When Bad Things Happen to Other People (17 page)

Smith was confident that “if you labour under any signal calamity, if by some extraordinary misfortune you are fallen into poverty, into diseases, into disgrace and disappointment...yet you may generally depend upon the sincerest sympathy of all your friends” (p. 43). The reason is that, “When I condole with you...I consider what I should suffer if I was really you, and I not only change circumstances with you, but I change persons and characters” (p. 317). The suffering of others brings on a profound shudder for Smith: there but for the grace of God go I.

Various thinkers have reflected on empathy and have found a problem in such logic. If, sensing my distress, Adam Smith emotionally identifies himself with me in the literal way he says, then he is necessarily unaware of his individual identity as distinct from mine. It is only to an observer that Smith has fellow-feeling with me, for Smith is unaware of the vicariousness of what he is feeling. If Smith immerses himself in my personality, then it becomes confusing to talk of him worrying about me. In order for Smith to care about me, he has to recognize his existence as a person separate from myself. Concern for another person and emotional identification with him, some philosophers have insisted, are mutually exclusive. The more perfectly I identify myself with another, the less sense there is in supposing that I can be disposed to help him.

A century after Adam Smith, Schopenhauer embraces this view and argues for it in terms of the separateness of persons:

To a certain extent I have identified myself with the other man, and in consequence the barrier between the ego and non-ego is for the moment abolished; only then do the other man’s affairs, his need, distress, and suffering, directly become my own. I no longer look at him as if he were something given to me by empirical intuitive perception, as something strange and foreign, as a matter of indifference, as something entirely different from me. On the contrary, I share the suffering 
in him,
in spite of the fact that his skin does not enclose my nerves. Only in this way can 
his
 woe, 
his
 distress, become a motive
for me
; otherwise it could be absolutely only my own. I repeat that this 
occurrence is mysterious,
 for it is something our faculty of reason can give no direct account of, and its grounds cannot be discovered on the path of experience. And yet it happens every day; everyone has often experienced it within himself; even to the most hardhearted and selfish it is not unknown. Every day it comes before our eyes, in single acts on a small scale.” (OBM, p. 166)

It is worth pointing out that the difference we make between ourselves and others may prove to be a rich source of fellow feeling. Loyalty to one particular group or ideology may lead to opposition to another; such opposition may strengthen group solidarity and lessen or obscure personal differences among members of a group. Contrary to Smith and Schopenhauer, it seems doubtful that we can empathize with a vast number of persons with quite different interests. Consequently, it is unlikely that we can impartially evaluate persons and positions foreign to us. The goal of taking into oneself the world’s wants and sufferings and, at an ideal level at least, feeling all of its pains is a basic motivation of utilitarianism, a doctrine Schopenhauer considers the very face of compassion.

Schopenhauer rebels against the Kantian tradition of moral philosophy that emphasizes the separateness and autonomy of persons and culminates by linking personhood and dignity. He would abhor what contemporary philosophical discussion terms “the separateness of persons.” This phenomenon can help to explain that there are some people whose misfortunes or suffering could never supply us with 
Schadenfreude
: they are too unlike ourselves. Aristotle, for example, tells us, “And since men strive for honor with those who are competitors, or rivals in love, in short with those who aim at the same things, they are bound to feel most envious of these” (
Rhetoric
 2.10). Schopenhauer’s aversion to the social distinctions on which Aristotle’s thinking rests is palpable: it is because of such distinctions that envy arises. In fact, however, the reason why I may envy one person stands as the same reason why I may not feel any
Schadenfreude
about another. The separateness of persons works in both a positive and negative way.

Another problem with Schopenhauer’s “principle of individuation” is that it fails to allow for competition, a central aspect of life in communities. It must be possible to win promotions, athletic contests, and political elections while maintaining an abiding respect for the persons who lose to us.

