People regularly judge themselves, so if you’re really in their headspace, you would be judging them as they do (e.g. all their insecurities). Often, you’ll come back to your headspace and think they’re probably judging themselves too hard. But sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you realize they’re being way too lenient on themselves. As the car crash instigator often justifies, “it just came out of nowhere! It’s not my fault, I couldn’t have done anything better.” Really? Or were you actively making choices that put you in this situation, and tried to avoid thinking about those choices every day until it became a habit and you no longer even had the capacity to realize where you were messing up?
I think the difference between John and ‘normies’ is that John is worse at deceiving himself. He holds himself accountable when things go wrong, and has trained himself to search for where he can improve, not just hope it magically happens someday. This is where the suspension of moral agency comes from: if others were truly morally capable agents, they would be trying to do the same.
Very possibly I’m misunderstanding this but reading this comment felt like it missed the point of what I was trying to say. I find myself agreeing with most of what you say and not seeing why you’ve said it.
Hmm, I felt like your comment pre-edit was saying, “empathy requires suspension of judgement,” while I feel like what makes you feel disgust as you empathize with some people is because, “empathy requires judgement, and you’re better at it than them.” I think normies say, “empathy isn’t judgement,” because the act of empathizing helps them eliminate unfair judgements, and often even judge the other person kinder than they judge themselves. I think smarter people, who are brainwashed to think empathy should somehow end up at this conclusion, modify it to “empathy requires a suspension of judgement,” but that’s totally different from what most people are doing when they empathize.
People regularly judge themselves, so if you’re really in their headspace, you would be judging them as they do (e.g. all their insecurities). Often, you’ll come back to your headspace and think they’re probably judging themselves too hard. But sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you realize they’re being way too lenient on themselves. As the car crash instigator often justifies, “it just came out of nowhere! It’s not my fault, I couldn’t have done anything better.” Really? Or were you actively making choices that put you in this situation, and tried to avoid thinking about those choices every day until it became a habit and you no longer even had the capacity to realize where you were messing up?
I think the difference between John and ‘normies’ is that John is worse at deceiving himself. He holds himself accountable when things go wrong, and has trained himself to search for where he can improve, not just hope it magically happens someday. This is where the suspension of moral agency comes from: if others were truly morally capable agents, they would be trying to do the same.
Very possibly I’m misunderstanding this but reading this comment felt like it missed the point of what I was trying to say. I find myself agreeing with most of what you say and not seeing why you’ve said it.
Hmm, I felt like your comment pre-edit was saying, “empathy requires suspension of judgement,” while I feel like what makes you feel disgust as you empathize with some people is because, “empathy requires judgement, and you’re better at it than them.” I think normies say, “empathy isn’t judgement,” because the act of empathizing helps them eliminate unfair judgements, and often even judge the other person kinder than they judge themselves. I think smarter people, who are brainwashed to think empathy should somehow end up at this conclusion, modify it to “empathy requires a suspension of judgement,” but that’s totally different from what most people are doing when they empathize.