| I guess once we have thrown away universal empathy we may as well throw away the natural numbers, the concept of a line or using categories to designate things we have never seen. I mean what's the point of calling a table a table if I will never be able to hold all existing tables in my head? More seriously, infinite concepts are usually really simple to conceive for most human minds, it's much more complicated to look at real life objects clashing with mental objects and extract new meaningful concepts that may help solve those inconsistencies. >And then the pendulum swung back. People do care, newspaper editorialists and social-media commenters granted. But they care inconsistently: grieving for victims of Brussels’ recent attacks and ignoring Yemen’s recent bombing victims; expressing outrage over ISIS rather than the much deadlier Boko Haram; mourning the death of Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe while overlooking countless human murder victims. There are far worthier tragedies, they wrote, than the ones that attract the most public empathy. >[...] If we recognized that we have a limited quantity of empathy to begin with, it would help to cure some of the acrimony and self-flagellation of these discussions. [...] We must begin with a realistic assessment of what those limits are, and then construct a scientific way of choosing which values matter most to us. For example in the above paragraph the author seems to extract that the meaning of those criticism is that we should feel bad about ourselves. I don't think that's the point, I agree that self-flagellation is improductive, but we can rationally examine those kinds of inconsistent beliefs and emotions. Is the way we look at those other people influencing how we act towards them? Do those actions affect how they act towards us? Is there any chance of reconciliation? The author also seems to blindly accept the belief that personal intervention is the only way to reduce misery, with no place for cold restructuring of society in a way that avoid generating that misery in the first place, done in a cold calculated way, with no need to deplete our precious, finite, empathy. |