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...

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...

Part 1, Chapter 7: Of the Sublime Anything that evokes feelings of pain and danger produces the sublime- "the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling". Pain is more powerful than pleasure. Furthermore, pain that is far enough from death can elicits pleasure. Part 2, Chapter 2: Terror Fear is the anticipation of pain or death, and as such it paralyzes. Thus, just as pain, fear too evokes the sublime. The common denominator of all of these is terror and it is terror which evokes the sublime. This is reflected in linguistics: in many languages similar words are used to describe wonder (the sublime) and terror. Part 3, Chapter 1: Of Beauty Beauty is distinct from but related to the sublime. Beauty is "those qualities in bodies by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it". Love, conversely, is defined by the perception of beauty. Love is distinct from lust and desire. Lust and desire are forces which drive to possess the object t...