What you describe looks to me more like a desired outcome than a virtue.
Isn’t everything? Things are virtuous because they have a good outcome (however defined), not in and of themselves.
Strongly disagree!
So do you think things are/can be virtuous regardless of whether they have a good or bad outcome? Or, indeed, regardless of whether a good or bad outcome is intended?
I don’t see how that can possibly be true.
Interesting. I myself don't see how the first statement can possibly be false! You intend to fling yourself atop a grenade to save the lives of your comrades. Unfortunately your aim is a bit off and instead your flailing body accidentally flips it into an ammunition dump, blowing up and killing hundreds. Virtuous action, good intention, bad outcome.
The second is more debatable. How about - You have promised to place fresh flowers on your beloved's grave every week and you do so faithfully, come snow or rain, for the next fifty years until your death. Here there is in some sense no outcome beyond the fulfilment of the promise itself. Yet I would argue that it is a virtuous action.
What you describe looks to me more like a desired outcome than a virtue.
Isn’t everything? Things are virtuous because they have a good outcome (however defined), not in and of themselves.
Not according to classical thought. It is being virtuous, acting virtuously, that is itself the character of a person living a flourishing life.
As Dafyd put it earlier, “one can justify whether a trait is a virtue by saying how acting according to that virtue makes our life as a human being a good life for a human being”.
Aristotle said that the flourishing life is one of "virtuous activity in accordance with reason". Epicurus might have said that a flourishing life is a life of pleasure, but also that this coincides with a life of virtue. The Stoics believed moral virtue was in and of itself sufficient for flourishing. Though the classical understanding of virtue included quite a lot of things we probably wouldn't include, being more along the lines of "traits of excellence".
@pease : And that's what's probably throwing me a bit. Not to derail, and I've got background noise to deal with...
I usually think of good and bad as derived consequentially. I don't trust ethics based on a priori thinking. "Follow these rules and you too can be a good person!!!™" And I feel like that model just sets a lot of people up for failure, certainly in the world I've always lived in. People confuse "Doing the right thing" with "acting according to The Book." The Book could be The Bible, The Quran, The Analects of Confucius, whathaveyou. But there's a ruleset and if you follow it, voila! You're a good person!
The way you say "flourish" jumps out at me and I'm not targeting you with it, but it's a way of thinking that I think is popular among some philosophers and Aristotle could be one of them. Pardon me if you're a fan of his. The whole thing smells like prosperity gospel. @Gwai reminds me that I would have more in common with Epicurus. I guess I got someone to read now in my copious spare time.
As my life has demonstrated to me on lots of ways, accidents happen. Things go wrong. People can do all the right things and get no reward whatsoever. Flourishing is not necessarily the mark of a good life. Read Proverbs. Vanity, vanity, chasing the wind!
And I think this is might be what I'm privately digging at - perhaps tangentially to this thread - by seeing Aristotle's hypocrisy. He sees a virtuous system and also allows for structural evils that seem necessary to the defense of the system that creates these "virtuous people," who will of course be men and for the love of mercy do not get me started on what Aristotle thought of the "weaker sex." It was repugnant.
I might conjecture that there's some deep link between excessively "internal" moral systems and hypocrisy, but that might be a reach. Basically, that's a hypothesis that might deserve it's own thread.
One hopes this does not require further explanation.
The way you say "flourish" jumps out at me and I'm not targeting you with it, but it's a way of thinking that I think is popular among some philosophers and Aristotle could be one of them. Pardon me if you're a fan of his. The whole thing smells like prosperity gospel. @Gwai reminds me that I would have more in common with Epicurus.
Epicurus or Epictetus? The hedonist or the stoic? Epicurus is certainly an adherent of the view that the good life is flourishing; the stoics too, though what they see as flourishing isn't what most of us would.
I can say what flourishing in virtue ethics means by contrasting it with the prosperity gospel. In the prosperity gospel, you give money to charity (or the church) and God rewards you with material possessions. But your enjoyment of material possessions isn't enhanced by having given them away previously - the connection is merely instrumental. If you could get the material possessions without giving to charity you'd enjoy the material possessions just as much. Indeed, a habit of giving away material possessions might lead one to regard them as less important.
In a marriage, for the marriage to flourish one has to exhibit kindness, empathy, and respect. But exhibiting those qualities doesn't just lead instrumentally to a flourishing marriage - they are part of the flourishing: the marriage is more important to you because those qualities are part of it. It is in that sense that virtues are qualities that lead to a flourishing life, not instrumentally but intrinsically.
Now empathy and respect aren't guarantees of a flourishing marriage. Fortune plays a part. But they're part of it.
And I think this is might be what I'm privately digging at - perhaps tangentially to this thread - by seeing Aristotle's hypocrisy.
I think it's only fair to call Aristotle's stance hypocrisy if he knew that what he was saying was wrong or at odds with his stance on virtue. As Aristotle doesn't give kindness or compassion or empathy as examples of virtues, I don't think it's hypocrisy. It's some sort of ethical failing, and certainly some sort of intellectual failing, but it's not hypocrisy.
Modern virtue ethics adapts Aristotle on the structure of virtue, but not on the content of virtue.
I have been reflecting on the idea of belonging and I was reading that post thinking about how being a Stoic or a Hedonist would appear to require a level of commitment to the lifestyle and the ethical/moral framework that few would take on today.
It's also my wedding anniversary today so I'm reflecting on what it means to be married. To belong to someone else.
In that frame, flourishing is an interesting word. It raises the question of comparison, in the sense of the person I would be if I had not been married all these years.
I usually think of good and bad as derived consequentially. I don't trust ethics based on a priori thinking…
The way you say "flourish" jumps out at me and I'm not targeting you with it, but it's a way of thinking that I think is popular among some philosophers and Aristotle could be one of them. Pardon me if you're a fan of his. The whole thing smells like prosperity gospel. @Gwai reminds me that I would have more in common with Epicurus. I guess I got someone to read now in my copious spare time.
As my life has demonstrated to me on lots of ways, accidents happen. Things go wrong. People can do all the right things and get no reward whatsoever. Flourishing is not necessarily the mark of a good life.
I'm actually more familiar with contemporary usage of the term "flourishing" than classical Greek philosophy's use of the term. "Flourishing" these days is the concern of a much wider range of disciplines. For example, from the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard, being "the good life" is pretty much the contemporary meaning:
flourishing - noun: a state in which all aspects of a person's life are good
…
Founded in 2016, the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science studies and promotes human flourishing, and develops systematic approaches to the synthesis of knowledge across disciplines.
Many topics that are fundamental to human well-being such as happiness itself, or virtue, religious community, meaning, and purpose have traditionally been viewed as principally falling within the purview of the humanities, often of philosophy or theology. However, a robust empirical research literature on these topics has now developed from sociology, political science, economics, education, psychology, medicine, public health, and other empirical sciences.…
It occurs to me that you might be using the term "good" in a distinct sense. As someone who takes a consequentialist view, what principles do you hold to for determining what is good or bad?
@Dafyd : @Gwai (happens to be my spouse, speaking of marriage) is telling me that Epicurus' concern was balance, and admits that this is second hand learning from undergrad. If you're more read on the guy, I'm intrigued. Their other argument is that hedonism in the classical sense (somewhat parallel what @pease says about "flourishing" is not the same as the modern. It's less "go make yourself as happy as possible" as "find a way to be content - flourish? - in a capricious world."
I was just playing on the sense that a good life is not necessarily tied to good ethical behavior. Sometimes doing the right thing leads directly to suffering, which I think is one of the big theses of the gospel. There is no connection between "be a good person" and "experience reward." I'm less knowledgeable on this, I think, than either of you in terms of what the old guys thought, but I can see how that connects to the "enjoy your life while you can" sense of hedonism.
On the other hand, there might be intrinsic joy in being ethical apart from external consequences, either divine favor or social advancement. And maybe that's virtue? It is virtuous to "do the right thing" because "it is the right thing to do" expecting neither reward nor punishment from God nor society.
