Episode 93 - Pity
Transcript
David: 0:13
Hello, and welcome to Overthink.
Ellie: 0:15
The podcast where two friends and philosophy professors encourage you to overthink your otherwise unexamined life.
David: 0:22
I'm David Peña Guzman.
Ellie: 0:24
and I'm Ellie Anderson. David, pity is not a very well liked emotion. What is your take on it?
David: 0:32
I am definitely team anti-pity for sure. I think pity is an unfitting response when we're relating to other people because it involves a sort of looking down on them. There is a dimension of, I guess, I would say condescension when it? comes to pity, And this is why it's been such a target of critique in the disability rights community as we'll see a little later in the episode.
Ellie: 0:57
Yeah. Nowadays, pity has been superseded, I think we could say, by other moral emotions. it doesn't have the same traction that compassion or sympathy or empathy have. I think though whether we think that pity is moral or not, I've been wanting to do an episode on this because I think pity is a feeling that many of us have nonetheless at various times in our lives. Our senses of what are morally fitting emotions don't necessarily track with how we actually feel we feel a lot of problematic emotions a lot of time.
David: 1:30
Speak for yourself. Some of us are morally pure, Ellie.
Ellie: 1:34
Okay. I could tell some stories. No I'm just kidding. Love you, David. I do think you're a good person for what it's worth.
David: 1:42
Wow. Thanks for the clarification. What?
Ellie: 1:48
I'm waiting for you to tell me that you also think I'm a good person.
David: 1:53
Pause. Long pause. Awkward pause, though. I think we're both pretty chill people. Morally chill is a new concept.
Ellie: 2:02
Although, I am gonna put myself on the line a little bit later in the episode, and people will still think I'm like I don't know. You don't have to think I'm a good person, but I don't know I don't know what it means for me to know whether or not I'm a good person. Anyway okay. Yeah. This is just to say, get ready for some putting myself on the line a little bit later on. I, do think though, in addition to the fact that our emotions don't always track what we actually think is morally fitting or not, I think that our feelings of pity do help uncover who we see as worthy of moral concern and why that implicit sense of worthiness can often track really problematic social dynamics. And so I wanna begin though more broadly, which is with a song that triggers an overwhelming, almost unbearable sense of pity for me, and that is the beatles song, Eleanor Rigby. Do you know this song, david?
David: 2:57
I I do know that song.
Ellie: 3:00
Okay. So I'm guessing yeah. If you know it, then probably most people know it because your pop culture, references are often very limited.
David: 3:09
Yes. You're a good person, Ellie. Remember that.
Ellie: 3:13
But just to quickly state for those who might not have heard this song, it's about a series of characters who are lonely and unfulfilled, and I just find this song truly deeply tragic to the point that listening to it, yeah, just physically pains me. but one of the characters in the song is Father mackenzie, this priest. And For some reason, this is the one that really gets me. the image of a priest laboring over writing a sermon that nobody is going to come hear. and then darning his socks makes me feel so sad.
David: 4:02
It it is sad. Although, let me ask you an ESL question, Ellie. What does the word darning mean? I've never actually known.
Ellie: 4:10
Oh, it's like repairing his socks because they have holes in them.
David: 4:14
My god. Okay. Okay. I did not realize that. Obviously, it's a very sad song, and it's a sad scene of somebody darning their undergarments. In this case, their socks. But I'm trying to figure out your sense of unbearable pity as you said because it seems a little bit random and maybe a little too much at the same time in connection to this particular character in this beatles song. What is it? What's going on?
Ellie: 4:40
It's the weirdest thing. I'm not a very sensitive person most of time, but for some reason, this song just really strikes at my soul. and I think the feeling is specifically one of pity, which I'm not sure is even an appropriate response to have. We'll come back to my unease around my own feelings of pity, but I do wanna know, david, am I alone? What do you, feel when you hear This song?
David: 5:02
Obviously, there is a sense of heartbreak and sorrow that washes, I think, over everybody who pays attention to the lyrics of the song, but that's not the first thing that comes to, I was gonna say it comes to mind, but I should say, comes to heart for me. Yeah. It's not the thing that comes too hard for me. I think the emotion that I feel the most is tied to the phrase look at the people, this sense of observing others in their loneliness. And for me, that's this feeling of sonder with an s, which is a term that refers to the realization that you have at certain moments in your life that other people's lives are as deep and as complex and as private as yours.
Ellie: 5:45
Wait. What? How did I not know about this?
David: 5:48
Yeah. It's a term that is that was invented to capture this particular emotion, this kind of sense of wonder at the interiority of other people. And for me, this feeling overwhelms whatever sadness or pity I might feel towards the characters in the song, whether it's the priest or Eleanor Rugby herself, who is The other
Ellie: 6:06
Eleanor Rigby?
David: 6:07
I just said rugby. Oh my gosh. Eleanor Rigby.
Ellie: 6:10
You're pronouncing it in the french way, too! It's Eleonore Rugby.
David: 6:13
Oh my god. Uh, but yeah, so this feeling of sonder, of looking at other people in the moment where the core of their existence is just shining through. And my partner will tell you that I get this feeling a lot, for example, on freeways when we're driving. And I look at somebody's car driving by us, and I just start imagining in very vivid terms what their life might be like, whether they have children, what they do for fun, what they do for a job, and my mind just starts running creating this narrative of who these other people are that makes their presence in my environment take this sudden moral salience.
