How I Feel Is All That Has Ever Mattered
Under that subject line, Jared Grippe emailed me the following:
When I hurt some one I care about, and they lose trust in me, I feel horrible. In dealing with these emotions I have been operating under the assumption that I am feeling these feelings because of what I did to them, because of how hurt they were. But I’m starting to think I just feel bad because I have potentially destroyed something that brings me such pleasure.
If this is true then empathy itself is just the ability to preserve or emulate someone else’s “feelings” in order to make greater predictions about how your actions may affect the level of pleasure that you, and only you, will feel in the future.
Is life simply a huge complicated collection of choices and chance with no purpose but to affect how we feel?
In other words, are we all just selfish creatures out for our own pleasure? Does altruism really exist, or do we always act in calculated self-interest? This is one of the oldest problems in the subject of Ethics.
I do many things for other people. Why is this? Perhaps I am actually altruistic, or maybe there is a deeper level of computation where I know that giving to others is in my own self-interest in the long run. Certainly selfish behaviour can include acts which seem mostly to benefit someone else. This idea is has been explored in fields such as “game theory” which explains certain types of cooperation as enlightened self-interest, or in evolutionary biology where the argument is made that we evolved to live in groups because it gave the species a better chance of survival, and thus helping someone else gives us pleasure on an instinctual level.
Then there’s empathy. Empathy is feeling the emotions of others. It seems, on first glance, to be a purely selfless thing, but perhaps it is merely a biological or social effect that forces us to take others into account. In fact, it is thought that emotion originally evolved in the mamals as a sort of primitive communication system. When a bunny sees a predator, it gets worried. Nearby bunnies empathize and are also worried, thus transmitting the fear to the entire social group in a way that encourages survival for all. Deep emotional reactions are also involved in child-rearing: we are unhappy when the baby is crying, protective when it is threatened, etc. This is thought to be the evolutionary basis of “love.” Reptiles and other non-mammals do not raise their children this way; their offspring hatch and fend entirely for their own. Correspondingly the non-mammals lack the brain structures that deal with emotion as we know it.
Note that one of the defining characteristics of a “sociopath” is someone who has absolutely no empathy for others. Sadly, approximately 2% of the population are thought to fall into this category. The rest of us seem, somehow, to care about others. It is interesting to speculate on how this state of affairs arose or how this behaviour is motivated — are we all really just motivated by our own pleasure, short term or long term?
Personally, I suspect that the title statement is correct. It certainly is powerful. “How I feel is all that has ever mattered.” Well, yes. To you. If you feel bad about hurting someone else, that is still your emotion. And if you were completely happy with your damaging choices, then you wouldn’t care about your effect on others — by definition. I don’t see any way out of this. In the end, I think it can only ever be our own emotions that matter. It seems to be hard for most poeple to admit this fundamental selfishness. It challenges deep notions of being a “good” person. It’s scary!
But why is this such a frightening thought, really? Better, I think, to simply accept that we have some selfish motivations and some not-selfish motivations. There is a temptation to make moral judegments about intent, but in practical terms this may be irrelevant when we find that someone consistently acts in the interests of others. In other words, does it really matter whether “true” altruism exists? Without the ability to look inside someone else’s head, would we even be able to recognize it if we ran across it?
Further complicating things is the fact that, in humans, ideas can influence emotions (and vice-versa, of course.) We seem to be able to train our emotional responses over time. We can choose to be altruistic, because we see that it makes the world a better place, because that’s what we were taught was right, or simply because it pleases us to make that choice. We can then train ourselves to like the feeling of acting selflessly, which can be a stronger emotion than any immediate loss to ourselves. Thus I give my lover the tastiest morsel on my plate and I am happy to do it.
Perhaps learning to love, in the broadest sense, is about consciously making the choice include the interests of others, and then learning to take pleasure in this. Not necessarily placing others above ourselves, for that can lead to all sorts of interesting pathologies, but simply considering their interests. Various traditions talk about viewing events through a larger “I”, or dissolving one’s ego, or the essential unity of all things. I suspect that all these are referring to essentially the same concept, which is this: you can decide how broad your scope of compassion is. You can choose to care about only yourself, or also your family / partner, or your friends, your community, your country, the entire human race, all living things, future generations…
I’m not saying that anyone can actually live this way all the time, but it might well be something to think about, something to study over the course of a lifetime, something to aspire to. It might have something to do with the meaning of “good”.
Of course, there is still the question of why one should bother thinking about these problems at all. For myself, I just know that I enjoy it.
Further reading:
- Wikipedia On Altruism
- Wikipedia On Game Theory
- Wikipedia On Emotion
- Ethics Update
- A General Theory Of Love by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon (Vintage, 2001)
