This review of Alison Gopnik's new book The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life describes some fascinating new neurological research about how babies' minds and brains work. Among other things, very young children seem to have an acute and subtle sensitivity to others' intentions, and a powerful sense of empathy. One might easily infer from these innate tendencies a strong propensity to develop a sense of property rights. These directly inferred property rights might be of many sorts, not just those arrangements we now see in the industrialized world (such as those framed by Smith), but some such rights or other seem inevitable if these findings about infant cognitive development are right.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23694
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Gopnik’s research might also suggest that babies might be closer to seeing the world in its natural state-as it really exists. The idea that “pain is pain, and joy is joy” does remove some of the artificial distinctions we tend to make out of convenience, (but also possibly necessity). There seems to be strong evidence here that suggests empathy is innate, but is this empathy one of selection rather than universal. The example Gopnik gives of the children and the different color t-shirts represents a kind of empathy that is more selective or based on preference than a universal type. Why is it that a child “with a wrong t-shirt” does not receive the same consideration and moral concern as the others with the same t-shirt? Is this an innocent sense of preserving those that are most similar to the child, what a child might consider his/her species--Or, is it more calculating than this?
As an emotion, I suspect empathy is by definition particular, hence (initially) partial. We can, of course, learn to expand the scope of those with whom we empathize, but what we seem to start with is just a basis of fellow-feeling to build on. We can build systems of exclusion and bigotry on it as well as ideologies of global egalitarianism.
first i would like to say that a few years ago i viewed the terms pity, sympathy, compassion and empathy to be differentiating tick marks on a spectrum of emotion having to do with the relationship between what we feel and our awareness of what others feel. i will attempt to remember what i posited...
pity is the awareness of another's suffering plus the awareness that the suffering is at the person's expense
sympathy differs in that the suffering was brought upon out of ignorance (the opportunity for awareness and therefore the dodging of suffering was readily available)
compassion is an immediate association to ones suffering and the realization that it was either unjust or out of their control
and empathy is a removed version of compassion where it is a rational knowledge that provokes the feeling. so i have compassion for my neighbor whose house gets destroyed in the flood because mine was destroyed as well but if i watch a flood on tv destroy someone's house i can only empathize with them because i am not directly in that situation.
i would also like to note that a few months ago i was watching a few 3 year old children in a room full of toys fight over the same toy time after time, it didn't matter what the toy was, if someone had it, then the rest of them wanted that toy and no other toy would have satisfied the child. as young as they were, they were products of their very unhealthy environment.
i read this passage this afternoon, thought it was appropriate.
"those who too good for this world are adorning some other. so long as you breathe the free air of earth, you are under obligation to render grateful service. once he who has fully mastered the breathless state* is freed from cosmic imperatives. brave indeed is the guru who undertakes to transform the crude ore of the ego-permeated humanity! a saint's courage is rooted in his compassion for maya**-bewildered men, the stumbling eyeless of the world."
sri yukteswar
*samadhi- super consciousness, the only alternative to death
**state of the world in constant flux, chaos
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