Ellie: 6:54
Okay. Whereas for me, there's no distance or no voyeurism for me and Father Mackenzie. It's just immediate. I am him, and it's so, sad.
David: 7:05
It's like a romantic unity, but in misery. And I do find it interesting that For you, it's more fusional, whereas for me, it's much more voyeuristic. And I wanna know in connection to that, why do you feel this way about Father Mackenzie, but maybe not about, let's say, an academic who is writing an article well into the wee hours of the night that, only two people are ever gonna read, and probably nobody is ever gonna cite anyways. Because it seems like you're just pitting somebody who isn't at the zenith of their profession and hasn't achieved any markers of success and recognition?
Ellie: 7:43
I feel like the equivalent for me wouldn't be the academic writing their articles because there may very well be a sense of well-being and enjoyment coming from that The activity might feel intrinsically valuable to them. The equivalent for me would be an academic whose students hate their classes, make fun of them behind their back when they turn around because there's chalk on it, then they go home at night and make their microwavable meal and feel horribly lonely. That's abyssal sense of I'm not living the way I wanna be living.
David: 8:16
Uh, but I don't think we know that father Mackenzie is sad or humiliated in that way. He's not sad that nobody will listen to his sermon. And if anything, maybe he can also find the act of writing his sermon intrinsically valuable. For him, it could just be part of his vocation as a priest that's not really connected to any earthly rewards. Oh, I don't know. Although, actually, I guess you're right that the very structure of the song indicates that he does not feel like there is intrinsic value to this activity. The song is in a minor key, for example. We know that he's lonely, and so on and so forth.
Ellie: 8:55
Exactly. and maybe the professor with chalk on their butt could also be a non pitiable figure if they're really confident about it. But I think what we're getting at is that at least for me, and again, I'm not saying this is a justifiable sense of pity, but it just is like how this feeling comes up for me. Pity is often triggered by a sense of a lack of confidence or recognition in the world around you, especially with respect to professional achievements. I don't know why.
David: 9:21
Well and if that's the case, I think this highlights one of the major problems of pity, which is that lacking confidence and somebody not attending to your sermons are not really good reasons to be pitied by other people who are, looking at you as an object of pity. But even if we agree that it's potentially a reason to treat somebody as a pitiable person. Why these particular features when, a lack of confidence and people not coming to your religious talk are not the biggest problems in the world to begin with. Today, we are talking about pity.
Ellie: 10:01
Is there a positive role for pity in social life?
David: 10:04
Or is pity simply an easy way for us to relieve our sense of guilt at the fact of other people suffering, especially those who are less fortunate than us?
Ellie: 10:13
And why has pity been the target of critique in disability studies? David, you mentioned that if pity is indeed triggered by the sense of not being adequately recognized in the world, There might be a problem with it. We might say that pity is triggered by a sense of a lack of dignity, and this for me is indicated by the loneliness and the tragic sense of father Mackenzie. And I'm really interested in what we are tracking when we're tracking that potential sense of a loss or lack of dignity, and how it might indicate that, pity is not a super fitting response. It's a disrespectful or even condescending response. I think the time has come to talk about Corn Man
David: 11:00
What in the world is Corn Man?
Ellie: 11:03
I've never told you about Corn Man? It's like this common reference for me. I'm shocked I've never mentioned
David: 11:09
I no. I don't think I've ever heard about it, and I don't know. Maybe we're not that close of friends as I thought we were.
Ellie: 11:17
Okay. I don't know. David, the time has come then for you, along with our listeners, to learn about Corn Man so you can regain the sense of closeness and listeners can parasocially gain the sense of closeness. Although, I have to say, I bring this up because you're always saying that we should put ourselves on the line more. And the story of Corn Man doesn't exactly paint me in a very positive light. I am using this as of why I vaguely sense that the pity response is an inappropriate response. So the question is whether you are ready for an autoethnography of a financially stable white lady.
David: 11:56
Ellie, I'm getting the popcorn out, and I am about to sit back and listen to the autoethnography of Ellie Anderson.
Ellie: 12:06
Yeah. The more I think about this story and my corn man responds, the more I'm just like, oh my god. It doesn't get grosser than this. Okay. I've already told you that I feel a strange, overwhelming sense of pity when hearing about a fictional priest from a Beatles song. And father Mackenzie for me is an iteration of this person that I, call Corn Man. A few years ago, I was on a beach vacation with a few girlfriends. It was on the Greek island of Santorini. And every day when we would walk to the beach from the little Airbnb that we were staying at, we passed this guy who had a stand that was selling roasted corn. He was like this older guy and his had this beautiful corn stand set up with a nice sign, lovely location, right on the beach. His corn always smelled really nice. But every time we passed him, he never had a customer. I never saw a single person the week that we were there buy corn from this man. to
David: 13:08
Okay.
Ellie: 13:09
And so for some reason, I always felt so awkward and uncomfortable going by him because I was like, people need to buy his corn. Why isn't he getting the recognition that he deserves?
David: 13:21
The, the recognition that he deserves? for the high quality corn that he sells in Santorini, this island in Greece. Although, I was in Santorini just a couple of weeks ago, so I wonder if I saw this man or
Ellie: 13:34
We it was on Perissa Beach.