What does it mean to speak of the separateness of persons? Some define separateness as physical difference. This kind of separateness is shared by plants, flowers, and paramecia; these, however, lack a point of view. A living thing can possess a subjective point of view if and only if it has (its own) experiences. Various animals share this capacity with us and would seem to deserve the same moral claims we do (Schopenhauer makes a good deal of this observation at the end of 
On the Basis of
 
Morality
). Humans differ from animals by having a sense of self; humans have an awareness both of their selves and of their biological and psychological continuity over the course of a life.

Bernard Williams has rejected utilitarianism on grounds that it fails to accommodate personal interests. The problem, Williams contends, is that “Persons lose their separateness as beneficiaries of utilitarian provisions, since in the form which maximizes average utility, there is an agglomeration of satisfactions which is basically indifferent to the separateness of those who have the satisfactions.”17 In 
Situation Ethics
 Joseph Fletcher equates the Christian notion of agape with utilitarianism because of the central role often assigned to equal regard: “Let’s say plainly that agape is utility; love is wellbeing; the Christian who does not individualize or sentimentalize love 
is
 a utilitarian.”18 Various charges against utilitarianism, that it cannot accommodate moral rights, distributive justice, and the personal point of view, derive from the claim that utilitarianism fails to recognize and appreciate the separateness of persons.

An objection to utilitarianism can be construed as raising the metaphysical question of how separate persons 
are
, as opposed to raising the moral question of how separate persons 
should be considered
. It is this second line of inquiry that I wish to follow here. In 
Ethics and the Limits
 
of Philosophy
 Williams insists that persons should be considered separate on the basis of their manifold preferences: “the truth is that this aggregate of preferences is simply unintelligible unless they are understood to be the preferences of 
different people
.”19 Williams, unlike Schopenhauer, deliberately avoids claims about the essential nature and identity of persons.

In the same general discussion of separateness in 
Ethics and the Limits
 
of Philosophy
 Williams criticizes R.M. Hare’s attempt in 
Moral Thinking
 20 to accomplish what can safely be associated with Schopenhauer’s aim to prevent us from thinking of ourselves as importantly dissimilar to those around us. Williams points out that imaginative identification with the feelings of others works to enlighten not only sympathetic persons but also sadistic or cruel persons. He explains that this knowledge helps us to distinguish between the cruel and the brutal or indifferent. The cruel person is someone who prefers not to give help, although that person certainly
knows
about the suffering of his or her neighbor.

To conclude the discussion of the separateness of persons: In 
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
 Richard Rorty takes the separateness of persons as a given, as is evident in his claim that the goal of ethical reflection is “the ability to think of people wildly different from ourselves as included in the range of ‘us’ [as opposed to ‘them’]” (p. 192). Rorty’s moral paradigm, the “liberal ironist,” thinks that mutual susceptibility to pain and humiliation can unite him or her to the manifestly different persons around; Schopenhauer holds that what can unite persons is a recognition of their common human nature. Whereas Schopenhauer urges us to 
recognize
 an ontological sort of solidarity with other persons, a solidarity that exists before our recognition of it, Rorty encourages us to 
create
 a more expansive social sense of solidarity.

We see, then, important objections to Schopenhauer’s view of the basic similarity of persons. Behind what Nietzsche labels the “herd mentality” lies opposition to Schopenhauer. Nietzsche objects strenuously to thinking of ourselves as others:

Today, conversely, when only the herd animal receives and dispenses honor in Europe, when “equality of rights” could all too easily be changed into equality in violating rights—I mean, into a common war on all that is rare, strange, privileged, the higher man, the higher soul, the higher duty, the higher responsibility, and the abundance of creative power and masterfulness—the concept of greatness entails being noble, wanting to be by oneself, being able to be different, standing alone and having to live independently. (
BGE
, Section 212)

A person who denies his or her individuality is thereafter incapable of either great achievements or great harm. In either event, the goal of morality has been served: the herd no longer has anything to fear.