@pease : Yeah, that's a big one, though...if you'll pardon a riposte, without experiential data, how can you see what's good using principles? I think might've picked up from Bonhoeffer's Ethics a deep distrust of principles. It's just people trying to build systems...ha! And we find ourselves circling back to the same argument. Also might be why I'm teasing Aristotle.
I think the basic good versus bad isn't rule sets or logic. It's empathy. The Good Samaritan isn't an effective parable because it's applying a logical argument. The basis of the good life is compassion, not logic. You can logically work to figure out a more compassionate action as you rise in political responsibility, but I think - even logically - that the basis for ethics and morality isn't pure logic or principle.
Epicurus thought that the point of life was pleasure, but he also thought that immoderate pleasures were outweighed by their consequences. So avoid alcohol because it's not worth the hangover, and so on.
One doesn't think that being a good person guarantees a happy life. But one thinks there must be some connection. Would you or do you teach your children to be good people? If you think that being a good person makes your children less likely to have happy lives why would you do that?
That doesn't mean one thinks one's children to value material success. It may mean that one thinks they'll have happier lives if they don't value material success. Roughly one wants to believe a good or happy life is one in which one values the things like friendship, love, and the kinds of achievement that being good makes one more likely to have.
I must have been an unknowing follower of Epicurus because I taught my children to think about the consequences of their actions and to take responsibility for them. If you make a mess, quickly take responsibility for it and start cleaning it up.
My daughter is a much better person than I am because she took responsibility for her own moral development and as a result put herself into situations where she developed her emotional intelligence.
I don't think I taught her that, she taught herself.
pease : Yeah, that's a big one, though...if you'll pardon a riposte, without experiential data, how can you see what's good using principles? I think might've picked up from Bonhoeffer's Ethics a deep distrust of principles. It's just people trying to build systems...ha! And we find ourselves circling back to the same argument. Also might be why I'm teasing Aristotle.
I think the basic good versus bad isn't rule sets or logic. It's empathy. The Good Samaritan isn't an effective parable because it's applying a logical argument. The basis of the good life is compassion, not logic. You can logically work to figure out a more compassionate action as you rise in political responsibility, but I think - even logically - that the basis for ethics and morality isn't pure logic or principle.
Thanks Bullfrog. I'm not familiar with Bonhoeffer's work, so can't really comment on that aspect of what you say about experiential data and principles.
What you thereafter describe sounds like a rather subjective ethical theory, and one that depends to a significant extent on an individual's ability to empathise. As I recall, notably just here on these forums, this isn't an ability that everyone shares to anything like the same extent. Some people here empathise barely at all. I'm curious by what you say about the basis of the good life being compassion *not* logic. I'd be more on board if it were based on compassion *and* reason. (Human beings are reasoning social animals, after all.)
Bonhoeffer had a lot to say, but I think he distrusted human reason because people are always going to skew to themselves. And he was dealing with Nazis and saw a lot of principles get subverted and put to terrible use. He believed in a vocational ethos, I think. Only God's call can resolve a moral dilemma, and you have to discern where God is calling. Reason has a role in that, but I think that if you're not careful, "principles" and "logic" can turn into tools for your own self-justification.
I'm being sloppy, but that's a rough sense of my recollection of why he didn't trust principles.
Along those lines, darkly, I think I've known more people who reason selfishly than people who are unreasonably compassionate. That might be why, on the margins, I'll tilt more toward compassion than reason as a basis for good living. I also trust a posteriori evidence more than a priori logic. It's too easy to rationalize the self into doing what the self wants to do.
Ironically, one might see some logic in this thinking.
I think, somewhat in a Buddhist or Stoic vein, that the pursuit of happiness can lead to its own kind of misery. We're unhappy because we want things that we can't get. Just look at capitalism. Look at America. It's a paradox I've struggled with my whole life, living in this culture. To thrive normally in this country, as the world reckons it, is to be a competitive hedonist living for a certain narrowly defined pleasure. What if I'm happier not doing that? It's very hard to be happy.
In that sense, I do think I find some common cause with Epicurus, even though in the modern sense of the word I'm pretty stoic. It seems like it's very hard to achieve real happiness of any sort in this godforsaken place without becoming a certain amount obsessed with materialism.
I also think that teaching kids to be good can turn into a straitjacket if you're not careful. I think that in pedagogy I try to teach by example and leave them leeway to learn by experience instead of instructing them on how to do things. There are pros and cons to that, of course. And...*gestures vaguely at the USA these days.* There's a lot going on.
Also, if being a good person makes a person less happy, sometimes that's worth the cost. I've seen photos of people who were very happy during the 1930s in Germany. I don't know if I'd want to be a happy person during that particular period of history. I don't know if I think happiness - in a certain sense - is my cardinal virtue. Of course, then you get the paradox that I'm happier not being entirely happy, because I know that means I'm living in reality.
Hannah Arendt has quite a good description of the consumerist society. She says the twin problems are that people feel unhappy and they are made to feel like they ought to feel happy.
In her picture of the 'social realm' people are essentially consumers because that is the corollary of being a labourer, and when they're not doing the job, leisure is then filled with other things that don't matter. You have a whole society of people who think that the only thing that matters is "making a living" and "being productive".
There is no time for actual work. The stuff of doing the thing for the sake of doing the thing. The stuff that has no interest in being comfortable or even happy.
So in short people have meaningless lives that make them unhappy and also are constantly told that they should want to be happy.
People often use the ten commandments as prescriptive demands. Do this and you will flourish or be saved, whatever. Note this way they seem individualistic.
I would argue they are more descriptive of what a godly community should be. They are communal in nature. A flourishing community would naturally act in these ways.
Bonhoeffer had a lot to say, but I think he distrusted human reason because people are always going to skew to themselves. … Only God's call can resolve a moral dilemma, and you have to discern where God is calling. Reason has a role in that, but I think that if you're not careful, "principles" and "logic" can turn into tools for your own self-justification.
…
Ironically, one might see some logic in this thinking.
Giving what I take to be a reasoned argument for distrusting human reason sounds to me like a paradox.
If faith in God is the thing that guides human reasoning, what do people without faith in God do - is that where empathy comes in?
I'm getting the impression that this is ultimately an ethical position that you can't reason about - you have to have faith in it.
Along those lines, darkly, I think I've known more people who reason selfishly than people who are unreasonably compassionate. That might be why, on the margins, I'll tilt more toward compassion than reason as a basis for good living.
If you're going to go down this route, it opens up the question about testing this premise in some empirical fashion.
@pease : At some point I'm going to pull the old Jack Sparrow defense and admit...
"Christian."
I am one. Born and raised. I'm not generally the type to throw it in anyone's face but if you cut into me enough - figuratively speaking - you'll probably hit Christ somewhere in the bedrock.
And for that reason I'm not going to pretend I can tell an atheist how to do ethics, but I also am not so arrogant or stupid as to pretend that atheists aren't capable of doing these things. The ones I've talked to usually say quite reasonable things like "You know, we also are capable of things like empathy. Is it that hard to understand?" And that includes a friend who's a surgeon in an ER who has probably saved more people's lives than I have.
Seriously, I usually find myself baffled by people who think atheists are incapable of being ethical. They do it about the same way anyone else does, messily but with general competence. You don't need to have a perfectly worked out systematic morality to be a decent human being. You just have to care enough, far as I can tell.
Testing the ratio of compassion versus reason in individuals, and how this affects behavior? That is probably doable. Sounds like a job for an undergraduate at a university studying psychology, if they can get the funding together.
Having given your last few posts more thought, plus a bit of reading around Bonhoeffer, some of this starts to ring a bell. It's likely I did come across some version of his thoughts on ethics at some point. (And probably The Cost of Discipleship.)
I don't think I'm alone in seeing the Bonhoeffer's ethics as resembling virtue ethics. Do what a virtuous man would do, where that man is Jesus.
Similarly, a virtuous person is a person who does what is virtuous - at the point of acting, they're not *thinking* about doing what is virtuous, they do it. There's an immediacy, which I understand is also an aspect of Bonhoeffer's ethics.
I can't see how consequentialism comes into Bonhoeffer's ethics. Does this have something to do with the regime he was living under?