David: 13:36
Oh my gosh. I did not go there. So I missed corn man. I was wondering what the whole corn man title of this archetype of pity for you referred to, but I guess this is the founding figure of that. Is that correct? That you that he embodies some of the traits of the of a person in relation to whom you felt pity.
Ellie: 13:55
Yeah anytime I experience a pity response, I call it Corn Man. Literally last week, I went to this event That was not very well attended with my partner, and he was like, is this event Corn Man? And I was like, kind of.
David: 14:07
I see. So in the spirit of thinking about the implications of this white lady ethnography as you presented it, Ellie,
Ellie: 14:15
By the way, David, it does make me feel better that you went to Santorini a couple weeks ago.
David: 14:19
Yeah.
Ellie: 14:20
I'm not the only one.
David: 14:22
Yes. thIs now it's time for an ethnography by a white lady by David Pena Guzman, who also went to Santorini.
Ellie: 14:32
A white lady making herself feel better about having gone to Santorini and experienced a pity response because her brown cohost has also been to Santorini.
David: 14:40
No. But Okay. My question here is about what the source of the pity or the cause of the pity actually is. Because all I know about this Corn man character as embodied by this particular Greek man is that he's a working class individual who had a stand and maybe not a lot of customers. And so the place where my mind originally goes is to thinking in terms of class and whether what's actually grounding this sense of pity from you is maybe a class position above all. And the reason that I'm thinking about this along the lines of the working class is because I'm now going back to the Eleanor Rigby song again. And the figure of Father Mackenzie who also triggers this emotion for you also represents the working class. What do we know about father Mackenzie other than that he's darning, as I've now learned that word, that he's darning his socks. So he is an embodiment of somebody who is poor, and that seems to be what these two characters potentially have in common. And I'm wondering whether you think that makes them an object of pity in those moments where you've had that reaction, whether it tracks that.
Ellie: 15:58
Okay. So I do think there's a class dimension. However, I would maybe contest the idea that father Mackenzie and Cornman are figures of the working class because to be a priest means to be pretty well educated. Historically, priests in the UK were from, middle classes or upper classes even. And Corn Man owns a stand, and so we might say that he's, like a small business owner. So I do think you're right that there is, a sense that they are both figures of the poor, but they're also not figures of minimal privilege. And so I do think there's something weird that tracks class privilege in my feelings about Corn Man, which is part of why I say it's like an autoethnography of a financially stable white lady. I was a tourist in Santorini, going to the beach every day and passing by this man who comes from an economically disadvantaged country relative to my own, but it's also weirdly condescending for me as a tourist to be pitying this, man when I don't know what his life is like. He probably has a perfectly happy life. We know that, father Mackenzie doesn't have a perfectly happy life, but still it's not as though these are figures who are so financially or ontologically insecure that they are, like, actually endangered in their very existence. And I think that's actually part of the problem with this whole Corn Man experience is that I am able to identify with those figures because they're still in some way similar.
David: 17:27
Yeah.
Ellie: 17:28
To me.
David: 17:29
You're right that they are not destitute in the full sense of the term. And the fact that there is some grounds for identification, then it makes me wonder whether what ultimately enables this feeling of pity to take over in your relationship to both of these characters is deep down oh my god. I'm like, really, we're moving here from autoethnography to a psychoanalysis of a white lady, which it was not the point of this discussion. But I'm just raising the question of whether you think there is The possibility that this actually comes from a fundamental fear that you might become him, either Corn man or father Mackenzie.
Ellie: 18:10
Absolutely. This is I think, why I feel like I identify so much with them I have these strong memories of being a really dorky child and always being concerned that nobody was gonna come to my birthday parties. I don't know if you know, this about me, David, but I actually still to this day don't really enjoy hosting because I always worry that nobody's gonna show up. And so there's this sense of a failure to be recognized as a valuable community memberthat tracks the loneliness that you hear in the story about father Mackenzie, and that for some reason, I was imagining in corn Man's experience. and I, was imagining it because I never saw anybody go to his stand. But I don't know. Maybe he has a perfectly happy social life outside of this. But I do. think that what that speaks to is the failure to be fully invested in a community, that is so far from the worst fate that can befall a person. And so as you said, there is this similarity that's being tracked in this pity response, which I think speaks to the fact that pity tends to be triggered as we know with empirical studies on empathy by people who are similar to you in certain respects, but whom you still nonetheless see as beneath you so it's Like, the worst of both, if that makes sense.
David: 19:21
No. It does make perfect sense and this is actually how the philosopher David Hume talks about pity in the treatise of human nature. He says that when we pity somebody, there is always an imaginative act of construction that has to happen because, of course, we have to think we know what is going on with the other person in order to come to the conclusion that they deserve our pity or that they merit it. And I think in this case, you are definitely projecting not just solitude, but also sadness or happiness onto these characters, but you're also projecting enough similitude to yourself in order to make that imaginative leap possible. Because if the abyss between you and the object of pity were too massive or too vast, then the identification rooted in this kind of imagination wouldn't be possible. And so it seems like these characters definitely are sad and morose in their capacity as objects of pity. But, of course, this is something that we have to imagine, and we don't really know that for a fact. That's the point that we don't know. Maybe the corn man in Greece has, as you said, a perfectly happy social life. It just doesn't register in public space.
