Every Person Has Value!

I'll have to disagree again, SM. One may think someone is a complete idiot and feel pity for them, but I beleive that it is very difficult to think someone a complete idiot and to feel EMPATHY for them - not unless you consider yourself a complete idiot, too.

And, I would say empathy is more undervalued than it is over valued. The problem is that feeling empathy for a person has gotten mixed up with being a door mat or a sniveling co-dependent.

For example, one can have understanding for the environmental and genetic forces which may have turned a person in the direction of beuing an addict or an alcoholic. One might even feel deep empathy for this person's plight. This does NOT mean that you will then enable their addiction. A person with empathy will judge the sin and not the sinner, while at the same time, not allowing themselves to be sinned against.

[Torrere]

Every person Has value, Every point of view has validity, there is no one you can't learn something from.

"I used to see the world in black and white. I now see that there are shades of grey, but I have not yet learned how to distinguish one shade of grey from another."

I guess what I'm saying is one subjectivity is not inherently superior to another

"In the meantime I shall regard all shades of grey as white."


Coincidentally, this perspective inhibits a person from arguing for their opinion.

Your perspective defines how you act, but you cannot act on all perspectives simultaneously. You must take one point of view for your own if you are going to do anything.

[monster]

"Every point of view has validity"

Maybe those who argue against this point are forgetting about negative values?

[Torrere]

Originally Posted by marichiko

The problem is that feeling empathy for a person has gotten mixed up with being a door mat or a sniveling co-dependent.

Doesn't empathy mean "I feel your pain"?

To feel empathy for someone's pain, if you aren't suffering the same pain at the same time, wouldn't it be necessary that you've experienced that type of pain before and you remember how it felt?

If you can feel empathy for anyone's pain, does that mean that you must have experienced all means of feeling pain?

If you've experienced all means of feeling pain, are you are doormat?

[wolf]

Originally Posted by Elspode

Mrs Elspode and I often discuss the validity of schizophrenics' experiences. I mean, just because it isn't real for you and me...does that mean it isn't real at all, on some level, in some other plane of existence?

I pretty much have the inside track on this one.

It's crazy.

No question.

That being said ... it is true that most delusional systems have some small grounding in reality. Things fall apart when it comes to that part of the brain responsible for interpretation of input.

[wolf]

Serving as a bad example has value, right?

I see more useless pieces of crap on a daily basis than most people see in three and a half years.

I know the difference between priceless and worthless.

[Elspode]

Okay, I think what we need is some sort of hypothetical, or perhaps a case in point. Please tell me the inherent value of:

1) The drug-crazed sociopath who beats, rapes and kills your sister.
2) The crooked CFO who loots his company's pension fund, leaving elderly people penniless while he buys a mansion, a boat, and new boobs for his girlfriend who replaced his wife of 25 years.
3) The punk who smashes out your @250.00 car window to steal your $15.00 CD laying on the front seat.

From my point of view, the only inherent value these sorts have is, in fact, whatever you can fetch for their component parts...kind of like a car when the engine is shelled.

[Elspode]

Originally Posted by monster

"Every point of view has validity"

So, "I think I'll burn down your house and kill your sleeping children" is valid, because the arsonist has a negative value system?

Oh...I get it. We're equating *values* with *integers*, so negative values are valid...mathematically speaking.

[Torrere]

Where you see a drug-crazed sociopath who beat, raped and killed your sister, Laurie the Youth Minister sees a soul waiting to be Saved.

[wolf]

1) The drug-crazed sociopath who beats, rapes and kills your sister.

Your sister has gotten you shitty birthday gifts for the last 46 years, including the years in which your parents purchased the items and pretended they were from her, while you have painstakingly searched for exactly the right thing, or responded to her increasingly expensive demands for specific items. She's permanently off your gift list.

2) The crooked CFO who loots his company's pension fund, leaving elderly people penniless while he buys a mansion, a boat, and new boobs for his girlfriend who replaced his wife of 25 years.

She was totally fucking hot before the boob job, and now she has surpassed even your wildest imaginings of the perfect woman.

3) The punk who smashes out your @250.00 car window to steal your $15.00 CD laying on the front seat.

You borrowed your brother-in-law's car that day. You don't like him anyway. The inconvenience that you cause him by his having to replace the window is worth the $250 that he demands you pay for the replacement.

[wolf]

By the way, I just accidentally discovered the feature that holds the last color chosen in the editor. That's pretty cool.

[Torrere]

Very nice try, wolf, but you fail. It's a common mistake -- you took the objective approach, and this conversation is about the subjective approach.

Y'see, the actions of these people are irrelevent, because there is no knowable objective reality. Instead, every living person creates their own subjective reality. In order to communicate with another person, your subjective realities must have something in common (hence the value of empathy). You cannot communicate with another person without being transformed.

One way to get into this mindset is to contemplate the question: "How long is the Emperor's nose?". Since it is impossible to measure the length of his nose, what you think is the length of his nose is pure guesswork. However, if you could compare your guesswork with the guesswork of everyone else in the country, you could get a precise value for the length of his nose.

Likewise, since objective reality is fundamentally unknowable, the best way to learn about it is by comparing your subjectivity with someone else's. The smaller the difference between your subjectivity and the other person's, the easier it is to communicate. The greater the difference, the more you can learn from them. Fox News uses this method to search for the truth.