However, I would say that empathy is neither specifically characteristic of Christians nor of atheists. There are people, both Christians and atheists, who are capable of empathy, and people, both Christians and atheists, who are not. Thus, to me, it makes sense to take empathy into account of your approach to ethical living *if* you are someone who empathises, but otherwise just to remember that it's one of those aspects of being human that a lot of people make assumptions about.
One difference between me and a religious person is that they often seems to think that the solution to a moral dilemma is to go deeper into the religion. Whereas I don't really see any depth there.
I do see advanced thinking and moral codes and reasoning. I have nothing against that.
But it does not seem to me to be obvious that there is an objective point of coalescence there. Which is particularly stark when you are a German Pastor about to be executed by the Nazis. Both of whom would appear to have very different frameworks of moral behaviour they say were derived from Christianity.
One might accurately say that the one is obviously very different to the other, but it seems to me that it is a very different thing to say that one will get the "good" answer only by going deeper into the religion. History suggests that's not accurate.
I don't think I'm alone in seeing the Bonhoeffer's ethics as resembling virtue ethics. Do what a virtuous man would do, where that man is Jesus.
Bullfrog, it's just occurred to me that this could be why you're so bothered about Aristotle's character. I'd be very surprised if any virtue ethicist held Aristotle up as the paragon of virtue.
Having given your last few posts more thought, plus a bit of reading around Bonhoeffer, some of this starts to ring a bell. It's likely I did come across some version of his thoughts on ethics at some point. (And probably The Cost of Discipleship.)
I don't think I'm alone in seeing the Bonhoeffer's ethics as resembling virtue ethics. Do what a virtuous man would do, where that man is Jesus.
Similarly, a virtuous person is a person who does what is virtuous - at the point of acting, they're not *thinking* about doing what is virtuous, they do it. There's an immediacy, which I understand is also an aspect of Bonhoeffer's ethics.
I can't see how consequentialism comes into Bonhoeffer's ethics. Does this have something to do with the regime he was living under?
However, I would say that empathy is neither specifically characteristic of Christians nor of atheists. There are people, both Christians and atheists, who are capable of empathy, and people, both Christians and atheists, who are not. Thus, to me, it makes sense to take empathy into account of your approach to ethical living *if* you are someone who empathises, but otherwise just to remember that it's one of those aspects of being human that a lot of people make assumptions about.
Is lack of or impaired empathy actually part of normal human psychology? I thought that was a symptom of of psychopathy?
One difference between me and a religious person is that they often seems to think that the solution to a moral dilemma is to go deeper into the religion. Whereas I don't really see any depth there.
I do see advanced thinking and moral codes and reasoning. I have nothing against that.
But it does not seem to me to be obvious that there is an objective point of coalescence there. Which is particularly stark when you are a German Pastor about to be executed by the Nazis. Both of whom would appear to have very different frameworks of moral behaviour they say were derived from Christianity.
One might accurately say that the one is obviously very different to the other, but it seems to me that it is a very different thing to say that one will get the "good" answer only by going deeper into the religion. History suggests that's not accurate.
My guess is that one of the things that Bonhoeffer was doing (or trying to do) was showing that Christianity doesn't just provide a morality or a moral code, it can also provide an ethical theory (even if it might not be described in those terms). Furthermore, he does so by pointing directly at Jesus - it is a Christ-centred ethics.
I regard the virtue of Jesus being a very different prospect from the morality of the visible Church. In that, I think it's possible to see the stark distinction that you describe.
PS Even a small amount of reading suggests how the meltdown of the German Church influenced Bonhoeffer.
Yes and no. Can’t cite a research study at the moment, but I will see if I can look one out. There will be outliers in both directions - so the groups pease describes will exist. Most people will be closer to the middle though.
There are people, both Christians and atheists, who are capable of empathy, and people, both Christians and atheists, who are not
would not be correct?
I was addressing what I saw as a contrast in the way that Bullfrog was ascribing the trait of empathy to Christians and non-Christians. I don't think it's a binary. I think it's a trait that at one end of the range as good as disappears (the outliers that Doublethink mentions), which can be the case with quite a lot of traits.
Thinking of a trait as being something that the majority of people have isn't usually very helpful if you happen to be one of the few people who don't have it. I'm reminded of the thread discussing belonging.
I was addressing what I saw as a contrast in the way that Bullfrog was ascribing the trait of empathy to Christians and non-Christians. I don't think it's a binary. I think it's a trait that at one end of the range as good as disappears (the outliers that Doublethink mentions), which can be the case with quite a lot of traits.
Thinking of a trait as being something that the majority of people have isn't usually very helpful if you happen to be one of the few people who don't have it. I'm reminded of the thread discussing belonging.
Slow down a second. I think you're putting a binary down where what I have isn't a binary, it's more like a pie that's sliced so many times that it doesn't exist.
Are you familiar with post modernism? I'm very post modern in my approach to people, practically existentialist. I've been trained, practically whipped with clue bats every time I've spoken about someone else's experience to the point where I get very wary of telling people what someone in any social category beyond me thinks.
That's why I often bring up friends a la "So, I know an atheist and this is what they say." That's as far as I feel safe going. I have atheist friends who I think are comfortable being held up as tokens, as it were, for the common sense argument that of course atheists are capable of common sense moral behavior. The basic claim I make is, "You don't need God for a functioning conscience." That's easy.
Everyone empathizes differently because everyone is different. I'm just a little more careful dealing with non-Christians because it's not my existential turf. Telling other people how they think and feel are a kind of "fighin' words" in my experience. And that is a very hard-earned lesson for me.
If you think I'm trying to say that Christians and non-Christians empathize differently because they're Christians and non-Christians, I think you're misunderstanding me and that's going to be make this conversation frustrating for me. I'm glad I had the chance to clear this one up before it got worse.
I was addressing what I saw as a contrast in the way that Bullfrog was ascribing the trait of empathy to Christians and non-Christians. I don't think it's a binary. I think it's a trait that at one end of the range as good as disappears (the outliers that Doublethink mentions), which can be the case with quite a lot of traits.
Thinking of a trait as being something that the majority of people have isn't usually very helpful if you happen to be one of the few people who don't have it. I'm reminded of the thread discussing belonging.
Slow down a second. I think you're putting a binary down where what I have isn't a binary, it's more like a pie that's sliced so many times that it doesn't exist.
So what's the binary this time?
Are you familiar with post modernism? I'm very post modern in my approach to people, practically existentialist. I've been trained, practically whipped with clue bats every time I've spoken about someone else's experience to the point where I get very wary of telling people what someone in any social category beyond me thinks.
Referring to post-modernism and existentialism at the same time is just confusing. I'm sure you're trying to make a point here, but I don't understand what it is.
That's why I often bring up friends a la "So, I know an atheist and this is what they say." That's as far as I feel safe going. I have atheist friends who I think are comfortable being held up as tokens, as it were, for the common sense argument that of course atheists are capable of common sense moral behavior. The basic claim I make is, "You don't need God for a functioning conscience." That's easy.
Why do you think you need to make this claim at all? Whose question is it that you're addressing?
Everyone empathizes differently because everyone is different. I'm just a little more careful dealing with non-Christians because it's not my existential turf. Telling other people how they think and feel are a kind of "fighin' words" in my experience. And that is a very hard-earned lesson for me.
Hmm. If it helps you, please feel free to deal with me as either a Christian or a non-Christian (or both at the same time).
If you think I'm trying to say that Christians and non-Christians empathize differently because they're Christians and non-Christians, I think you're misunderstanding me and that's going to be make this conversation frustrating for me. I'm glad I had the chance to clear this one up before it got worse.
Please can you avoid claiming to have cleared something up for someone else until *after* you have confirmation. As it stands, this comes across along the lines of the sarcastic use of "sorted that for you".
That aside, I'm still trying to work out what you meant by the following:
I think the basic good versus bad isn't rule sets or logic. It's empathy. The Good Samaritan isn't an effective parable because it's applying a logical argument.
