a theory of moral sentiments, continued

I had lots more to say on the subject of my last post, but I was out of time and whenever I start a post and save it to finish later, it lingers in my "drafts" box for weeks and months, and by the time I get back to it my ideas have so evolved that I can't continue it. So I decided to just post it and continue later, if moved.

The state of mind I ended with in the last post-- the understanding, not just intellectual but emotional, that my neighbor's suffering is an evil equivalent to my own suffering-- is most clearly felt when the neighbor is loved. In fact I might make this one of the cornerstone definitions of love. A strange thing happens, only in moments and glimpses mind you, but even these moments and glimpses are peculiar and powerful... a strange thing happens when we love someone, and that someone suffers. For a moment we feel that suffering, and it is just as potent and painful an evil as if it had happened to us. It is not simply the discomfort of having a loud crying in our ears (though that occurs too, and is a factor at times even in the most loving relationships); it is, for moments and glimpses, a true fellow-feeling. Not that we ever think, at such times, "I feel just as bad as if this was happening to me"... that thought belongs to a different state of mind. What I am talking about is sitting beside a friend in pain, and feeling their pain without reference to oneself, or to the friend, but as a wound on the face of the world, under which we all suffer.

This is not to denigrate the individual sufferer's place in suffering. If there were no individual sufferer, there would be no suffering at all. But the suffering of the individual, if we only understood it properly, acts as a wound and a blight to all of us-- to the whole of humanity, and possibly to the nonhuman world as well. To feel this-- not to know it but to feel it-- persistently and wholly, would be in the truest sense to love our neighbors as ourselves. Possibly it would also crush us.

Then comes the final question of my last post. If one person's experience of suffering is a universal wound, should not one person's experience of joy be a universal blessing? I don't know; the second conclusion doesn't seem nearly as intuitively sound to me as the first. I will have to think about it more.

I have strayed a long way from my fable of the infants. But the connections should be obvious. If the infant loves his twin in the deepest sense, then it truly will not matter to him which of them receives the pinch. It is because he does not see clearly enough that he and his twin are the same kind of creature that he prefers the pinch to fall on his sibling's foot rather than his own. He has learned that they are the same, but he keeps forgetting it; he keeps thinking there is some grander distinction than simply which feet they are connected to. But that is all it boils down to. I occupy a particular place in space and time; I am connected to a particular set of receptors-- eyes, ears, skin-- by which the world touches me. But whether a pain is given to these receptors, or those to which my neighbor is connected, is a trivial matter; the important thing is that there is pain. And if I could know this, and feel it in my gut, and never forget it, then I would be incapable of hurting another person by either activity or neglect.

a theory of moral sentiments

Imagine twin infants in a crib. They're pretty new to this whole life thing, but they're slowly picking it up... sights and sounds that are repeated become familiar, some of them are associated with pleasure or pain. As these associations build up, they perhaps begin to experience anticipation, both positive and negative. When big sister's face appears over the horizon and she is smiling, they may feel a positive anticipation, because usually this means she is about to play with them or tickle them or sing to them. If she looks angry, though, they feel some apprehension, because sometimes she is resentful, and takes out her resentment by pinching their feet in not at all a nice way.

(By the way, this is a fable, not a treatise on child emotional development. I'd be interested to know in what order these various associations and emotions actually emerge, but it's beside the point here.)

One thing that neither of them knows is that they are twins. While to outsiders they are more or less a doubled unit, identical and interchangeable (and even in the family they are usually lumped together in talk as "the babies"), to themselves they are entirely different types of entity. One of them may indeed have noticed that there are four more or less identical feet in the crib-- but for two of the feet, when big sister tickles them, there is a delightful sensation and urge to laugh. For the other two, in appearance so similar, no shred of such sensation results. So clearly the four feet, though they look so similar, belong to two vastly different classes of object. So that, whether big sister tickles or pinches those two feet really makes little difference.

The infant may later observe that in fact it does make a difference whether the other two feet are tickled or pinched. First of all, the other object in the crib either laughs or cries, and if the object's laughter is pleasant and crying unpleasant, then the infant has good reason to prefer that the object be tickled. Second, if the object's feet are pinched, chances are that the infant's feet will be pinched imminently. The fate of the object's feet is a reliable indicator of the mood of the big sister, and for that reason too it makes a difference to the infant.

All this emotional range is quite plausible for the infant, and out of it may come a very strong appearance of sympathy. The infant doesn't like it when its twin's feet are pinched. He is likely even to begin expressing his dislike by crying even before his own feet are pinched. But the infant is worlds away, probably years away, from even beginning to have a real sympathy for his twin. The pinching of his twin's feet affects his world negatively; that is why he cries.

At some point, though, he makes the shocking discovery that that other object, the twin, is analogous to himself. It flies in the face of many observed facts (those feet produce no sensation! How can they possibly be like mine?), but there it is. The world must now be re-ordered to contain many subjects, not just one. He begins to understand that the twin's feet do produce sensation--for the twin. How odd.

Suppose, now that everybody is a little older, big sister has become more refined in her resentment. Instead of hating or loving both babies at once, she deals with her conflicted feelings by hating one of them and loving the other-- switching more or less randomly between each. (If you think this is implausible, consider the black sheep-white sheep phenomenon that arises in most families.) So any time she approaches the twins, she will tickle one's feet, and pinch the other's.

This changes the emotional landscape considerably. Now, for one of the babies, the pinching of the other feet means two things: the other twin will start to cry, which is unpleasant, and the sister will tickle his own feet, which is pleasant. And there is, too, in the back of his head the knowledge that the twin has experienced pain, very like what the infant himself would have experienced had the sister's wrath fallen on him instead. What does the child do? Does he cry because his twin is making such an infernal noise? Does he laugh because his feet are being tickled?

Or does he really, in a flash of inhuman insight, internalize the fact that, for the whole state of the universe, it makes no difference whose feet are pinched, his or his twin's? In the universe, someone's feet are being pinched-- whether the pinching happens to fall on my foot or my twin's matters only to the two of us, and only because we're so locked inside our own bodies. Whether the pulse of pain happens to flow to me or to my neighbor clearly is not the important thing: the important thing is that there is a pulse of pain.

And then the yet more unthinkable thought: is it the same for joy?