May your growth mindset be strong enough to both increase your circle of moral concern to the widest you would reflectively endorse, and your capabilities to meet the challenge of influencing that circle well.
I’m confused—how does being agenty help one get utility from compassion? I think part of my confusion is because these ideas are all pretty abstract; a concrete example would help.
Here’s an example I expect to be unambiguous for all these terms: if you care about the people in Africa dying from malaria, and single-handedly launch a gene drive that extinguishes mosquitoes, you’ve applied agency to turn compassion into utility.
That makes sense, although succeeding in that way at extinguishing mosquitoes requires a lot more than agency! Although it does help. So I guess I see why it would help. The OP sounds to me like it’s implying that agency is enough, not just that it can help, but I guess there are a lot of situations where it is enough. Like donating to a charity or something. Am I thinking about this correctly?
I of course don’t know what he meant, but what I took it to mean is that there are probably cases in which you have everything else but just lack the will to do the thing, and was an exhortation to muster it and act! As has been said, “Hesitation is always easy, rarely useful.” Seeing as it was posted this time of year, I figured it was a personal take on New Year’s Resolutions.
I thought of it as a New Years blessing. Someone might say “Wishing a happy new year to you and your family & friends” and I kinda wanted to work with that a bit and expand it (and restate it in jargon for fun).
Like, wanting things to go well for your family & friends is fine, but being empowered to cause them to go well is even better. And “family & friends” is one sort of circle of moral concern; but around here maybe the reader is concerned about humanity or animals or lifekind or all sentient beings, so “your friends & family” could easily be too narrow. I also did want to include that applied compassion towards yourself is part of it; “put on your own oxygen mask before assisting others” and all.
But yeah, for things to actually go well (+utility), it’s not enough to be benevolent (compassion), you also have to have some power (agency) to cause your benevolence to have some effect. (And I really liked @anaguma’s followup.)
May you be agenty enough that your compassion yields utility, for you and your circle of moral concern.
May you be compassionate enough that your agency doesn’t narrow your circle of moral concern.
May you be capable enough that even the largest circle of moral concern does not exhaust your influence.
May your growth mindset be strong enough to both increase your circle of moral concern to the widest you would reflectively endorse, and your capabilities to meet the challenge of influencing that circle well.
I’m confused—how does being agenty help one get utility from compassion? I think part of my confusion is because these ideas are all pretty abstract; a concrete example would help.
Here’s an example I expect to be unambiguous for all these terms: if you care about the people in Africa dying from malaria, and single-handedly launch a gene drive that extinguishes mosquitoes, you’ve applied agency to turn compassion into utility.
That makes sense, although succeeding in that way at extinguishing mosquitoes requires a lot more than agency! Although it does help. So I guess I see why it would help. The OP sounds to me like it’s implying that agency is enough, not just that it can help, but I guess there are a lot of situations where it is enough. Like donating to a charity or something. Am I thinking about this correctly?
I of course don’t know what he meant, but what I took it to mean is that there are probably cases in which you have everything else but just lack the will to do the thing, and was an exhortation to muster it and act! As has been said, “Hesitation is always easy, rarely useful.” Seeing as it was posted this time of year, I figured it was a personal take on New Year’s Resolutions.
Ok yeah, I think this is making sense to me now. Thanks!
I think there were a couple extra “s”s ;)
I thought of it as a New Years blessing. Someone might say “Wishing a happy new year to you and your family & friends” and I kinda wanted to work with that a bit and expand it (and restate it in jargon for fun).
Like, wanting things to go well for your family & friends is fine, but being empowered to cause them to go well is even better. And “family & friends” is one sort of circle of moral concern; but around here maybe the reader is concerned about humanity or animals or lifekind or all sentient beings, so “your friends & family” could easily be too narrow. I also did want to include that applied compassion towards yourself is part of it; “put on your own oxygen mask before assisting others” and all.
But yeah, for things to actually go well (+utility), it’s not enough to be benevolent (compassion), you also have to have some power (agency) to cause your benevolence to have some effect. (And I really liked @anaguma’s followup.)