Ellie: 20:41
Yeah. And I think that for some reason is for me really tied up with this notion of pity. There's this weird sense of the dignity And confidence that come with being recognized as a community member. My deepest fear is being nobody, that's exactly what Corn man is triggering. And I say that, really, being vulnerable with. that because I know that is to have that be my deepest fear is not a flattering thing at all, And it really indicates a certain level of privilege. And so I think this also you see this in news articles about who is visible as an object of pity or even compassion, sympathy, empathy, and who just doesn't quite register as visible such that their relative invisibility doesn't even seem like a sad thing.
David: 21:36
I think it's really important that we ask ourselves precisely that question. Who registers for me in this moment as an object of pity and on what grounds? And that we attend to the possibility that what we perceive as pitiable traits or characteristics in that person maybe complete mirages that are produced by, honestly, really messed up social dynamics and social forces. Just thinking about corn man, you said that he has this small stance, and he's this person who maybe is from the working class, but maybe a small business owner. But I'm just wondering, what if he's actually this very successful businessman who is using this as a front for a very hyper lucrative business in Santorini, and he's just super wealthy. And we don't know that. Right? Corn man is deep down a total badass, and he was you didn't know this, Ellie, but you were his object of pity. Yes. Yes.
Ellie: 22:34
Everybody in the community of Perissa Beach knows that he's super legit, but then just has his supposed stand and tourists are passing by thinking he's not getting enough business.
David: 22:45
I know he's just sitting behind his stand being like, little do they know that I'm, like, ten times richer than they are. But I think this speaks on a more philosophical note, I think this speaks to that gap that can and very frequently does exist, obviously, between our perception of the person that we pity and the reality of their lives as they themselves experience it.
Ellie: 23:07
And I do think even if we are accurately projecting when we're pitying somebody, let's say corn man, actually wasn't successful in the same way that I perceived him as being unsuccessful. There's also something really impotent about it as an emotion, I think because I never bought the corn.
David: 23:25
So you were pitying him and then just still moving away, being like, good luck with your corn stand, corn man.
Ellie: 23:33
No. Exactly. That's like the worst part I was just like I just didn't end up actually buying the corn. I said every day I was gonna buy the corn. I never bought the corn. Anyway, okay, I wanna pivot and briefly make an intellectual contribution to remind listeners that I can be a valuable cohost And not just somebody explaining my own problematic and who cares psychology, which is about the etymology of the word pity. Because I think the way that we've been talking about it right now has justifiably suggested that pity is, If not a straightforwardly immoral response, at least a fraught response morally, And this was not always the case, actually. So the word pity comes from the Latin word pietas, which is piety. And then around the thirteen hundreds, it started to mean compassion or mercy. And quick sidebar on this, there's that famous Michelangelo sculpture, the pieta, which is the Virgin Mary holding Jesus's body. So you can see that's Pieta, that's piety or pity. So around the thirteen hundreds, the word pity starts to mean compassion or mercy, But it was actually associated with virtue. It was seen as a fitting moral response. So the one who felt pity was considered virtuous. And I think this is quite different from the view of pity that We have today. because as we've been talking about it usually has a negative connotation Because it implies this sort of condescension, but also perhaps some sort of in group recognition even.
David: 24:58
Yeah. I really find this history very intriguing because I also read that the shift that you're talking about happened sometime in the nineteenth century. That pity before that used to be a general virtue under Christian morality. But then in the nineteenth century in particular, it started to take on a negative quality to it. And at that point, people started moving away from pity and foregrounding compassion as the appropriate term for the virtue in question. And in the course of that transition, pity becomes something else altogether. We live in a society in which we don't want to be seen as victims. And I suspect that this is one of the reasons why compassion is nowadays seen as a good moral emotion because it carries a connotation of the two people being equal. The person who is feeling the emotion and then person who is the object of the emotion in some way, there is an equalizing element. Whereas pity is seen as a negative emotion because it connotes an imbalance or an asymmetry of power. I think it's specifically a kind of expression of superiority. It's about a holier than thou attitude or about being higher than the person that you are pitying. And I think pity includes not just that imbalance or asymmetry, but it includes a kind of disdain or aversion that's just baked into it. And I think this is how you originally introduced the figure of Corn Man. We said that this is the figure that you fear most becoming.
Ellie: 26:38
Yeah. I think there is absolutely that and then there's also this other side of it though, which is that who we're as a victim to begin with is conditioned by a certain sense of similarity. So this is why I said before that it's the worst of both worlds. Right? Because you're seeing somebody as an object of pity and aversion, maybe disdain. I don't know if I'd go that far. But then that's also dependent on you recognizing them as, worthy of moral concern like you are. And I worry that a lot of people's pity reactions don't get triggered as strongly when it comes to people who are considered abject.
David: 27:16
And I think a lot of what we're discussing right now can be elucidated by what is called the stereotype content model. And before we talk about that, I wanna thank our mutual friend, Alexandra Peabody for bringing this to our attention. Even though she famously doesn't listen to any podcast, and so she will probably never listen to this.
