#paul bloom

[1000rh]

Empathy is limited […] in that it focuses on specific individuals. Its spotlight nature renders it innumerate and myopic.

– Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (2016)

[nerianasims]

The Root of All Cruelty? by Paul Bloom

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/27/the-root-of-all-cruelty

Opening in a private window works. But here are some excerpts:

"The thesis that viewing others as objects or animals enables our very worst conduct would seem to explain a great deal. Yet there’s reason to think that it’s almost the opposite of the truth.

At some European soccer games, fans make monkey noises at African players and throw bananas at them. Describing Africans as monkeys is a common racist trope, and might seem like yet another example of dehumanization. But plainly these fans don’t really think the players are monkeys; the whole point of their behavior is to disorient and humiliate. To believe that such taunts are effective is to assume that their targets would be ashamed to be thought of that way—which implies that, at some level, you think of them as people after all.

Consider what happened after Hitler annexed Austria, in 1938...

The Jews who were forced to scrub the streets—not to mention those subjected to far worse degradations—were not thought of as lacking human emotions. Indeed, if the Jews had been thought to be indifferent to their treatment, there would have been nothing to watch here; the crowd had gathered because it wanted to see them suffer. The logic of such brutality is the logic of metaphor: to assert a likeness between two different things holds power only in the light of that difference. The sadism of treating human beings like vermin lies precisely in the recognition that they are not.

What about violence more generally? Some evolutionary psychologists and economists explain assault, rape, and murder as rational actions, benefitting the perpetrator or the perpetrator’s genes. No doubt some violence—and a reputation for being willing and able to engage in violence—can serve a useful purpose, particularly in more brutal environments. On the other hand, much violent behavior can be seen as evidence of a loss of control. It’s Criminology 101 that many crimes are committed under the influence of drugs and alcohol, and that people who assault, rape, and murder show less impulse control in other aspects of their lives as well. In the heat of passion, the moral enormity of the violent action loses its purchase.

But “Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships” (Cambridge), by the anthropologist Alan Fiske and the psychologist Tage Rai, argues that these standard accounts often have it backward. In many instances, violence is neither a cold-blooded solution to a problem nor a failure of inhibition; most of all, it doesn’t entail a blindness to moral considerations. On the contrary, morality is often a motivating force: “People are impelled to violence when they feel that to regulate certain social relationships, imposing suffering or death is necessary, natural, legitimate, desirable, condoned, admired, and ethically gratifying.” Obvious examples include suicide bombings, honor killings, and the torture of prisoners during war, but Fiske and Rai extend the list to gang fights and violence toward intimate partners. For Fiske and Rai, actions like these often reflect the desire to do the right thing, to exact just vengeance, or to teach someone a lesson. There’s a profound continuity between such acts and the punishments that—in the name of requital, deterrence, or discipline—the criminal-justice system lawfully imposes. Moral violence, whether reflected in legal sanctions, the killing of enemy soldiers in war, or punishing someone for an ethical transgression, is motivated by the recognition that its victim is a moral agent, someone fully human.

In the fiercely argued and timely study “Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny” (Oxford), the philosopher Kate Manne makes a consonant argument about sexual violence. “The idea of rapists as monsters exonerates by caricature,” she writes, urging us to recognize “the banality of misogyny,” the disturbing possibility that “people may know full well that those they treat in brutally degrading and inhuman ways are fellow human beings, underneath a more or less thin veneer of false consciousness.”...

If the worst acts of cruelty aren’t propelled by dehumanization, not all dehumanization is accompanied by cruelty. Manne points out that there’s nothing wrong with a surgeon viewing her patients as mere bodies when they’re on the operating table; in fact, it’s important for doctors not to have certain natural reactions—anger, moral disgust, sexual desire—when examining patients. The philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum has given the example of using your sleeping partner’s stomach as a pillow when lying in bed, and goes on to explore the more fraught case of objectification during sexual intercourse, suggesting that there’s nothing inherently wrong about this so long as it is consensual and restricted to the bedroom...

As a philosopher, Manne grounds her arguments in more technical literature, and at one point she emphasizes the connection between her position and the Oxford philosopher P. F. Strawson’s theory of “reactive attitudes.” Strawson argued that, when we’re dealing with another person as a person, we can’t help experiencing such attitudes as admiration and gratitude, resentment and blame. You generally don’t feel this way toward rocks or rodents. Acknowledging the humanity of another, then, has its risks, and these are neatly summarized by Manne, who notes that seeing someone as a person makes it possible for that person to be a true friend or beloved spouse, but it also makes it possible for people to be “an intelligible rival, enemy, usurper, insubordinate, betrayer, etc.”...