What you thereafter describe sounds like a rather subjective ethical theory, and one that depends to a significant extent on an individual's ability to empathise. As I recall, notably just here on these forums, this isn't an ability that everyone shares to anything like the same extent. Some people here empathise barely at all.
This is the thing I keep hoping you're going to clear up. Saying things like “everyone empathizes differently because everyone is different” is heading in the direction of being even less clear, because if everyone empathises differently, all the distinctions between good and bad are subjective and arbitrary.
The only binary for me is Bullfrog vs Not-Bullfrog; everything else is varying degrees of bullshit, including my religious beliefs.*
And if you really understand postmodernity and existentialism, you'll understand that joke, so I won't need to explain it to you again.
And I'm not sure I can answer what are for me very visceral questions about the relationships between bodies in an abstract fashion. Suffering is the universal human experience and the management of suffering is the basis for all ethical calculations, from which we can derive morality. There are sliders that we can place at more or less arbitrary places for "this is the amount of pain we must tolerate," but there will forever be pain and it will forever require management.
And maybe that's why I simply cannot and therefore will not satisfy you. If a person truly lacks empathy, akin to a robot or an AI or a computer model, I don't think they can understand that. All they can do is imitate it. Is that what you're aiming at, and trying to get out of me? You want ethics or morals without empathy? No can do, as I see it.
Feel free to disagree, but I'd rather not be asked again to rehash what I've already typed.
* Yes, that's a subtle joke I made up on the fly. Frog, shit, haha.
Thanks Bullfrog - you are welcome to respond to as much or as little of my posting as you see fit.
The universality of human suffering and the management of suffering being the basis of ethical calculations is something that I understand and that makes sense to me.
A person who lacks empathy is nothing like a robot or an AI / computer model. A person who lacks empathy is still a person who suffers, and who is capable of understanding the suffering of others.
What you describe looks to me more like a desired outcome than a virtue.
Isn’t everything? Things are virtuous because they have a good outcome (however defined), not in and of themselves.
Strongly disagree!
So do you think things are/can be virtuous regardless of whether they have a good or bad outcome? Or, indeed, regardless of whether a good or bad outcome is intended?
I don’t see how that can possibly be true.
Interesting. I myself don't see how the first statement can possibly be false! You intend to fling yourself atop a grenade to save the lives of your comrades. Unfortunately your aim is a bit off and instead your flailing body accidentally flips it into an ammunition dump, blowing up and killing hundreds. Virtuous action, good intention, bad outcome.
The action of flinging yourself on top of a grenade is only virtuous if you’re doing it to save the lives of your comrades - that is, because of the intended outcome (I’ll grant that it can still be a virtuous action even if it fails to achieve the desired outcome). But if you’re the only person within the blast radius then flinging yourself on top of a grenade is not a virtuous action. More like stupid. The only action that might be considered virtuous in such a circumstance would be to try to save the only life that is at risk - your own - by flinging yourself away from the grenade.
It can be seen, therefore, that the action of flinging yourself on top of a grenade has no inherent virtue in and of itself (because if it did then it would be the virtuous thing to do even if nobody else was in danger). It is the attempt to save others - the desired outcome - that makes it virtuous.
As I said, I think the same is true for any action. Virtue is derived from the desired outcome of an action, not an inherent property of the action itself.
The second is more debatable. How about - You have promised to place fresh flowers on your beloved's grave every week and you do so faithfully, come snow or rain, for the next fifty years until your death. Here there is in some sense no outcome beyond the fulfilment of the promise itself. Yet I would argue that it is a virtuous action.
Fulfilling the promise is a desired outcome, albeit one that affects nobody other than the one doing it. This could take us into a whole new discussion about whether virtuous acts must perforce be good for others rather than only oneself or not, but as it doesn’t harm anyone else either I’d say it’s at worst virtue-neutral.
I’m not kidding - I have an EQ score of 8 out of 80, repeated (give or take one or two marks) over several tests over several years. Basically put, I am all but incapable of empathizing with others.
Fulfilling the promise is a desired outcome, albeit one that affects nobody other than the one doing it. This could take us into a whole new discussion about whether virtuous acts must perforce be good for others rather than only oneself or not, but as it doesn’t harm anyone else either I’d say it’s at worst virtue-neutral.
I think now you are defining "outcome" so widely as to make it a useless term.
OK let us try another scenario.
Person A rescues a drowning child from a canal. A is motivated by a desire for the welfare of the child and its family and would have sacrified their own life to rescue the child's if necessary.
Person B rescues a drowning child from a canal. B is motivated by a desire for glory and reputation for heroism which B hopes will advance B's standing in the community. B is pleased to have rescued the child but would not have put themselves at serious risk to do so.
Person C rescues a drowning child from a canal. C is motivated by a desire to deceive neighbours into believing in C's good will so that C can in future commit crimes more easily. C would have preferred not to rescue the child and feels regret at its survival, but finds this a convenient way of achieving their aims.
Action A is more virtuous than action B. Action C is not virtuous at all. Agree/disagree?
Umm, I did have a high school friend who gave his life up in Vietnam for others. He was attached to a medical unit which was about to be overrun by Viet Cong. He ended up holding his ground against an attack wave while the rest of the unit withdrew from the field.
None of these makes a difference to the child or the child's family.
Agreed. Which is why it raises the question about virtue - if outcome is the only measure, the actions are equally virtuous. Most people however would instinctively feel A was more virtuous than B was more virtuous than C.
I seem to recall someone something similar about making a show of one's religious virtues.
Fulfilling the promise is a desired outcome, albeit one that affects nobody other than the one doing it. This could take us into a whole new discussion about whether virtuous acts must perforce be good for others rather than only oneself or not, but as it doesn’t harm anyone else either I’d say it’s at worst virtue-neutral.
I think now you are defining "outcome" so widely as to make it a useless term.
OK let us try another scenario.
Person A rescues a drowning child from a canal. A is motivated by a desire for the welfare of the child and its family and would have sacrified their own life to rescue the child's if necessary.
Person B rescues a drowning child from a canal. B is motivated by a desire for glory and reputation for heroism which B hopes will advance B's standing in the community. B is pleased to have rescued the child but would not have put themselves at serious risk to do so.
Person C rescues a drowning child from a canal. C is motivated by a desire to deceive neighbours into believing in C's good will so that C can in future commit crimes more easily. C would have preferred not to rescue the child and feels regret at its survival, but finds this a convenient way of achieving their aims.
Action A is more virtuous than action B. Action C is not virtuous at all. Agree/disagree?
Agree. Which still means the action itself is not inherently virtuous, but that its virtue is determined by the desired outcome.
Thanks Bullfrog - you are welcome to respond to as much or as little of my posting as you see fit.
The universality of human suffering and the management of suffering being the basis of ethical calculations is something that I understand and that makes sense to me.
A person who lacks empathy is nothing like a robot or an AI / computer model. A person who lacks empathy is still a person who suffers, and who is capable of understanding the suffering of others.
To the first, appreciated. Sometimes your response leaves me feeling interrogated and I have to pick how many queries and corrections I feel like responding to. That one left me a bit overwhelmed. Admittedly, my thoughts run in packs that are sometimes hard to discipline. Thanks for the clarification.
Glad we agree on the second, that might be the ground of it. Ha! Solved!
I think empathy is by definition the ability to understand the suffering of others. So we're at semantics now. My guess is you mean "understand" in a cognitive sense where I tend to think "understand" has an emotive side that falls under the range of "empathy," and at that point I think we're quibbling into the realm of tedium.
As I said earlier the standard formula for a virtuous action is the right actions for the right reason in the right manner. The right reason may be a desired outcome - or not depending on whether you think there are reasons that aren't outcomes.
The right manner of I remember correctly includes the appropriate degree of emotions: so in the case of courage you act neither oblivious to the danger not barely coping with panic; in the case of gift giving you give looking forward to the recipient being happy rather than grudgingly.
Aristotle has four types of agent: the purely vicious who doesn't care about the right thing to do or is culpably mistaken; the akratic, who knows what the right thing is but gives in to temptation; the enkratic who wants to do the wrong thing but does the right thing because it's right; and the virtuous who wants to do the right thing. While modern moral thinking tends to think it's more meritorious to be tempted and resist, classical ethics, possibly with the exception of Plato, thinks that it's better to not finding the temptation tempting in the first place.