Ellie: 27:35
By the way, David she was actually one of the friends I was in greece with, so she was present for the original Corn man
David: 27:41
She saw it take form. And in fact, she's at the heart of this episode because she is a disability study scholar who gave us a bunch of really helpful references that we're gonna be talking about later in the episode. But back to the stereotype content model. According to this model, our projections toward out groups develop along two different axes, Warmth and competence. Warmth has to do with whether we perceive members of an out group to be friendly, good natured, and in short, just likable. Whereas competence is about whether we perceive them to be capable, confident, and skilled. So according to this view, We pity people whom we perceive as high on the warmth axis, i.e. very likable, but low on the competence axis, i.e., deeply incompetent in some way. The people that often fall into this category as objects of pity, because of that perception, because of that high on one axis, low on the other, tend to be people with disabilities that we collectively perceive as likable, but in some way, unskilled, incompetent, not confident, so on and so forth. And this can be contrasted with how we socially perceive a different group, which is people in a condition of homelessness who are generally perceived in the inverse way. They are perceived maybe also as incompetent, perhaps so low on the competence access. But in their case, we perceive them as also low on the warmth access, So they are deeply unlikable, unlike people with disabilities. And in the case of people in a condition of homelessness, Because they are low on both axes, our response tends to be something else. It tends to be disgust rather than pity. The early 1990s, the disabled people's movement and disability arts movement in the UK began using the phrase piss on pity as their slogan. This was a response to the fact that we live in a society that perceives people with disabilities as objects of pity. Able bodied people often take an attitude of pity towards disabled people. Maybe looking at somebody using a wheelchair and saying, Oh wow, that's so sad. I feel really bad for them. And for the disability rights movement, this kind of response is deeply condescending because it does involve an elevating of the self over The object of one's pity.
Ellie: 30:49
Yeah. And this speaks to the problematic power differentials and sense of distance that we discussed earlier with pity.
David: 30:55
Yeah. And the phrase piss on pity was originally coined by a musician, a man by the name of Johnny Crescendo.
Ellie: 31:01
Incredible name.
David: 31:03
Yes. And the phrase was used in particular as a critique of the telethon fundraisers in the UK that often present disabled people as objects of charity. And these disability activists, what they wanted to do with this phrase was essentially turned the antipathy that these shows cultivated for people with disabilities against the shows themselves. So by saying, we piss on your pity, it's like saying we pity you for pitying us. So it was a reversal of that negative emotion.
Ellie: 31:41
It was the idea that they didn't support the charities that the, Telethons, we're raising money for?
David: 31:46
No it's just the telethon itself, because often what happens in telethons, and these are also a huge institution in Mexico and Latin America What often would happen is these national events that are televised to get people to donate money by sending a text message.
Ellie: 32:00
Yeah totally. Usually with a Celine Dion song in the background.
David: 32:04
Exactly. And then often what they do is they bring particular individuals on stage as representatives of the communities that they want to help. So look at this poor kid in a wheelchair, look at how he falls off of it, or look at how his legs don't move. And so it contributes to the production of a cultural image and representation of disability where you have exactly what we talked about before. You have passivity, you have spectatorship, and you have moral futility.
Ellie: 32:34
Yeah, and it seems that in addition to the problems of distance and condescension that we often find with pity, there's actually an even deeper problem with pity in the case of disability. And that's the very idea that disability is a misfortune. Even if you go back to the old way of using pity synonymously with compassion, as we talked about a bit earlier, or in the ancient Greek word eleos, in order to get rid of the problem of condescension, you're still left with the idea that you're feeling for another person in their misfortune. So remember that definition from Adam Smith was that pity or compassion involves feeling for another in their sorrow. And that sorrow usually tracks an actual misfortune. But from a disability rights perspective, it's a huge problem to assume that disability is a misfortune to begin with, and especially that all disabilities are.
David: 33:29
That's correct. And this is the starting point, actually, of a really interesting article critiquing pity from this perspective. Joseph Stramondo's How an ideology of pity is a social harm to people with disabilities.
Ellie: 33:42
I'm excited to talk about this one. He's such a great philosopher and he actually went to my alma mater.
David: 33:47
Oh cool, I didn't know that. I had dinner with him and a few other experts on disability earlier this year at the APA, so I'm cooler than you.
Ellie: 33:56
Although I wasn't at the APA, so who knows? Yeah. Maybe I would have been invited
David: 33:59
Be that as it may. You know who is an expert on disability theory. Joe Stramondo. And he is a powerful and very compelling critic of pity. He begins by saying that pity obviously is an emotion, but it's not just an emotion. It's also a power relation. And he criticizes moral theorists such as Martha Nussbaum, who's been a guest on our podcast for defining it primarily as an emotion, because he thinks that when we talk about pity, just as a feeling we naturalize it as if it's just like part of our human repertoire of emotional responses. And he has this quote that I just want to share with our listeners."Having pity on somebody who is oppressed denies the contingency of their suffering. It hides the real source of the problem."
Ellie: 34:51
And one thing I found helpful on that point is that Sromondo turns to Sartre's text, Anti Semite and Jew, to make sense of this. So in Anti Semite and Jew, Sartre talks about how there's a perception among Anti Semites that Jewish people have a kind of inner core or essence that is expressed in their bodily comportment and in their lives in general. But in fact, like there is no Jewish essence, it's rather a perception of a core that actually masks the power relations that create the Jew as Jew. And Stramondo talks about how, for Sartre, having pity On a Jewish person during the Holocaust meant treating their suffering as if it were caused by their Jewishness rather than by their oppression. It's important in that case to locate the source. of the suffering in the oppression rather than in the identity of the person suffering. And so despite obviously differences in the oppression of the Jews and their genocide in the Holocaust and the oppression of people with disabilities, although people with disabilities were also murdered in the Holocaust. Strand argues that pity operates similarly in both cases, in that when we pity someone, we misdiagnose the source of the problem.
