>
>I do not step on ants, or yell at my relatives. I feel bad when I
>hear news of a stranger dying in a heat wave. How did I score? ;-)
>
> --ravi
Ok, I'll change the question: Do you feel the same empathy when a stranger dies as when it's someone close to you?
This is an age old question explored very nicely in an article called "Killing a Chinese Mandarin: The Moral Implications of Distance" by Carlo Ginzburg. I've clipped an excerpt below.
And how does one get through life without yelling at relatives or stepping on an ant? ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
'I'm being tortured by evil thoughts.' [Rastignac says, adding:] 'Have you read Rousseau?'
'Yes.'
'Do you remember that passage in which he asks the reader what he would do if he could become wealthy by killing an old Chinese mandarin, without leaving Paris, just by an act of will?'
'Yes.'
'Well then?'
'Oh, I'm on my thirty-third mandarin.'
'Don't joke about it. Come, if it were proved to you that the thing was possible and that all you'd need to do would be nod your head, would you do it?'
'Is your mandarin very old? Oh, well, young or old, healthy or paralytic, good Lord . . . Oh, the devil! Well, no.' (H. de Balzac, Père Goriot)
The mandarin parable anticipates the development of Rastignac's character. Balzac wants to show that in bourgeois society it is difficult to observe moral obligations, including the most basic ones. The chain of relations in which we are all involved can make us at least indirectly responsible for a crime. Some years later, in Modeste Mignon, Balzac again used a mandarin to make a similar point: 'If at this moment,' the poet Canalis says, 'the most important mandarin in China is closing his eyes and putting the Empire into mourning, does that grieve you deeply? In India the English are killing thousands of men as good as we are; and at this moment, as I speak, the most charming woman is there being burnt but you have had coffee for breakfast all the same?' In a world dominated by the cruelties of backwardness and the cruelties of imperialism, moral indifference already implies a form of complicity.
On the contrary, the resistance of Rastignac's friend to the idea of killing an unknown Chinese mandarin can be considered as an implicit endorsement of the existence of 'a general idea of just and unjust in accordance with nature'as Aristotle put it. But the emergence of a worldwide economic system had already turned the possibility of a financial gain, involving much longer distances than Aristotle had imagined even in his wildest flight of fantasy, into a reality. The possibility of such a connection was perceived a long time ago. 'A WestIndia merchant will tell you, that he is not without concern about what passes in Jamaica,' David Hume remarked in a section of his Treatise of Human Nature placed under the title "Of Contiguity and Distance in Space and Time". As we will see, Hume's subtle remarks on this topic ignored the moral and juridical implications of it. This silence is not easily missed today. We should have become aware that somebody's financial gains can be related, more or less directly, to the distress of distant human beings, thrown into poverty, starvation, and even death. But the economy is only one of the possibilities of affecting other people's lives from a distance which progress has given us. In the most widespread version of the story the Chinese mandarin can be killed simply by pressing a button: a detail which is more consistent with modern warfare than with the traditional attribution of the story to Rousseau.