The thing is, your question also led me to some knotty ethical problems, such as, just as an example, is death and even violence not sometimes a compassionate act, if those things preserve life in the larger scale? When you're talking about enlightened compassion, is that an immediate thing where you oppose all forms of harm, or is it longer-viewed? For instance, if you are compassionate, are you in favor of or opposed to capital punishment, faults in the system aside? If you oppose it, are you not hardening yourself to empathy with the victims and victims' families, and if you are in favor of it, are you not hardening yourself to the suffering of the criminal?
I've never had much tolerance for violent movies, and especially not for gore or depiction of suffering. I don't know if that's some instinctive level of empathy going on or if I just learned that very early -- but I've never been able to handle them. I think in that case I actually attach the intolerance more to my vivid imagination, which is very suggestible -- I get nightmares easily and have trouble getting some things out of my head. I guess you could see that as empathetic, but it could also be self-interested.
These questions get complicated. :) And I didn't even get to your last interesting point about what society is nurturing. I was just thinking about something like this a few days ago... wondering whether Japan, for instance, does a better job of teaching empathy, philosophically speaking. But then even in that very Buddhist environment you get things like their behavior during WW2...
I do think that, in the west, with education comes compassion. The trouble is not enough people have access to education.
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I've never had much tolerance for violent movies, and especially not for gore or depiction of suffering. I don't know if that's some instinctive level of empathy going on or if I just learned that very early -- but I've never been able to handle them. I think in that case I actually attach the intolerance more to my vivid imagination, which is very suggestible -- I get nightmares easily and have trouble getting some things out of my head. I guess you could see that as empathetic, but it could also be self-interested.
These questions get complicated. :) And I didn't even get to your last interesting point about what society is nurturing. I was just thinking about something like this a few days ago... wondering whether Japan, for instance, does a better job of teaching empathy, philosophically speaking. But then even in that very Buddhist environment you get things like their behavior during WW2...
I do think that, in the west, with education comes compassion. The trouble is not enough people have access to education.
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