I feel like Augustine might have a role in that shift. I recall a seminary prof saying his self-reflections on his own inner struggle were revolutionary at the time. Of course, wasn't his thesis that in the end you'll lose without God's grace? And yet we still revere the struggle...
I’m not kidding - I have an EQ score of 8 out of 80, repeated (give or take one or two marks) over several tests over several years. Basically put, I am all but incapable of empathizing with others.
Hi, Marvin. This has stayed in the back of my mind from previous discussions.
To the first, appreciated. Sometimes your response leaves me feeling interrogated and I have to pick how many queries and corrections I feel like responding to. That one left me a bit overwhelmed. Admittedly, my thoughts run in packs that are sometimes hard to discipline. Thanks for the clarification.
Thanks Bullfrog, and apologies - my mind runs on finding answers to questions, which can get intense.
I think empathy is by definition the ability to understand the suffering of others.
It's commonly described as "feeling as another feels", whatever the emotion. I think it also includes the ability to understand another's emotions. I believe that limiting it to suffering would be unusual.
The Empathy Quotient that Marvin linked to is fairly specific:
According to the authors of the measure, empathy is a combination of the ability to feel an appropriate emotion in response to another's emotion and the ability to understand anothers' emotion (this is associated with the theory of mind).
…
EQ tests the empathizing–systemizing theory, a theory that places individuals in different brain-type categories based on their tendencies toward empathy and system creation, and that was intended to determine clinically the role of lack of empathy in psychopathology, and in particular to screen for autism spectrum disorder.
So we're at semantics now. My guess is you mean "understand" in a cognitive sense where I tend to think "understand" has an emotive side that falls under the range of "empathy," and at that point I think we're quibbling into the realm of tedium.
It feels more significant than quibbling to me - I would say empathy is about both feeling and understanding the emotions of another person.
To my mind, suffering isn't an emotion as such - it is something to which there is an emotional reaction. In that regard, I wouldn't try to assess the extent of a person's suffering on the basis of their apparent emotional state.
I think it might be closer to say that I wouldn't trust someone to deal in ethics or morality if they were not emotionally concerned with the suffering of others on some level, as opposed to treating them like numbers on a spreadsheet. And I'd call that emotional concern empathy.
I think a lot of the horror shows I've read about from the 19th to 20th century (read: eugenics) were produced by people who had very compelling ideas about improving the world, while lacking empathy for the people through whom they were trying to do that work.
I think it might be closer to say that I wouldn't trust someone to deal in ethics or morality if they were not emotionally concerned with the suffering of others on some level, as opposed to treating them like numbers on a spreadsheet. And I'd call that emotional concern empathy.
You earlier mentioned soldiers as an example of people who might have impaired empathy. It sounds like, from your perspective, that this also impairs their moral concern, which would presumably be the case for anyone with impaired empathy (often acquired through circumstances beyond their control). This makes me wonder how you'd suggest such people go about acting morally, or whether you'd trust them to do so.
I think a lot of the horror shows I've read about from the 19th to 20th century (read: eugenics) were produced by people who had very compelling ideas about improving the world, while lacking empathy for the people through whom they were trying to do that work.
It strikes me that many of the atrocities we consider most heinous are perpetrated against groups of people who have been systematically dehumanised, and that this dehumanisation often happened intentionally, in order to reduce the degree of moral concern that the agents of atrocities have for the victims.
Furthermore, if this is done effectively, I suspect that many people living in such environments don't even notice it, and just assume that some groups of people are less deserving of moral concern than others.
Returning to our own situations, I don't know how empathy works for you - would you say you have the same degree of empathy for people, regardless of their circumstances? At the extremes, would you say you are able to empathise with killers to the same extent as the families of their victims? Or abusers to the same extent as the victims of their abuse?
@pease : Soldiers? I know a few. Ever met one? That's a hard one and it varies by person.
One good rule of thumb for me is that you have to deal with people on a case-by-case basis. It depends on the soldier. Some people have an easier time of it than others. Be careful assuming "Oh, that's a soldier! They must lack empathy!" Your question seems a little more simplistic than my thinking and experience of the subject is.
[CONTENT WARNING FOR BRIEF DEPICTION OF FORMER TRAUMA]
But I think that the social context of war demands a lack of empathy because you're effectively required to kill people by the nature of the "game" that you're playing. I know someone who showed me a vague discoloration on a boot he brought back and he says "See that? That's someone else's blood. He tried to kill me. I killed him first." It's as simple as that.
I imagine, being empathic, in that situation, that empathy could get you killed because the distraction would delay you in the act of violent self defense. You have to detach or shut down parts of yourself to do things like that. And then re-attaching those pieces...it's not fun, I imagine.
And I'm not qualified to wade deeply into those waters. That's the kind of PTSD stuff that therapists get paid to do. I'm not one, even if I think I have some of the instincts.
What I would note from another anecdote is - as gamers say - "touch grass." People are social animals in a social environment. Being in civilian life is just different. Someone with that kind of problem needs to focus on their immediate environment and try, carefully, to make peace with the "soldier" persona they had to construct to survive the war.
Eventually you revert to being a whole person with a relatively normal emotional range, and make peace with yourself.
Honestly, I'm only a seminarian who took a 100 level class in psych. My training in this is very light. But that's my sense of it.
Returning to our own situations, I don't know how empathy works for you - would you say you have the same degree of empathy for people, regardless of their circumstances? At the extremes, would you say you are able to empathize with killers to the same extent as the families of their victims? Or abusers to the same extent as the victims of their abuse?
Yes, but sometimes that empathy leads to anger or other things. I also sometimes try to exercise empathy for monsters as a kind of self defense, either so I can try to avoid becoming a predator or so I can avoid becoming prey. I empathize with killers partly to avoid becoming one, because I know that they're human and sometimes I can feel the same impulses in myself. I also got bullied a fair bit as a kid and to survive, you have to study the people who are hurting you so you can understand how to outmaneuver them. "Defense against the Dark Arts" as it were.
Jesus had that bit where he says "Rip your eyes out if you catch yourself lusting after someone. They say don't murder, I say don't call someone a fool," etc. I think the big lesson there is that hate and murder are kind of the same thing. Lust is just the brain training itself to commit rape. Revenge fantasies are just imagining what your body could do to someone out of moral outrage. Hatfields & McCoys, the cycle continues (to bring up a local variation on a timeless theme, look it up.)
What I absorbed a little too early in life is that you are required to remove hate from your soul. One way to get there is empathizing with monsters so that you don't become one. We all experience these impulses. And from that, voila! You find empathy. I find it comes up very naturally and it takes some pretty serious psychological duct-work to make it stop once you start feeling it. I feel a moral obligation to try to understand people like Joseph Stalin so that, in petty ways, I don't turn into one.
Returning to our own situations, I don't know how empathy works for you - would you say you have the same degree of empathy for people, regardless of their circumstances? At the extremes, would you say you are able to empathize with killers to the same extent as the families of their victims? Or abusers to the same extent as the victims of their abuse?
Yes, but sometimes that empathy leads to anger or other things. I also sometimes try to exercise empathy for monsters as a kind of self defense, either so I can try to avoid becoming a predator or so I can avoid becoming prey. I empathize with killers partly to avoid becoming one, because I know that they're human and sometimes I can feel the same impulses in myself. I also got bullied a fair bit as a kid and to survive, you have to study the people who are hurting you so you can understand how to outmaneuver them. "Defense against the Dark Arts" as it were.
Jesus had that bit where he says "Rip your eyes out if you catch yourself lusting after someone. They say don't murder, I say don't call someone a fool," etc. I think the big lesson there is that hate and murder are kind of the same thing. Lust is just the brain training itself to commit rape. Revenge fantasies are just imagining what your body could do to someone out of moral outrage. Hatfields & McCoys, the cycle continues (to bring up a local variation on a timeless theme, look it up.)
