult to have others do their cleaning for them.
While I now live alone, I have lived with people, and I am familiar with the challenge of sharing chores. I am fine with sharing chores based on my responsibility argument. However, one can argue in favor of having one partner doing the cleaning. Consider, if you will, a situation in which one person makes much more money than her partner. Her time is thus more financially valuable than that of her partner, especially if the time she would otherwise spend cleaning is spent earning money. Since the partner’s time is literally worth less, it makes more economic sense for the partner to do the cleaning.
This does have considerable appeal and can be seen as analogous to the smart use of employee resources. For example, if the toilet overflows at a small law firm, it makes sense for the least valuable employee to deal with the toilet while the more valuable employees keep racking up those billable hours.
A counter to this, at least in the case of people who are in a relationship, is that the moral value of each partner’s time as a person is not a function of their work salary. While this is an ideal, a person should value their partner’s time on par with their own—or someone should re-consider that relationship. There is also the matter of respect—to regard a person as being worth less simply because they make less money is to fail to respect that person as a person. As such, chores should be divided fairly. This can include dividing the chores based on each person’s cleaning skills, preferences and level of mess creation. For example, if one person has a habit of creating muddy messes on the floor, then that should be their responsibility. But, to the degree that each person contributes to the mess, each should contribute to the cleaning. There can, of course, be some “exchange” of chores—but the responsibilities should be shared based on the principle of fairness.
As mentioned above, what caused me to initially reflect on this was being asked why I did not hire someone to clean for me. Obviously enough, hiring a person to do the cleaning is morally different from having one’s partner do the work. The easy and obvious moral justification for this is one of utility. If a person values avoiding cleaning more than what it would cost to hire someone to clean, then it would make sense to do so and would seem, in general, morally on par with hiring someone to perform a root canal or argue a legal case. This assumes that the person is not coerced and is paid a fair wage—if this is not the case, then other moral concerns arise.
This is a reasonable view. I do hire people to do work for me, such as replacing the tires on my truck. I have also hired people to take care of my pets when I am out of town, thus paying someone to take care of my responsibilities. However, in these cases I am hiring people to perform tasks that I cannot perform (or cannot perform as well). I am not paying someone to avoid something I am responsible for, namely my messes. As such, I think part of the cost of hiring someone else to clean up after me would include a moral cost: failing in my responsibility when I could fulfil my obligation and engaging in behavior that is not good for my character. I think that the lesson that you can make whatever messes you want if you have enough money to pay others to clean it up is the wrong sort of lesson.
A sensible reply to this is that any alleged moral harm done to the person doing the hiring is offset by the good done at creating a job for someone. After all, there are people who make their living cleaning up other people’s messes and if everyone had my view, these people would need to find new jobs. That is certainly an appealing argument. At some point, probably when I finally get sick of scrubbing toilets and mopping up pet puke, I might let it convince me. But until then, I will keep making my mother proud and build character by cleaning my own toilet.