Hi, I'd like to welcome people back. What we're going to do this week is talk about what's often seen as the foundation of morality. What you could call caring, concern, fellow feeling, the idea that other people matter to us. And I'll call this here compassion. And the first two lectures will deal with the nature and scope of compassion. And then the second two lectures will deal with empathy. Now empathy is often regarded as the source of compassion or source of all morality. And we'll evaluate that claim looking at what empathy is, how it works? What it could do for us? And what it can't do for us? Now, as a starting point, I want you to imagine a perfect psychopath. We are going to real psychopaths pretty soon, but now talk about an imaginary psychopath. This imaginary psychopath is highly intelligent, has a normal set of emotions and desires, but totally lacks compassion, totally lacks fellow feeling. Other people do not matter to him. So, although he's not a sadist, when he wants something he'll try to get it, without any regard for other people's feelings. If he wants money or sex or power, he'll just try to get it, and he doesn't care who he hurts along the way. If the cat is in front of him and he's bored and he feels like strangling the cat, he'll strangle the cat. Now, suppose you had this perfect psychopath in front of you, and you wanted to take it upon yourself to convince him to be a good person. You wanted to argue with him that he shouldn't be this kind of person. So you started off by saying look, you know when you harm people, when you do things to people and they hate it, and it hurts them. And he says yeah. And he says well how would you feel if other people did that to you. And he would answer well I, I would hate that and then you say so do you recognize the symetry. And he would respond and say, sure, I'm not an idiot, I'm a highly intelligent psychopath. I recognize that the two are a lot alike. I just don't care. And then you could throw some philosophy at him. So you could talk about a consequentialist like Bentham, who would argue that the right thing to do is to increase the sum of pleasure in the world. And you say to him, look, you, look at your actions, you're decreasing the sum of pleasure. You're increasing the amount of pain in the world. And he could say, I don't care. I understand I'm making the world worse. I just don't care. You could talk about deontological philosophers like Immanuel Kant and tell him about the categorical imperative and he could say, I understand the categorical comparative. And remember, I'm a smart guy. I just don't care. I don't care if I make the world worst. I don't care if my acts are not the sort of acts one would want to extent universally. The only way you can get the psychopath to act in a decent way is through threats of punishment or reward. And, you know, this is one reason why we have prisons. It's one reason why we have, we have fines, some societies executions, because there're some proportion of people in the world where the only way they will act decently towards other people. The only way other people's feelings and emotions will count is if they know that if they don't act that way they themselves are going to be hurt. They are going to have their money taken away from them. They are going to be put into a cage. They are going to be killed. Now, this is just a way of introducing an idea argued by David Hume and other philosophers that In order to get morality off the ground, in order to be motivated to do good things and not bad things, you need to have some spark of feelings. You need to have other people have to matter to you. If not, you're no better then the psychopath. And we can take this insight and turn it around. And say, look, since we have morality, since most people listen to this. Do have a sense of right and wrong. This means that we must have had some spark of compassion, some of these feelings. We are not inherently psychopaths, and this makes morality possible. Now, the point, the idea that people have fundamentally kind thoughts towards others, that would regard others with some degree of caring and compassion, is an old one. And it was articulated, I think, most clearly by Adam Smith in, in, in his writings in the 1700s. Now, some of you may know Adam Smith as the founder of modern economics. He wrote this classic book, an inquiry into the, wealth of nations, into nature and cause of wealth of nations. which, in which he argued he defended in part a somewhat free market. He defended the idea that self-interested agents working just for their own benefit can in some societies have things work that things end up for the benefit of everybody. goodness, emerges as through the invisible hand as an emergent property of self-interest and greed. But it's easy to misread this as saying that Adam Smith himself thought people were greedy and self-serving. And nothing could be further from the true. So wealth of nations was Adam Smith's second book. His first book which he said was his finest book, was The Theory of Moral Sentiments. And this is a brilliant discussion of our natural inclinations towards sympathy, towards kindness, sometimes towards punishment and justice and vengeance. And he begins this book with a couple of, a few sentences I think eloquently capture a lot about human nature. So, he writes. However selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him. That we often derive sorrow from the sorrow of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it. So Smith says he doesn't need any examples, and I am not going to provide any examples. I'll ask you to provide your own. So imagine, imagine a person you love in the world, could be your, your child, your boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, your best friend, your, your, there must be somebody. And imagine that person in sorrow, imagine that person is suffering. How does that make you feel? Now, if your answer is meh, I'm fine. Then you're a psychopath, then, then you're one of the small proportion of people who, who may well lack fellow feeling. But most of us would say, wow, I don't want that to happen. I don't want somebody I care for to suffer. I want that suffering to go away. And, and so this seems to be sort of a fundamental aspect of ourselves. Now one can reasonably ask, and is a, I think an extremly interesting scientific question, where does this come from? Why do we care about others? What happens to us or has happened to us that causes us to care about others? And one common enough view is that we're not born that way. We're born entirely cold blooded. This is satirized in one of my favorite onion headlines that reads, new study reveals most children unrepentant sociopaths. And the idea that this headline captures however, satirically is that we started off as cold blooded monsters, and caring and compassion and the like, they emerge later. They come later. And this is an idea which has had some famous champions, including Thomas Hobbes and Sigmund Freud. But it's not an idea that I believe is right. I think that [UNKNOWN] right now, enough, enough of, there is by now, enough of a body of evidence from studies and observations of babies and young children, to suggest that, on some degree compassion shows up early. So, one finding for instance is a baby's crying. So, how do you make a baby cry? Well, there's a lot of ways to do this. But one way to do it which is pretty powerful, is expose the baby to the cries of other babies. The baby will hear the sound of other babies and then start to cry, him or herself. Now some very cynical psychologists have said, well that doesn't show anything. Maybe babies are so stupid that they hear the sounds of other babies crying, they think they themselves are crying, this panics them, so they cry some more. But then even more clever psychologists did another study, where they expose babies to the sound of crying babies and these were tape recordings, either of their own cries or other babies cries. And they find that babies get upset more at the sound of their own cries than at the cries of others, suggesting it really is some sort of outer directed feeling. And this is supported in different ways. We know that babies when they see someone else suffering as soon as they're able to might pat and soothe the other person to try to make them feel better. And we know that toddlers will start to share and help those around them, particularly those they are familiar with and those that they care about such as their siblings and, and, and, and maybe their friends. It's not it's hard to disagree then, with Adam Smith's claim that some compassion, some fellow feeling is part of our nature. Now there are a lot of open questions. You might ask how would this develop over life span. You might ask, okay part of it maybe is hard wired, how could this evolve? Is it shared by other animals like chimpanzees and monkeys? You might arg-, wonder about the extent to which it varies across cultures. Are some people in some societies more compassionate than others? You might you might wonder to what extent is this compassion pure? Or to what extent it sort of regulated by self-interest, by selfish priorities. And those are all great questions. And in fact those are the sort of questions we're going to be dealing with throughout the rest of the course. But I want to turn now in the next lecture to the limits of compassion. So we've talked so far about our feelings towards those around us, what about our feelings towards strangers? [MUSIC]