David: 36:17
Yeah. And in fact, we project again, going back to Hume, an imaginary cause that doesn't exist. What makes the Jew pitiful in the eyes of the anti Semite is his "Jewishness", that je ne sais quoi, that personal quality of just being too Jewish that he carries around and that he cannot escape because it's written on his body. And similarly, what makes the person with a disability pitiful in the eyes of the able bodied person is their quote unquote disabledness, again, which is here construed as a personal tragedy that is enthroned in their very being, and because pity involves that projection, the right way to deal with this is not to try to figure out, Oh who should I pity? How much should I pity them? But rather to understand the harm, the social harm, that pity itself as an emotion. Ellie: And to stick with the Sartre link that Sartre develops in Anti Semite and Jew, which is, we must ask, not, what is a Jew, but what have you made of the Jews? And Stramondo suggests, this is a quote from his article. We must ask, not what is a cripple, but what have you made of the cripples? And this is a way of emphasizing the social construction of disability. Yeah, that crippledness is made, right? Rather than found out there in the social world.
Ellie: 37:51
I love how you now just created a slight modification to Beauvoir's formula, it's like one is not born a cripple but becomes one.
David: 38:01
That's sort of correct.
Ellie: 38:02
No, I think, I thought that was fair, I was just thinking it was funny that we're going from Stramondo modifying a Sartre formula to us modifying a Beauvoir one.
David: 38:11
Yeah, and the upshot to Stramondo's article is that this power relation that pity institutes between the able bodied and the disabled actually comes at a high social cost because it harms people with disabilities precisely by putting them in a subordinate position in the position of the dominated. And at the end of the essay, he gives a number of concrete examples of how this feeling of pity. Translates into social institutions and patterns of behavior that take a toll on the disability community. For example, he says, it's no wonder that in a world where we pity the disabled, we have a lot of money going into the nursing home industry. For instance, he notes that a lot of funds from Medicare and Medicaid are channeled toward these institutional solutions to need for care rather than to the kinds of, at home care options that maybe people with disability would obviously prefer as opposed to being institutionalized in a nursing home. He also talks about how much money goes into biotech research for protocols that Openly proclaim the cure of a disability as a primary goal.
Ellie: 39:35
Obviously seeing it as a misfortune in that case. Yes, a misfortune that applies to individuals and that is rooted in their body. Just like the Jewishness of the Jew. And this, a super basic example here that, people talk about in Disability Studies 101 is the fact that a wheelchair user can't get into a building that doesn't have a wheelchair ramp, not because of their bodily inabilities, but because there's not a wheelchair ramp.
David: 40:03
Yeah. He also points this out. He's like, look at the irony of spending millions of dollars to cure all these disabilities when the real cause of suffering for a lot of people with disabilities is that they're being discriminated against at the DMV, in employment, in education. And those are not things for which you can find a biotech solution. They require social and political and legal changes, and that's a solution of a different order. And he also gives the example, of course, of the telethons with which we began, because what these telethons do, and I mentioned this a couple of minutes ago, is they disseminate an image of disability that then burrows into our private and collective imaginaries where the disabled are cast as fundamentally lamentable, which is what leads to that holier than thou attitude that then we feel good about having because we think it's what charity means.
Ellie: 41:07
And above all, I think one way that we can see the problems with pity is in the sheer fact that most people really don't want to be pitied, right? We're talking about how the disability rights movement involves a rejection of pity. I think there's something about feeling pitied that is, that provokes an extremely aversive reaction among people.
David: 41:32
Yeah, the desire to piss on those who pity you.
Ellie: 41:56
I guess one question that emerges is whether pity is always a wrong reaction or only in certain cases, like maybe we shouldn't pity corn man or people with disabilities, but we should pity other people. So the question is the fittingness of pity a matter of its object or rather of the emotion itself?
David: 42:17
That's a tough question. And I think a lot of this depends on whether we feel that people either deserve or don't deserve the misfortune that befalls them. So it seems like we feel pity for people who presumably don't deserve what has happened to them.
Ellie: 42:36
Or at least have had circumstances outside of their control determine their fate. One thing our listeners might not know, is that pity forms a big part of Aristotle's theory of tragedy. Specifically his view of catharsis. In ancient Greek, the word is eleos, which we mentioned before, and this is also sometimes translated as compassion. In fact, Martha Nussbaum thinks that it should be translated as compassion rather than as pity, but it certainly has been translated as pity for a long time. And for Aristotle, tragic stories provoke the feelings of fear and pity. Take the example of Oedipus. The king who accidentally married his mother and killed his father because he didn't know who his parents were. And when we watch such a play, we feel fear that something similar could happen to us. Okay not that similar.