It is important to remember that "one subjectivity is not inherently superior to another", because, after all, it's subjective. Therein lies the beauty of the subjective approach: because every subjectivity is valid, we are freed from the chains of judgement.

Now let's try to answer these questions the subjective way.

1) The drug-crazed sociopath who beats, rapes and kills your sister.

The sociopath knows much more about pain and neglect than you do. The sociopath occupies a more visceral subjectivity, one full of contrasting colors, vividity and darkness.

2) The crooked CFO who loots his company's pension fund, leaving elderly people penniless while he buys a mansion, a boat, and new boobs for his girlfriend who replaced his wife of 25 years.

The CFO occupies a much more placid subjectivity than the sociopath, and is probably less painful to talk to (unless you retch when you learn why he ditched his wife and looted his company). The CFO obviously worked hard to get to his position. It would probably be very pleasant, in fact, to talk with the CFO on his yacht while smoking his Cuban cigars.


3) The punk who smashes out your @250.00 car window to steal your $15.00 CD laying on the front seat.


Fortunately, you have an obvious commonality with the punk: similar taste in music. Music gives order to subjectivities, so it is sure that you will be able to communicate with the punk on a large number of issues. Since the punk was willing to smash your $250.00 car window, he is clearly a free spirit. His subjectivity is probably untainted by social mores or book learning and therefore more pure. Be glad that you were able to meet the punk: $265.00 is a small price to pay for the value of this meeting of the minds.

Nah, I couldn't disagree more, the sociopathic killer, the greedy CEO and the punk are all psychopaths. Some psychopaths are just more clever at the game than others, as in the case of the CEO.

While I highly value the quality of empathy, you can't do empathy on a psychopath. Empathy means to feel WITH someone. When we are talking about a non-psychopathic person, I don't think you need to have experienced his same exact pain to have empathy for him. All you need is enough imagination to put yourself in that person's place and imagine what he must be feeling.

Psychopaths completely lack all empathy. Higher human emotions are completely foreign to them. I tried doing empathy on the "ax murderer." I tried imagining myself in his place and looking out through his eyes at the world. It made me sick before I got very far into the experiment. I can't imagine being indifferent to the life or death of another person; I can't imagine just helping myself to what I want - whether its someone else's car stereo or a the workers's pension fund at my company..

I am far from being Mother Teresa, and I've certainly done my share of selfish things, but never on that level, and some of them I feel bad about to this very day. The psychopath has no remorse. None - just a sense of entitlement.

The ax murderer played classical guitar; I have loved the music of the classical guitar all my life. I got to hear classical guitar concerts that he played just for me. He also stole $23,000 from me. It wasn't worth it.

For that $23,000, not only could I have bought myself a really nice sound system and a collection of classical guitar CD's made by some of the greatest players in the world; I also could have attended any number of live concerts by these musicians, and at the end, I wouldn't be feeling this deep sense of betrayal and mistrust of my ability to make good judgements of other human beings.

The point of view of a psychopath is not only worthless, its frightening. They are the one group of people I have NO empathy for. I think they should all be put on an island somewhere and they can prey on each other and leave the rest of society alone.

[wolf]

Originally Posted by Torrere

Very nice try, wolf, but you fail. It's a common mistake -- you took the objective approach, and this conversation is about the subjective approach.

Truly, you are a poet, and poets see the world differently.

[smoothmoniker]

Originally Posted by Torrere

Therein lies the beauty of the subjective approach: because every subjectivity is valid, we are freed from the chains of judgement.

Ah, and here we get to the heart of it. This is really a conversation about morality, isn't it? And nobody wants to be in the position of having to make judgmental statements about somebody else's moral alignment, right?

Let me make two somewhat unrelated comments here.

First, to say that, in your words, a "knowable objective reality" exists is not the same thing as saying that there is a perfectly objective observer of it. As far as I know, nobody who steps up to the plate in baseball hits a home-run on every pitch. That doesn't stop us from saying that some batters are better or worse at measuring against that unrealized standard. Yes, every person has perspectival limitations, but no, that does not mean everyone is limited to exactly the same degree by their being a subject in their own observation.

Secondly, if we are truly going to say that subjectivity prevails over objectivity in every case, it does not allow us to talk about moral progress. At all.

Think about this for a second - imagine a person who is cruel to people, abuses power, hurts the innocents, kills and eats young children. Now imagine that, over the course of several years, he slowly stops being cruel, abusive, and an infant cannibal. We would want to say that he has made progress, right? He is better now than he was. But to say that someone has progressed implies an external measure that they have advanced along. If we're subjectivists, we're not allowed to introduce anything external. We are not allowed to say that the former infant cannibal has made moral progress. We are not allowed, in fact, to say that anything about him has changed, other than his perspective.

The same is true of cultural relativism (the emperor and the nose story) - we all believe that a Germany that killed millions in the 1940s has morally progressed to become the Germany today that, ya know, doesn't load people on boxcars and gas them. They have progressed in some way that transcends perspectival shift.

We might be able to talk about relativism as an academic curiosity, but we can't actually live like that. We all, truly, believe that progress has been made.