#moralizing

[sabakos]

This sounds wrong at first but there's no moral value to empathy. My ability to empathize with you also means I understand how to hurt you as much as possible. Your failure to empathize with me prevents you from doing the same to me in return. Like all knowledge, understanding the emotions of others can be used for either good or bad. Those who have less knowledge have a disability, not a moral weakness.

So when a person has brain problems that make them unable to feel empathy, treating them like a monster is simply your own failure to practice what you are faulting them for not being able to do.

[princesssarisa]

Part I of Little Women has a minor recurring theme of "Be good, or your loved ones might die because of you."

First there's Amy falling through the thin ice because of Jo's anger. Then Beth's pet bird Pip starves to death because of her irresponsibility. And then Beth's illness is framed as being Meg and Jo's fault because they neglected to visit the Hummels – realistically, of course, scarlet fever has an incubation period, so Beth would have already caught it before the day Meg and Jo refuse to go in her place, but Jo still blames herself and the narrative seems to want us to feel as if it's their fault.

By repeating this morbid theme, was Alcott just following the conventions of the era's moralizing children's literature? Or does it say something about her psychology?

[the-statue-of-ozymandias]

My heart breaks when I think about the tragedy of the human condition. There are so many who feel pain and anger that could be alleviated if someone, anyone just showed them basic and sincere human kindness. It’s very easy to say that therapy is needed, and maybe it is, but a normal average person can be the first step towards good if they only went slightly out of there way for a person who might be having a hard time. If you look at the people who were society’s greatest monsters it’s easy to see that if a better, kinder guiding hand was offered, maybe they could’ve become better people. Maybe all the bad things they did would’ve never come to pass if any person who had good in their hearts had found them first, or at least found them and said “there is still good in the world. You don’t need to do this.”

[publicatiosui]

The implied equation between being “talented professionals” and having “souls” is a telling expression of current literary attitudes. People’s souls are more likely to be found in the ways they betray each other, their modes of love and hate, than on their résumés. Authorial image management now seeps into the writing of fiction itself. The more readers (and critics) are content to conflate alter egos with authors, the more authors are tempted to idealize their fictional selves: confessional literature cedes the field to the autofiction of self-flattery. Characters in middlebrow melodramas are fine-tuned to avoid the ruffling of sensitivities. Elsewhere villains and victims are flattened so that the readers of contemporary gothic narratives can easily tell them apart. A pseudopolitical moralizing about these issues has crept into more and more of our criticism, and prizes are bestowed on maudlin therapeutic narratives of abuse and recovery. (See last year’s Booker winner Shuggie Bain.) Roth was rarely maudlin, and however much his characters indulged in therapy (analysis, as it was called back then), it never worked.

-- Christian Lorentzen, whose output led him to be described as "two of the five best book critics we currently have"

[violentviolette]

Do you consider yourself a good person?

I consider the dichotomy of "good" and "bad" people to be inherently flawed and useless to society and people's lives.

firstly, it is impossible to be an "inherently" good or bad person. all people have the potential to hurt others within them just as everyone has the ability to be kind. its our choices and our behavior that determine what kind of person someone is and since we are constantly making choices and actions, that alignment is constantly changing. someone might have been a kind and considerate person a few years ago, but now they are angry and aggressive, and vice versa.

and because of that constant state of flux, I think its really useless and meaningless to try and classify people this way. I think its much more important to look at peoples current actions to determine what kind of person they are in a way that's specific and accountable.

I don't know what being a "good" or "bad" person looks like because those are subjective arbitrary moral judgments and not actions. I care much more if a person is kind, honest, and genuine than if they are "good".

I can't hold someone accountable to the vague notion of "good" but I can hold them accountable for being kind or honest because it's an action, not a moral value judgement.

I am either a good or bad person depending on who u ask. some people would say that since I think not nice thoughts that makes me a bad person, while another might say I'm a good person because I don't act on those thoughts and purposefully choose to be kind instead.

its a useless categorization that does nothing other than moralize humanity and give people a convenient excuse to pretend they are incapable of doing harm because they're morally pure while others are morally impure and therefore their actions are always punishable. same old conservative morality, different hat

[rapeculturerealities]

Many of us think of washing someone’s mouth out with soap as an outdated punishment for ill-tempered children, but for a long time it was also commonplace as a corrective for women who ventured beyond the bounds of what their husbands considered wifely. It’s also no accident that such a penalty was enacted in conjunction with the submerging of the offending party into a body of water. After all, washing away sin is an act as old as civilization itself, and one that’s most often associated with children, women, and others considered uninitiated in the ways of morality and faith. Baptism is meant to purify, through Christ, children born with sin. While any Jew can go to the mikveh, or ritual bath, women have to go after their mensesto wash away the impurity of their own blood.