David: 43:27
I was gonna say that seems like a bit of an exceptional situation. It just wouldn't happen to me, especially because I don't have a father,
Ellie: 43:36
but in any case, neither does Oedipus after he kills him. But the idea that there's some secret that you don't have access to and that could ruin your life in spite of all of your best efforts. The fact that you could reach the peak of your life and then be brought down by some tragic misrecognition is something that provokes fear in the viewers for Aristotle. And then there's the related feeling of eleos. You feel pity or compassion that this awful thing happened to this person, even though he's a fictional character. When you see Oedipus having clawed out his eyes at the end of the play, blood running down his face. You feel a sense of pity for his situation.
David: 44:17
Oedipus, the original corn man.
Ellie: 44:20
I actually don't feel like Oedipus is that much of a corn man figure. Though he is certainly a sad one, but maybe that's just because he had the privilege of being a king. And you know that my corn man syndrome is unfortunately tied to that. Yes, that's it. But I think another way of putting it would be that even though there's a fundamental misrecognition at the heart of the Oedipus story, He was still recognized in a certain sense, and so maybe that's why he doesn't qualify as Corn man. But anyway, catharsis for Aristotle is comprised of the feelings of fear and pity. So pity plays a really central role in the power of art.
David: 44:59
Yeah, and I think the power of art is the operative term here, because fear and pity are negative feelings for Aristotle. And he emphasizes that what's special about catharsis is that it's a transformation of these negative feelings into a pleasant feeling of relief. And this could end up reinforcing that concern that we raised earlier about how pity involves an element of distance from the object of pity, especially because we could say that catharsis involves feeling pleasure by knowing that you are not the object of pity. So I pity you, and therefore I know that I'm not the one being pitied.
Ellie: 45:43
David, I know you did a bit of research on the view of pity that Aristotle develops in his moral philosophy rather than in his philosophy of art, so maybe you could tell us a bit about that.
David: 45:53
Yeah. So slightly different take in connection to moral psychology rather than aesthetics. And I'm going to focus here on a specific article, one by the philosopher Kristján Kristjánsson entitled "pity, a mitigated defense." And the reason that I chose this article is because there are not a lot of defenses of pity out there. And so this is one that just stood out for that reason alone. And it focuses on Aristotle's theory of pity in his book, The Rhetoric. In this book, Aristotle differentiates between two forms of, again, what the Greeks called eleos, this difficult to translate term. There is eleos or compassion, let's say for now, that we feel for people for a misfortune that befalls them that is completely undeserved. So imagine an accident or a tragedy. And the reason that it's okay to call that kind of eleos compassion is because it seems to cohere with. The way in which we use that term today, right? Like something that happened to you. I feel compassion for you. I feel for you. And according to Aristotle, that is a good moral emotion to feel in that circumstance. So when somebody didn't deserve it, it's okay to feel compassion for them. The problem for Aristotle, who is a philosopher of the mean in, in all of his, moral writings, is that every emotion that is a virtue can become a vice if we take it to its extreme, or if we apply it to the wrong circumstance in the wrong way. And so there is an excessive form of eleos, and that's when we start feeling so much compassion that we start feeling compassion for people who actually deserve what they had coming to them. So here, think about like somebody who committed a crime and then ended up in jail. Aristotle says that's a case of a deserved misfortune. And when somebody feels eleos for that person, they're actually misusing or rather abusing in some way the emotion. And so it becomes a vice. And Kristjánsson says that excess off compassion is pity.
Ellie: 48:12
Yeah, I would maybe push against the jail example because I think abolitionists everywhere are wondering does anyone deserve to go to jail for a crime they've committed? Maybe jail or prison is not, a fitting response to a crime. So I think there are questions that we could probe about that, but let's say maybe to take an easy example of this. Let's say a president who has explicitly broken the law is indicted for breaking the law. It seems like it would be weird to have eleos for him in that situation, at least in his capacity as flagrant rulebreaker. So I think that's also a question of, like, how are we conceiving of the people whom we're feeling eleos for? Because I think that we can maybe have compassion for all people while also not necessarily having compassion for things they did that harmed others. Yeah. Maybe we even still could. I don't know.
David: 49:14
I don't know. Aristotle sometimes is like cut and dry about those claims. He's you need to have the right one emotion to the right one situation. And so in the case of the president who committed a crime and then gets indicted, Aristotle says, don't feel eleos for that person. The right emotion for that particular circumstance is righteous indignation, like a sense of justice. Justice has been done because you did something that you shouldn't have done, and now you have to pay the price. And so the problem is that in those cases of deserved misfortune, Pity is always the wrong response, at least for Aristotle.
Ellie: 49:53
And in terms of it as excess, I do feel like there is certainly, back to my corn man syndrome, an element of excess. It's not a fitting response because it's usually directed towards complete strangers. So I wouldn't even know whether they deserve their suffering or not. And sometimes I don't even know whether they are suffering to begin with, right?
David: 50:10
Correct. And so that's Aristotle's position, which is different than the position of Kristjánsson, who is an Aristotelian scholar or a scholar of Aristotelianism. And Kristjánsson says, look, what I want to do is take this Aristotelian critique of pity and turn it against Aristotle on Aristotle's own terms. So basically he wants to say that there is actually A small role for pity to play in our moral lives and Aristotle has missed that and therefore has made a mistake.
Ellie: 50:45
So what is this role of pity?
David: 50:47
So the argument goes like this. You know how Aristotle is all about the mean.
Ellie: 50:53
Yeah. You don't want, you don't want too little of something. You don't want too much of something. He's the Goldilocks of ethics.