What I absorbed a little too early in life is that you are required to remove hate from your soul. One way to get there is empathizing with monsters so that you don't become one. We all experience these impulses. And from that, voila! You find empathy. I find it comes up very naturally and it takes some pretty serious psychological duct-work to make it stop once you start feeling it. I feel a moral obligation to try to understand people like Joseph Stalin so that, in petty ways, I don't turn into one.
Maybe I'm weird.
No, you're not. I always thought this was actually the heart of Christian teaching on the matter.
One good rule of thumb for me is that you have to deal with people on a case-by-case basis. It depends on the soldier. Some people have an easier time of it than others. Be careful assuming "Oh, that's a soldier! They must lack empathy!" Your question seems a little more simplistic than my thinking and experience of the subject is.
Given that the post to which I was referring comprised the following 11 words, that comment seems somewhat ironic:
Eventually you revert to being a whole person with a relatively normal emotional range, and make peace with yourself.
Things might have improved in the last 100 years in some countries' armed forces, but given the number of people involved in armed conflict around the world without any access to therapists, that sounds more like wishful thinking than anything.
More generally, it's starting to look to me as though your attitude and moral concern towards others is largely determined by societal and circumstantial factors, which wouldn't be unusual. And which isn't too far removed from KarlLB's point.
@pease : Based on my contacts, mental healthcare in the US military is a book of dark jokes.
I think morality is almost always determined by societal and circumstantial factors, because that's all anyone gets. Of course, as I think I've been saying, I'm earnestly skeptical of absolute morality. You're probably not far off base there, to my eyes.
Comments
Interesting. I myself don't see how the first statement can possibly be false! You intend to fling yourself atop a grenade to save the lives of your comrades. Unfortunately your aim is a bit off and instead your flailing body accidentally flips it into an ammunition dump, blowing up and killing hundreds. Virtuous action, good intention, bad outcome.
The second is more debatable. How about - You have promised to place fresh flowers on your beloved's grave every week and you do so faithfully, come snow or rain, for the next fifty years until your death. Here there is in some sense no outcome beyond the fulfilment of the promise itself. Yet I would argue that it is a virtuous action.
As Dafyd put it earlier, “one can justify whether a trait is a virtue by saying how acting according to that virtue makes our life as a human being a good life for a human being”.
Aristotle said that the flourishing life is one of "virtuous activity in accordance with reason". Epicurus might have said that a flourishing life is a life of pleasure, but also that this coincides with a life of virtue. The Stoics believed moral virtue was in and of itself sufficient for flourishing. Though the classical understanding of virtue included quite a lot of things we probably wouldn't include, being more along the lines of "traits of excellence".
I usually think of good and bad as derived consequentially. I don't trust ethics based on a priori thinking. "Follow these rules and you too can be a good person!!!™" And I feel like that model just sets a lot of people up for failure, certainly in the world I've always lived in. People confuse "Doing the right thing" with "acting according to The Book." The Book could be The Bible, The Quran, The Analects of Confucius, whathaveyou. But there's a ruleset and if you follow it, voila! You're a good person!
The way you say "flourish" jumps out at me and I'm not targeting you with it, but it's a way of thinking that I think is popular among some philosophers and Aristotle could be one of them. Pardon me if you're a fan of his. The whole thing smells like prosperity gospel. @Gwai reminds me that I would have more in common with Epicurus. I guess I got someone to read now in my copious spare time.
As my life has demonstrated to me on lots of ways, accidents happen. Things go wrong. People can do all the right things and get no reward whatsoever. Flourishing is not necessarily the mark of a good life. Read Proverbs. Vanity, vanity, chasing the wind!
And I think this is might be what I'm privately digging at - perhaps tangentially to this thread - by seeing Aristotle's hypocrisy. He sees a virtuous system and also allows for structural evils that seem necessary to the defense of the system that creates these "virtuous people," who will of course be men and for the love of mercy do not get me started on what Aristotle thought of the "weaker sex." It was repugnant.
I might conjecture that there's some deep link between excessively "internal" moral systems and hypocrisy, but that might be a reach. Basically, that's a hypothesis that might deserve it's own thread.
One hopes this does not require further explanation.
I can say what flourishing in virtue ethics means by contrasting it with the prosperity gospel. In the prosperity gospel, you give money to charity (or the church) and God rewards you with material possessions. But your enjoyment of material possessions isn't enhanced by having given them away previously - the connection is merely instrumental. If you could get the material possessions without giving to charity you'd enjoy the material possessions just as much. Indeed, a habit of giving away material possessions might lead one to regard them as less important.
In a marriage, for the marriage to flourish one has to exhibit kindness, empathy, and respect. But exhibiting those qualities doesn't just lead instrumentally to a flourishing marriage - they are part of the flourishing: the marriage is more important to you because those qualities are part of it. It is in that sense that virtues are qualities that lead to a flourishing life, not instrumentally but intrinsically.
Now empathy and respect aren't guarantees of a flourishing marriage. Fortune plays a part. But they're part of it.
I think it's only fair to call Aristotle's stance hypocrisy if he knew that what he was saying was wrong or at odds with his stance on virtue. As Aristotle doesn't give kindness or compassion or empathy as examples of virtues, I don't think it's hypocrisy. It's some sort of ethical failing, and certainly some sort of intellectual failing, but it's not hypocrisy.
Modern virtue ethics adapts Aristotle on the structure of virtue, but not on the content of virtue.
It's also my wedding anniversary today so I'm reflecting on what it means to be married. To belong to someone else.
In that frame, flourishing is an interesting word. It raises the question of comparison, in the sense of the person I would be if I had not been married all these years.
I was just playing on the sense that a good life is not necessarily tied to good ethical behavior. Sometimes doing the right thing leads directly to suffering, which I think is one of the big theses of the gospel. There is no connection between "be a good person" and "experience reward." I'm less knowledgeable on this, I think, than either of you in terms of what the old guys thought, but I can see how that connects to the "enjoy your life while you can" sense of hedonism.
On the other hand, there might be intrinsic joy in being ethical apart from external consequences, either divine favor or social advancement. And maybe that's virtue? It is virtuous to "do the right thing" because "it is the right thing to do" expecting neither reward nor punishment from God nor society.
@pease : Yeah, that's a big one, though...if you'll pardon a riposte, without experiential data, how can you see what's good using principles? I think might've picked up from Bonhoeffer's Ethics a deep distrust of principles. It's just people trying to build systems...ha! And we find ourselves circling back to the same argument. Also might be why I'm teasing Aristotle.
I think the basic good versus bad isn't rule sets or logic. It's empathy. The Good Samaritan isn't an effective parable because it's applying a logical argument. The basis of the good life is compassion, not logic. You can logically work to figure out a more compassionate action as you rise in political responsibility, but I think - even logically - that the basis for ethics and morality isn't pure logic or principle.
One doesn't think that being a good person guarantees a happy life. But one thinks there must be some connection. Would you or do you teach your children to be good people? If you think that being a good person makes your children less likely to have happy lives why would you do that?
That doesn't mean one thinks one's children to value material success. It may mean that one thinks they'll have happier lives if they don't value material success. Roughly one wants to believe a good or happy life is one in which one values the things like friendship, love, and the kinds of achievement that being good makes one more likely to have.
My daughter is a much better person than I am because she took responsibility for her own moral development and as a result put herself into situations where she developed her emotional intelligence.
I don't think I taught her that, she taught herself.
What you thereafter describe sounds like a rather subjective ethical theory, and one that depends to a significant extent on an individual's ability to empathise. As I recall, notably just here on these forums, this isn't an ability that everyone shares to anything like the same extent. Some people here empathise barely at all. I'm curious by what you say about the basis of the good life being compassion *not* logic. I'd be more on board if it were based on compassion *and* reason. (Human beings are reasoning social animals, after all.)
I'm being sloppy, but that's a rough sense of my recollection of why he didn't trust principles.
Along those lines, darkly, I think I've known more people who reason selfishly than people who are unreasonably compassionate. That might be why, on the margins, I'll tilt more toward compassion than reason as a basis for good living. I also trust a posteriori evidence more than a priori logic. It's too easy to rationalize the self into doing what the self wants to do.