Finally, Schopenhauer’s reverence for genius in 
The World As Will and
Representation
undermines his own stance with regard to separateness. Schopenhauer certainly does conceive of the genius as a creature decisively dissimilar to the rest of humanity. It was the Schopenhauerian genius who largely inspired Nietzsche’s much more famous account of the
Ubermensch
. Nietzsche’s insistence that personhood is a function of the ineradicable will to power represents an improvement over Schopenhauer’s finally incoherent position.

I do not mean to ridicule Schopenhauer’s view, which rises from a wish to tame the fierceness of suffering. One real way in which we as extraordinarily varied people come to resemble one another closely is through the experience of suffering. Schopenhauer understood this, but confused the insight with the infliction of suffering. A torturer aims to reduce a human being to the lowest common denominator through the infliction of pain; a sadist tries to force a person to lose hold of whatever it is that makes that person unique. The sadist’s goal is to minimize or deny individuality, which means that sadism and torture depend on Schopenhauer’s being wrong about the separateness of persons.

Sharing Suffering: Sympathy

Our moral tradition exalts sympathetic people. Feeling
Schadenfreude
would appear to violate an ethical obligation to cultivate the virtue of compassion, so central to the ethics of duty. Kant postulates that although it is not in itself a duty to share the sufferings (or joys) of others, it is a duty to sympathize actively with them, and, as such, to cultivate the virtue of compassion (
MM,
 p. 205). Kant says “cultivate” because he believes that human beings are naturally compassionate. Because everyone already has certain inherent moral endowments, no one could have a duty to acquire them: they are moral feeling, conscience, love of one’s neighbor, and respect for oneself (self-esteem) (
MM
, p. 200). These endowments lie at the basis of morality, as subjective conditions of receptiveness to the concept of duty, not as objective conditions of morality. It is by virtue of already having these natural predispositions of the mind that persons can be put under obligation. Freud would obviously disagree, given his sharply divergent notion of human nature.

It might seem odd here that Kant generally disregards the moral import of the emotions, as I have said, even as he postulates an ethical obligation to have a certain emotion (i.e., sympathy). A Kantian understanding of the motive of duty can be stretched to include the motive of sympathy if the sympathy stems from the motive of duty (this differs from attributing moral value to sympathy itself).21

Kant’s is an ontological claim, one involving a view of human nature. Although philosophical appeals to human nature have become decidedly passé in recent decades, essentialistic notions of human identity still surface with some frequency in discussions of personal obligation. As Kant knew, the most systematic account of the virtues and vices comes from Aristotle, and in the synthesis of Aristotelian and Christian philosophy found in St. Thomas Aquinas. For Kant, as for St. Thomas Aquinas, an account of the virtues and vices depends on what human nature is like. Accordingly, Kant defines vice in 
The Metaphysics of Morals
 through a particular notion of human nature:

If vice is taken in the sense of a basic principle (a vice proper), then any vice, which would make human nature itself detestable, is inhuman when regarded objectively. But considered subjectively, that is, in terms of what experience teaches us about our species, such vices are still 
human.
 As to whether, in vehement revulsion, one could call some of these vices 
devilish,
 and so too the virtues opposed to them 
angelic,
 both of these concepts are only Ideas of a maximum used as a standard for comparing degrees of morality. (p. 208)

It is this standard for comparing degrees of morality that requires clarification in a discussion of the moral status of 
Schadenfreude
.

Given that Kant refers to
Schadenfreude
in 
The Metaphysics of Morals
 as “no stranger to human nature,” it would hardly seem that he considers
Schadenfreude
an aberrant or epiphenomenal vice. It seems more likely that he regards
Schadenfreude
as all too common to be diabolical in a literal sense. This must be what he means when he calls
Schadenfreude
“
teuflisch
” or diabolical in the 
Lectures on Ethics
. When Kant disapproves of
Schadenfreude
as “
teuflisch
,” then, he rejects it as a vice on a par with envy, sloth, and greed.