David: 50:59
Exactly. And this is the key to what some people have called the homeostatic approach to ethics that we get out of Aristotle. It's just all about balance. And of course, it's hard to be a perfect Aristotelian moral agent and always have the right reaction to every situation. Sometimes we mess up and sometimes we mess up more in one direction than another. So for Aristotle, deficiency and excess of any one moral emotion is a problem. But Kristjánsson says the problem is that we don't mess up in our moral lives always like 50 percent one, 50 percent the other one, as if it were just a coin toss. Maybe there's something about who we are that makes us lean toward one end of the spectrum more than the other in connection to particular moral emotions. So let me make this concrete. Think about the moral virtue of mildness of temper in Aristotle not getting too angry too quickly. Most people, when they mess up that mildness of temper. tend to mess it up in the direction of excess, right? Like most of us are too angry rather than not angry enough. Like we fuck up in that direction. And the same thing happens also with generosity. If we fail to be generous moral agents, it's because we fall in this case in the direction of deficiency. Oh, I actually didn't give any money or, I was not generous rather than oh my gosh, I actually was too generous over the past year.
Ellie: 52:38
I don't know. A lot of people are too generous.
David: 52:41
Yeah, but not the majority. Most people are cheap and avaricious and not giving. And so the virtuous person has to be aware of this tendency that we might have to move toward one end of the spectrum rather than the other. And this is Kristjánsson and this is not Aristotle. We have to be aware of this tendency and then over correct it by moving intentionally in the opposite direction. So rather than aiming for the actual mean, We have to aim a little bit to the side in our moral behavior in order for it all to correct and ultimately land in the actual mean. So as a general rule, Kristjánsson says, we should be more mild than appropriate because we fall on the other side. And if anything, you should err on the side of being extra generous because again, the risk is that we will be insufficiently generous. Now turn to the virtue of compassion slash pity, eleos. In what direction, Ellie, do you think that most of us fail in connection to this virtue? Are we too compassionate or not compassionate enough? Exactly. We, yeah you already knew that, right? Like we fail in the direction of deficiency. And so maybe it is good for our moral development to actually be excessively compassionate as a way to correct for that tendency, because that tendency of not being compassionate, which Aristotle calls callousness, is a really bad thing. And so maybe we should be a little bit, quote unquote, vicious, vice like, and be willing to go to the excessive end of compassion, which is pity, even if we don't really think it's inherently good.
Ellie: 54:30
I find that a very weird argument. For one, I think it would need a lot more clarification about the cases in which we need Eleos and ones where we don't. I don't think having, okay, I'll go back to Corn Man here. Is everybody over Corn Man or not? I'm not sure. Okay. Corn Man, I would say, is an excess of eleos, or Corn Man syndrome. Not Corn Man himself, who knows. It's not like in a good way. I think that excess of pity that I have, or just like the feeling of pity in general, if we want to say that pity itself is the problem is indicative of a certain kind of failing. And it would be better if I didn't feel that way towards those people because I don't know what their lives are like. And hell, it's better if I buy a corn from the guy than if I, than that I think about him for years and years with this overwhelming feeling. There are probably lots of cases where I should have if not pity, then at least compassion for people when I don't. And so I would say that the solution would not be to just accept that I have an excess of pity in certain cases, but to recognize that there are some situations in which I do have an excess of pity and to aim to back off from that. As I said before, it's not as though I can just think my way out of this feeling, but what I can do is try and retrain my habits a little bit so I don't experience it or at minimum, even if I do experience it, then try and counteract it in other ways, recognizing that it's not a fitting response to a situation. And then try and cultivate more compassion in other cases.
David: 56:11
Yeah. And so here it would depend, and Aristotle's ethics are of course always contextual and always tailored to the individual. So in your case, we already know from the beginning of the story that you are more prone to, you're already prone to excess of compassion, right?
Ellie: 56:24
So you are atypical, according to Kristjánsson, relative to the majority of people. The majority of people tend to fall on deficiency of compassion. But I actually really don't agree with that. I think. I think I have an, I'm prone to an excess of pity in this particular case. That's why there is like such a thing as corn man, right? this term that I've come up with, I don't think I'm prone to attend excess of pity in general in my life. In fact, I probably have a deficiency of it in some ways. So I feel like it's weird to have this conception of these strong character traits where like I am prone to, cause I also think for instance, with anger, I'm prone to an excess of anger in certain situations, but not in others.
David: 57:06
Correct. And I don't want us to get distracted by corn man here anymore, rather than the actual debate about the philosophy of pity.
Ellie: 57:14
Yeah, but using it as an illustration.
David: 57:15
Yes, I know. But like the problem is that then I get distracted by the problems with the specific pattern of your corn man syndrome.
Ellie: 57:22
You said Aristotle's view is always contextual.
David: 57:25
Yes, true. And The question here is whether there's a role for pity to play in the good moral life. Now, Kristjánsson says yes, because it helps us correct that tendency that many people have to fall on the end of deficiency. So it's all those metaphors in ancient philosophy where it's like, if the target is in the center in your moral life, you should aim higher because the wind will pick it down.
Ellie: 57:50
You have to take all these external variables into consideration. And so to reach the mean, we just have to aim a little bit to the side. And so that's why he calls it a very mitigated defense.
Outro: 58:02
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