Ironically, one might see some logic in this thinking.
I think, somewhat in a Buddhist or Stoic vein, that the pursuit of happiness can lead to its own kind of misery. We're unhappy because we want things that we can't get. Just look at capitalism. Look at America. It's a paradox I've struggled with my whole life, living in this culture. To thrive normally in this country, as the world reckons it, is to be a competitive hedonist living for a certain narrowly defined pleasure. What if I'm happier not doing that? It's very hard to be happy.
In that sense, I do think I find some common cause with Epicurus, even though in the modern sense of the word I'm pretty stoic. It seems like it's very hard to achieve real happiness of any sort in this godforsaken place without becoming a certain amount obsessed with materialism.
I also think that teaching kids to be good can turn into a straitjacket if you're not careful. I think that in pedagogy I try to teach by example and leave them leeway to learn by experience instead of instructing them on how to do things. There are pros and cons to that, of course. And...*gestures vaguely at the USA these days.* There's a lot going on.
Also, if being a good person makes a person less happy, sometimes that's worth the cost. I've seen photos of people who were very happy during the 1930s in Germany. I don't know if I'd want to be a happy person during that particular period of history. I don't know if I think happiness - in a certain sense - is my cardinal virtue. Of course, then you get the paradox that I'm happier not being entirely happy, because I know that means I'm living in reality.
In her picture of the 'social realm' people are essentially consumers because that is the corollary of being a labourer, and when they're not doing the job, leisure is then filled with other things that don't matter. You have a whole society of people who think that the only thing that matters is "making a living" and "being productive".
There is no time for actual work. The stuff of doing the thing for the sake of doing the thing. The stuff that has no interest in being comfortable or even happy.
So in short people have meaningless lives that make them unhappy and also are constantly told that they should want to be happy.
I would argue they are more descriptive of what a godly community should be. They are communal in nature. A flourishing community would naturally act in these ways.
If faith in God is the thing that guides human reasoning, what do people without faith in God do - is that where empathy comes in?
I'm getting the impression that this is ultimately an ethical position that you can't reason about - you have to have faith in it.
If you're going to go down this route, it opens up the question about testing this premise in some empirical fashion.
"Christian."
I am one. Born and raised. I'm not generally the type to throw it in anyone's face but if you cut into me enough - figuratively speaking - you'll probably hit Christ somewhere in the bedrock.
And for that reason I'm not going to pretend I can tell an atheist how to do ethics, but I also am not so arrogant or stupid as to pretend that atheists aren't capable of doing these things. The ones I've talked to usually say quite reasonable things like "You know, we also are capable of things like empathy. Is it that hard to understand?" And that includes a friend who's a surgeon in an ER who has probably saved more people's lives than I have.
Seriously, I usually find myself baffled by people who think atheists are incapable of being ethical. They do it about the same way anyone else does, messily but with general competence. You don't need to have a perfectly worked out systematic morality to be a decent human being. You just have to care enough, far as I can tell.
Testing the ratio of compassion versus reason in individuals, and how this affects behavior? That is probably doable. Sounds like a job for an undergraduate at a university studying psychology, if they can get the funding together.
Having given your last few posts more thought, plus a bit of reading around Bonhoeffer, some of this starts to ring a bell. It's likely I did come across some version of his thoughts on ethics at some point. (And probably The Cost of Discipleship.)
I don't think I'm alone in seeing the Bonhoeffer's ethics as resembling virtue ethics. Do what a virtuous man would do, where that man is Jesus.
Similarly, a virtuous person is a person who does what is virtuous - at the point of acting, they're not *thinking* about doing what is virtuous, they do it. There's an immediacy, which I understand is also an aspect of Bonhoeffer's ethics.
I can't see how consequentialism comes into Bonhoeffer's ethics. Does this have something to do with the regime he was living under?
However, I would say that empathy is neither specifically characteristic of Christians nor of atheists. There are people, both Christians and atheists, who are capable of empathy, and people, both Christians and atheists, who are not. Thus, to me, it makes sense to take empathy into account of your approach to ethical living *if* you are someone who empathises, but otherwise just to remember that it's one of those aspects of being human that a lot of people make assumptions about.
I do see advanced thinking and moral codes and reasoning. I have nothing against that.
But it does not seem to me to be obvious that there is an objective point of coalescence there. Which is particularly stark when you are a German Pastor about to be executed by the Nazis. Both of whom would appear to have very different frameworks of moral behaviour they say were derived from Christianity.
One might accurately say that the one is obviously very different to the other, but it seems to me that it is a very different thing to say that one will get the "good" answer only by going deeper into the religion. History suggests that's not accurate.
Is lack of or impaired empathy actually part of normal human psychology? I thought that was a symptom of of psychopathy?
So @pease 's binary description:
would not be correct?
I regard the virtue of Jesus being a very different prospect from the morality of the visible Church. In that, I think it's possible to see the stark distinction that you describe.
PS Even a small amount of reading suggests how the meltdown of the German Church influenced Bonhoeffer.
Thinking of a trait as being something that the majority of people have isn't usually very helpful if you happen to be one of the few people who don't have it. I'm reminded of the thread discussing belonging.
Slow down a second. I think you're putting a binary down where what I have isn't a binary, it's more like a pie that's sliced so many times that it doesn't exist.
Are you familiar with post modernism? I'm very post modern in my approach to people, practically existentialist. I've been trained, practically whipped with clue bats every time I've spoken about someone else's experience to the point where I get very wary of telling people what someone in any social category beyond me thinks.
That's why I often bring up friends a la "So, I know an atheist and this is what they say." That's as far as I feel safe going. I have atheist friends who I think are comfortable being held up as tokens, as it were, for the common sense argument that of course atheists are capable of common sense moral behavior. The basic claim I make is, "You don't need God for a functioning conscience." That's easy.
Everyone empathizes differently because everyone is different. I'm just a little more careful dealing with non-Christians because it's not my existential turf. Telling other people how they think and feel are a kind of "fighin' words" in my experience. And that is a very hard-earned lesson for me.
If you think I'm trying to say that Christians and non-Christians empathize differently because they're Christians and non-Christians, I think you're misunderstanding me and that's going to be make this conversation frustrating for me. I'm glad I had the chance to clear this one up before it got worse.
Referring to post-modernism and existentialism at the same time is just confusing. I'm sure you're trying to make a point here, but I don't understand what it is.
Why do you think you need to make this claim at all? Whose question is it that you're addressing?
Hmm. If it helps you, please feel free to deal with me as either a Christian or a non-Christian (or both at the same time).
Please can you avoid claiming to have cleared something up for someone else until *after* you have confirmation. As it stands, this comes across along the lines of the sarcastic use of "sorted that for you".
That aside, I'm still trying to work out what you meant by the following: My original response to this was: This is the thing I keep hoping you're going to clear up. Saying things like “everyone empathizes differently because everyone is different” is heading in the direction of being even less clear, because if everyone empathises differently, all the distinctions between good and bad are subjective and arbitrary.
The only binary for me is Bullfrog vs Not-Bullfrog; everything else is varying degrees of bullshit, including my religious beliefs.*
And if you really understand postmodernity and existentialism, you'll understand that joke, so I won't need to explain it to you again.
And I'm not sure I can answer what are for me very visceral questions about the relationships between bodies in an abstract fashion. Suffering is the universal human experience and the management of suffering is the basis for all ethical calculations, from which we can derive morality. There are sliders that we can place at more or less arbitrary places for "this is the amount of pain we must tolerate," but there will forever be pain and it will forever require management.
And maybe that's why I simply cannot and therefore will not satisfy you. If a person truly lacks empathy, akin to a robot or an AI or a computer model, I don't think they can understand that. All they can do is imitate it. Is that what you're aiming at, and trying to get out of me? You want ethics or morals without empathy? No can do, as I see it.
Feel free to disagree, but I'd rather not be asked again to rehash what I've already typed.
* Yes, that's a subtle joke I made up on the fly. Frog, shit, haha.
The universality of human suffering and the management of suffering being the basis of ethical calculations is something that I understand and that makes sense to me.