In medieval times, and up to as late as the early 19th century, women who were presumed to be witches (or simply deemed immoral) would often be strapped to a chair and submerged in water as both punishment for their perceived crimes and as a form of purification. And soap, layered on top of the symbolically cleansing water, was often portrayed as the “cure” for nonwhite cultures that white imperialists sought to indoctrinate—violently, if necessary—in their notions of faith, family structure, and goodness. One infamous 1890s advertisement for Pears’ Soap depicts a military man washing his hands in a basin, with copy that reads, “The first step towards lightening The White Man’s Burden is through teaching the virtues of cleanliness.”

Prior to the mid-1800s, soap was handmade by artisans at great cost, and available only to royalty or the very wealthy; bathing itself was seen as more of an extravagance than as a matter of hygiene. But in the mid-19th century, multiple factors brought soap to the forefront of Western culture. Doctors like Ignaz Semmelweis in Hungary and, later and more famously, Louis Pasteur, recommended regular handwashing as a way to prevent disease. At the same time industrialization allowed for the more efficient production and distribution of soap. But along with the mass-market availability of soap came an increased sense of responsibility in the minds of the powerful for governing “uncivilized” outsiders through cleansing. These purveyors of morality turned their eyes, as they so often did, to those they believed were the most in need of purification: people of color, misbehaving children, and wayward women. The desire to maintain an ideal of spiritual spotless-ness has always been a driving force of patriarchy; the introduction of soap simply added an implicit caveat suggesting that natural means of purging impurity were insufficient—true cleansing required a man-made product designed to eliminate filth.

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[scriptorsecular]

The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.

Aldous Huxley

[hermitthrush]

Again it seethes, again it glows! Thou fool, go in and comfort her! When such a head as thine no outlet knows, It thinks the end must soon occur. Hail him, who keeps a steadfast mind! Thou, else, dost well the devil-nature wear: Naught so insipid in the world I find As is a devil in despair.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part One (1829) | Taylor translation, Act 1, Scene XV. Mephistopheles and his contempt for Faust’s moral vacillations.

[collage-sugar]

only a portion

[chvazquez]

#12RulesforLife #book 📖 #tedxtalk #humans #threat #planet #antihuman #china 🇨🇳 #hightech #children #parents #moralizing #Mao #revolution

[princesssarisa]

Online discussions of fictional tragic heroes and complex villains tend to be awfully prone to black-and-white thinking and moralizing.

From Shakespeare characters, to Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, to Anakin Skywalker, whenever they're discussed, these same assumptions seem to appear:

"This character is tragically flawed and at least partly to blame for their own downfall" equals "This character is a bad person who deserves to suffer and die."

"This character's choices are wrong, but well-meaning and understandable given their circumstances" equals "This character is an innocent cinnamon roll who does nothing wrong."

"This character doesn't start out as a villain, but is flawed and shows hints of their future villainy from the start" equals "This character was inherently evil from birth."

"This character is never entirely bad even after becoming a villain – at heart they're still capable of love and compassion" equals "This character is never a villain, they're just a misunderstood sweetheart."

"This character does bad things, but other characters share in the blame too" equals "It's all the other people's fault."

I'll admit, I'm on the autism spectrum and I'm no stranger to black-and-white thinking myself, but still... I'm pretty sure that fiction doesn't work that way.

[reasonandempathy]

Activism: “Here is why and how you can directly get involved and help people.”

Moralizing: “If you disagree with me you’re a shit person and you need to apologize.”

Learn the difference.

[oliviadehavillandwarnsyou-blog]

[furryalligator]

"Why do you guys insist on forcing your messages down readers' throats?" http://pic.twitter.com/ltzZzMZu50

— Tom Brevoort (@TomBrevoort) January 22, 2017

[asmallexperiment]

Really, Jeff, how do you feel?

The hypocrisy of Tony La Russa and the understandable fears of black baseball players:

Tony La Russa, a convicted drunk driver who managed one of the most steroid-addled clubhouses in modern baseball history and today oversees an organization that at the trade deadline passed along to multiple organizations private medical information about a player it wanted to deal, spent Wednesday playing moralist, a role that suits him about as well as chief baseball officer for a major league franchise.