Certainly, Pitzer’s description of various concentration camps contains so many examples of cruelty and degradation that it’s impossible to see them as a mere failure to acknowledge the humanity of their victims. As the scholar of warfare Johannes Lang has observed of the Nazi death camps, “What might look like the dehumanization of the other is instead a way to exert power over another human.”

The limitations of the dehumanization thesis are hardly good news. There has always been something optimistic about the idea that our worst acts of inhumanity are based on confusion. It suggests that we could make the world better simply by having a clearer grasp of reality—by deactivating those brain implants, or their ideological equivalent. The truth may be harder to accept: that our best and our worst tendencies arise precisely from seeing others as human."

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

“The most common misconception about morality: that it’s a human invention.”

-- Paul Bloom

--

Evolution of morality

Dogs Understand Fairness, Get Jealous, Study Finds

Chimpanzee empathy is key to understanding human engagement

Chimps Have a Sense of Fairness

Honeybees Strict No Drinking Policy

Animals Are Moral Creatures, Scientist Argues

Primate Police: Why Some Chimps Play the Cop

“Our primate relatives [apes] show evolutionary rudiments of morality: behaviors that look like altruism, sympathy, moral disapproval, sharing, and even notions of fairness. That’s exactly what we’d expect if human morality is built on the genes of our ancestors.”

– Jerry A. Coyne

[luxe-pauvre]

Why would we ever choose to suffer? Sometimes, as a hedonist would tell you, it’s for the sake of tangible goals. Pain can distract us from our anxieties and even help us transcend the self. Choosing to suffer can serve social goals – it can display how tough we are or serve as a cry for help. Unpleasant emotions, such as fear and sadness, are part of play and fantasy and can provide moral satisfaction. And effort and struggle and difficulty can, in the right contexts, lead to the joys of mastery and flow. But there’s more. The economist George Loewenstein gives the example of serious mountaineering. The pleasures here are not obvious, to say the least; rather, it seems to be “unrelenting misery from end to end”. Diaries and journals by climbers talk about “relentless cold (often leading to frostbite and loss of extremities, or death), exhaustion, snow-blindness, altitude sickness, sleeplessness, squalid conditions, hunger, fear…” There is constant craving for food. And there is boredom: “On a typical ascent, the vast majority of time is spent in mind-bogglingly monotonous activities – for example, being ‘weathered out’ for many hours in a small smelly tent crammed in with other climbers.” Climbers describe their experiences as lonely and alienating, spending days and weeks in bitter silence, with disagreements that don’t get smoothed over. And yet people do it, and then do it again and again, getting some satisfaction that doesn’t reduce in any real way to pleasure. Apparently, then, for at least some of us, a life well lived is more than a life of pleasure and happiness. I side with the economist Tyler Cowen, who wrote: “What’s good about an individual human life can’t be boiled down to any single value. It’s not all about beauty or all about justice or all about happiness. Pluralist theories are more plausible, postulating a variety of relevant values, including human wellbeing, justice, fairness, beauty, the artistic peaks of human achievement, the quality of mercy, and the many different and, indeed, sometimes contrasting kinds of happiness. Life is complicated.”

Paul Bloom, Hedonism is overrated - to make the best of life there must be pain, says this Yale professor

[beyourselfchulanmaria]

The Root of All Cruelty? 一切殘忍的根源？ by Paul Bloom | The New Yorker / 🤓 👍worth reading!

The Root of All Cruelty?

Perpetrators of violence, we’re told, dehumanize their victims. The truth is worse.

[scogito]

Dedicato ai falsi empatici.

Libro fondamentale per guardare in faccia il torpore di fasulla sensibilità con cui vi elogiate a vicenda, per vedere la botte di marcia morale di cui siete fieri e forse rendervi conto che il concetto di "buono" ha poco a che vedere con l'essere spugne di immondizia.

[morpsychology]

We often think that empathy, our capacity "to feel someone's pain," is the ultimate source of goodness. Nothing could be farther from the truth, argues psychology professor Paul Bloom. Scientific studies show that empathy is a capricious and irrational emotion that can cloud people's judgement and even lead to violence and cruelty.

[petitefleuriste]

Pleasure results from gaining knowledge about the object of our pleasure, not, as we might assume, from merely experiencing it over and over again.