A person who lacks empathy is nothing like a robot or an AI / computer model. A person who lacks empathy is still a person who suffers, and who is capable of understanding the suffering of others.
The action of flinging yourself on top of a grenade is only virtuous if you’re doing it to save the lives of your comrades - that is, because of the intended outcome (I’ll grant that it can still be a virtuous action even if it fails to achieve the desired outcome). But if you’re the only person within the blast radius then flinging yourself on top of a grenade is not a virtuous action. More like stupid. The only action that might be considered virtuous in such a circumstance would be to try to save the only life that is at risk - your own - by flinging yourself away from the grenade.
It can be seen, therefore, that the action of flinging yourself on top of a grenade has no inherent virtue in and of itself (because if it did then it would be the virtuous thing to do even if nobody else was in danger). It is the attempt to save others - the desired outcome - that makes it virtuous.
As I said, I think the same is true for any action. Virtue is derived from the desired outcome of an action, not an inherent property of the action itself.
Fulfilling the promise is a desired outcome, albeit one that affects nobody other than the one doing it. This could take us into a whole new discussion about whether virtuous acts must perforce be good for others rather than only oneself or not, but as it doesn’t harm anyone else either I’d say it’s at worst virtue-neutral.
Yo. 👋
I’m not kidding - I have an EQ score of 8 out of 80, repeated (give or take one or two marks) over several tests over several years. Basically put, I am all but incapable of empathizing with others.
I think now you are defining "outcome" so widely as to make it a useless term.
OK let us try another scenario.
Person A rescues a drowning child from a canal. A is motivated by a desire for the welfare of the child and its family and would have sacrified their own life to rescue the child's if necessary.
Person B rescues a drowning child from a canal. B is motivated by a desire for glory and reputation for heroism which B hopes will advance B's standing in the community. B is pleased to have rescued the child but would not have put themselves at serious risk to do so.
Person C rescues a drowning child from a canal. C is motivated by a desire to deceive neighbours into believing in C's good will so that C can in future commit crimes more easily. C would have preferred not to rescue the child and feels regret at its survival, but finds this a convenient way of achieving their aims.
Action A is more virtuous than action B. Action C is not virtuous at all. Agree/disagree?
Agreed. Which is why it raises the question about virtue - if outcome is the only measure, the actions are equally virtuous. Most people however would instinctively feel A was more virtuous than B was more virtuous than C.
I seem to recall someone something similar about making a show of one's religious virtues.
Agree. Which still means the action itself is not inherently virtuous, but that its virtue is determined by the desired outcome.
To the first, appreciated. Sometimes your response leaves me feeling interrogated and I have to pick how many queries and corrections I feel like responding to. That one left me a bit overwhelmed. Admittedly, my thoughts run in packs that are sometimes hard to discipline. Thanks for the clarification.
Glad we agree on the second, that might be the ground of it. Ha! Solved!
I think empathy is by definition the ability to understand the suffering of others. So we're at semantics now. My guess is you mean "understand" in a cognitive sense where I tend to think "understand" has an emotive side that falls under the range of "empathy," and at that point I think we're quibbling into the realm of tedium.
The right manner of I remember correctly includes the appropriate degree of emotions: so in the case of courage you act neither oblivious to the danger not barely coping with panic; in the case of gift giving you give looking forward to the recipient being happy rather than grudgingly.
Aristotle has four types of agent: the purely vicious who doesn't care about the right thing to do or is culpably mistaken; the akratic, who knows what the right thing is but gives in to temptation; the enkratic who wants to do the wrong thing but does the right thing because it's right; and the virtuous who wants to do the right thing. While modern moral thinking tends to think it's more meritorious to be tempted and resist, classical ethics, possibly with the exception of Plato, thinks that it's better to not finding the temptation tempting in the first place.
I feel like Augustine might have a role in that shift. I recall a seminary prof saying his self-reflections on his own inner struggle were revolutionary at the time. Of course, wasn't his thesis that in the end you'll lose without God's grace? And yet we still revere the struggle...
Thanks Bullfrog, and apologies - my mind runs on finding answers to questions, which can get intense.
It's commonly described as "feeling as another feels", whatever the emotion. I think it also includes the ability to understand another's emotions. I believe that limiting it to suffering would be unusual.
The Empathy Quotient that Marvin linked to is fairly specific: . It feels more significant than quibbling to me - I would say empathy is about both feeling and understanding the emotions of another person.
To my mind, suffering isn't an emotion as such - it is something to which there is an emotional reaction. In that regard, I wouldn't try to assess the extent of a person's suffering on the basis of their apparent emotional state.
I think a lot of the horror shows I've read about from the 19th to 20th century (read: eugenics) were produced by people who had very compelling ideas about improving the world, while lacking empathy for the people through whom they were trying to do that work.
It strikes me that many of the atrocities we consider most heinous are perpetrated against groups of people who have been systematically dehumanised, and that this dehumanisation often happened intentionally, in order to reduce the degree of moral concern that the agents of atrocities have for the victims.
Furthermore, if this is done effectively, I suspect that many people living in such environments don't even notice it, and just assume that some groups of people are less deserving of moral concern than others.
Returning to our own situations, I don't know how empathy works for you - would you say you have the same degree of empathy for people, regardless of their circumstances? At the extremes, would you say you are able to empathise with killers to the same extent as the families of their victims? Or abusers to the same extent as the victims of their abuse?
One good rule of thumb for me is that you have to deal with people on a case-by-case basis. It depends on the soldier. Some people have an easier time of it than others. Be careful assuming "Oh, that's a soldier! They must lack empathy!" Your question seems a little more simplistic than my thinking and experience of the subject is.
[CONTENT WARNING FOR BRIEF DEPICTION OF FORMER TRAUMA]
And I'm not qualified to wade deeply into those waters. That's the kind of PTSD stuff that therapists get paid to do. I'm not one, even if I think I have some of the instincts.
What I would note from another anecdote is - as gamers say - "touch grass." People are social animals in a social environment. Being in civilian life is just different. Someone with that kind of problem needs to focus on their immediate environment and try, carefully, to make peace with the "soldier" persona they had to construct to survive the war.
Eventually you revert to being a whole person with a relatively normal emotional range, and make peace with yourself.
Honestly, I'm only a seminarian who took a 100 level class in psych. My training in this is very light. But that's my sense of it.
Yes, but sometimes that empathy leads to anger or other things. I also sometimes try to exercise empathy for monsters as a kind of self defense, either so I can try to avoid becoming a predator or so I can avoid becoming prey. I empathize with killers partly to avoid becoming one, because I know that they're human and sometimes I can feel the same impulses in myself. I also got bullied a fair bit as a kid and to survive, you have to study the people who are hurting you so you can understand how to outmaneuver them. "Defense against the Dark Arts" as it were.
Jesus had that bit where he says "Rip your eyes out if you catch yourself lusting after someone. They say don't murder, I say don't call someone a fool," etc. I think the big lesson there is that hate and murder are kind of the same thing. Lust is just the brain training itself to commit rape. Revenge fantasies are just imagining what your body could do to someone out of moral outrage. Hatfields & McCoys, the cycle continues (to bring up a local variation on a timeless theme, look it up.)
What I absorbed a little too early in life is that you are required to remove hate from your soul. One way to get there is empathizing with monsters so that you don't become one. We all experience these impulses. And from that, voila! You find empathy. I find it comes up very naturally and it takes some pretty serious psychological duct-work to make it stop once you start feeling it. I feel a moral obligation to try to understand people like Joseph Stalin so that, in petty ways, I don't turn into one.
Maybe I'm weird.
No, you're not. I always thought this was actually the heart of Christian teaching on the matter.
More generally, it's starting to look to me as though your attitude and moral concern towards others is largely determined by societal and circumstantial factors, which wouldn't be unusual. And which isn't too far removed from KarlLB's point.
I think morality is almost always determined by societal and circumstantial factors, because that's all anyone gets. Of course, as I think I've been saying, I'm earnestly skeptical of absolute morality. You're probably not far off base there, to my eyes.