| OCR Text |
Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 489 8 responses to others. He defines an empathic response as one in which I respond to another's expression of an emotion by feeling that emotion myself. In a sympathetic response, I dislike another's aversive states and like their pleasant states. In a fully rational person, these responses will extend to the anticipated future of the objects of her benevolence, and as much toward future generations as toward the present one. They will also discriminate more finely between rational and irrational distress, and tend to feel empathy and sympathy for rational rather than irrational discomfort (146). Notice that Brandt's account of empathic and sympathetic responses does not square with his initial definition of benevolence, since one might have empathic or sympathetic responses to others without desiring to maximize their happiness, and might desire to maximize their happiness without having empathic or sympathetic feelings toward them. Empathy and sympathy are emotions, whereas benevolence is a certain kind of desire. There is no necessary connection among them. Brandt reasons - controversially - that these responses are native because they appear in the second year of life, supposedly before learning can occur. He then argues that benevolence would not extinguish in a fully rational person because the early appearance of sympathy makes it resistant to extinction (143; also 333). This means that whether or not benevolent desires are rational or not is similarly a function of two contingent and empirical conditions: first, whether or not benevolent desires are initially present in an agent - i.e. whether they are instinctive, or, if not, universally learned in the process of upbringing; and second, assuming they exist, whether or not they would extinguish under cognitive psychotherapy or not - i.e. whether they are based on idiosyncratic associations that can be altered through intense and careful exposure to information relevant to them. If there is no exposure to information that would alter them, then they are rational; if there is, then they are not. In the best-case scenario, benevolent desires turn out to have the status of the desire for food or nurturing: they are instinctive and ineliminable by cognitive psychotherapy. In the second-best case scenario, they are at least ineliminable, even if based on learned, idiosyncratic childhood associations. If, on the other hand, cognitive psychotherapy can extinguish benevolent desires in some people, then they cannot be rational for those people. And if cognitive psychotherapy can extinguish benevolent desires in everyone, then they can be rational for no one. 8 He also says, "or a disposition easily to learn to have empathic and sympathetic responses" (139). But this begs the question, by turning any easily learned desire into a native desire. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
