(April 10, 2023 at 3:15 pm)emjay Wrote:(April 10, 2023 at 2:52 pm)Anomalocaris Wrote: I don’t think empathy is about abstractly reducing the negative. It is fundamentally about establishing or sustaining a norm of behavior that would increase the chance that others would help reduce the negative when the negative happens to oneself.
I was not meaning it in an abstract sense, but just generalising by using the word negative. Nor was I thinking about the global/social meaning of empathy but just the fact that for an individual, empathy allows you to understand or envisage another's suffering, and the mere thought of that is often unpleasant enough to drive action to reduce or prevent the imagined thing continuing/occurring.
But why should we feel empathy, or feel uncomfortable with th suffering of another? The answer is probably the presence of the propensity for empathy serves the individual in a community by enhancing the chance that collective effort will be devoted by the community to reducing the individual’s suffering. Therefore the propensity has selfish value for the individual.
