ESSAY CEMETERY

Jesse Prinz argues against empathy. He considers himself a Humean sentimentalist, in the sense that he accepts the Humean assumption of approbation and disapprobation as the bases of moral judgment. That is, Prinz agrees that our assessment of actions as moral or immoral is based on our evaluation of them as praiseworthy or condemnable. But Prinz doesn’t agree with Hume’s thesis that approbation and disapprobation are rooted in empathy. He doesn’t accept that empathy is a precondition of approbation or disapprobation and argues that these are rather founded in emotions such as anger, disgust, and admiration. In J.M Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello, the title character offers a view of empathy that is useful in considering the implications of empathy as a foundation to morality. I will attempt to expose the weaknesses in Prinz’s dismissal of empathy as a precondition of approbation and disapprobation, focusing on the constitutive and causal preconditions. I will then discuss Coetzee’s...

Through the title character in his novel Elizabeth Costello , J.M. Coetzee explores the moral responsibilities of the writer. In Chapter Six of that novel, Elizabeth reads a book about the attempts of German soldiers on Hitler’s life. She is struck by a fictional passage in which a hangman taunts the plotters he is about to execute. Elizabeth finds the passage vivid and terrifying; she feels it is evil. Elizabeth feels some of the evil must have transferred to West through the mere act of imagining and writing the hangman’s words, and likewise to the novel’s readers. “I do not want to read this, she said to herself; yet she had gone on reading, excited despite herself. The devil is leading me on.” In The Sublime and the Beautiful , Edmund Burke defines the sublime. The sublime, he posits, is “the strongest emotion that the mind is capable of feeling” (Ch. 1.7). It is evoked by feelings of pain or danger. Most interestingly, pain that is far enough removed from danger elicits pleasure. ...

Problems with fiction about horror: it can be pleasurable; it doesn’t do justice to the horror (but at least there’s exposure) Have we considered that the explorer enticed into that forest may come out not better and stronger for the experience but worse? How do you compare two evils? Can you? Is there an ethical problem with such a comparison? Having to choose between telling a story and doing good. Elizabeth would choose good; he would choose to tell a story. Basically he is an aestheticist and she is an ethical writer. The answer, as far as she can see, is that she no longer believes that storytelling is good in itself, whereas for West, or at least for West as he was when he wrote the Stauffenberg book, the question does not seem to arise. If she, as she is nowadays, had to choose between telling a story and doing good, she would rather, she thinks, do good. West, she thinks, would rather tell a story, though perhaps she ought to suspend judgement until she hears it from his own li...

Costello has been invited to talk about the problem of evil in the world. This is because she gave a talk in which she compared animal slaughterhouses to the holocaust and people thought she was belittling the holocaust. She thinks it’s futile to talk about evil and she’s also wary of defending herself but she agreed because of a novel she was reading at the time she received the invitation. The book contained a description of the execution of holocaust victims by hanging and it made her sick and inspired/motivated her to speak of evil.  The paper she agreed to give was on the topic “witness, silence and censorship”. She has lately come to believe that we live in a capitalist (“illimitable endeavor”) world. She has also come to believe that reading and writing do not always improve one. In her lecture, she wonders if Paul West, the author of the holocaust book, was not permanently scarred by his exploration of the topic. In the lecture, she proposes that paul’s soul may have been s...