Abstract
Influential moral theories keyed to benevolence (including Mengzi’s and Hutcheson’s) claim a footing for ideal moral benevolence in natural human benevolence. The meaning of this claim depends on how natural and ideal benevolence are conceived and how the two are supposed to be related—as Mengzi suggests, for example, that there is an innate “sprout” of compassionate aversion to suffering that tends to grow into moral humaneness. In any case it is plausible that some sort of spontaneous and consistent human friendliness supports a moral standard of unselfish concern for the well-being of others. The premise of benevolence theory is strengthened when we take account of a largely overlooked form of general good will: benevolent interest in the efforts of others. Here too a form of moral benevolence may grow from a base in natural good will, a point anticipated in Aristotle’s observation that our friendly interest in others is stimulated by the contestants in sports events. The sports spectator act of “pulling for” contestants, though conflicted by competition and exploited for various nonmoral satisfactions, is a vivid specimen of a general pulling for all innocent efforts in an inclusive moral fellowship of triers.
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Mengzi, Mencius, trans. D. C. Lau, rev. ed. (London: Penguin, 2003); Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004) and An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002). For a recent example see Michael Slote, Morals from Motives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
E.g. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1888), p. 603; and see Rico Vitz, “Sympathy and Benevolence in Hume’s Moral Psychology,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 42 (2004): 261–275. In this paper “sympathy” will refer to any sort of prosocial emotional response.
Note that it may be true, as Hutcheson thinks, that we love benevolent actions and agents, holding benevolence very dear among the possibilities of human life, without loving the objects of benevolence, that is, without loving by being benevolent (Inquiry, p. 90).
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Harris Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), 1155a20-23.
Michael Tomasello derives a moral psychology of sympathy and respect for others from the evolutionary development of human capacities for cooperation in A Natural History of Human Morality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). The naturalness of this psychology is ambiguous since a big part of the posited evolution depends on reasoning, even in the face-to-face “natural morality” that precedes the cultural objectification of moral norms. Yet Tomasello cites numerous findings of early childhood solicitude for others that seem to support the premise of a biologically inherited, species-characteristic emotional orientation to benevolence and aptitude for benevolent thinking.
Mengzi, Mencius, p. 38 [II A 6]. The key passage: “Suppose a man were, all of a sudden, to see a young child on the verge of falling into a well. He would certainly be moved to compassion, not because he wanted to get in the good graces of the parents, nor because he wished to win the praise of his fellow villagers or friends, nor yet because he disliked the cry of the child. From this it can be seen that whoever is devoid of the heart of compassion is not human… The heart of compassion is the germ [duan, sprout] of benevolence [ren]…For a man possessing these… germs to deny his own potentialities is to cripple himself” (38 [II A 6]).
Adequately socialized adults will have acquired realizations that the survival of human groups depends on raising the young (which means that the young child at the well is much more to them than a generically innocent being capable of suffering) and that all humans must rely on others for protection from hazards to which they are vulnerable (“It could be me about to do something like falling into a well”).
Winnie Sung argues that the heart conceived here by Mengzi involves being unwilling to cause or fail to prevent harm just in cases where one’s actions have a bearing on another’s well-being, rather than being generally responsive to suffering. Sung, “Bu Ren (Cannot Bear to Harm) in the Mencius,” Philosophy East and West 69 (2019): 1098–1119. Sung’s interpretation does not change Mengzi’s position in my argument but does bring a significant practical specification to benevolence. This view of benevolence would share with karma theory a concern about causality in interagent relations.
Essay, p. 17. Some life experience may be required before our natural powers of benevolence and moral sensitivity are exercised (p. 10).
To be clear, I grant that both Hutchesonian and Confucian ethics can effectively address the practical well-doing of others. I believe that the focus my paper offers will help them to do so.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1166b-1167a. Rackham renders kalos here as “beautiful” and andreia as “brave.” See also 1155b-1156a on elements that must be added to eunoia for there to be proper friendship.
Amplifying Aristotle’s interest, Peter Hadreas argues that eunoia must mean recognition of worthiness—“Eunoia [Goodwill]: Aristotle on the Beginning of Friendship,” Ancient Philosophy 15 (1995): 393–402. But that is too pointed a definition of eunoia, even for Aristotle’s usage. Consistent with its normal meaning, Aristotle understands eunoia as the base of all friendly attitudes.
The sense of fellowship becomes more problematic, without necessarily breaking down, in cases of pulling for someone to succeed in an action just for fulfillment of the puller’s own purposes (pulling for an airline agent to swiftly solve the problems of people ahead of you in line) and pulling benevolently yet at cross purposes with the fellow agent (pulling for your shy son or daughter to ask someone to dance) or without fully understanding or endorsing the purposes of the fellow agent (pulling for a member of a different culture to succeed in renewing a traditional ritual).
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1067a8-10.
I am presenting this ideal on a sentimentalist base, but a formalist approach can arrive at it also. As is well known, Kant derives an imperative of practical helpfulness from a fairness requirement rather than from natural benevolence (Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton [New York: Harper & Row, 1964], AA 4:423, 430; The Doctrine of Virtue, trans. Mary J. Gregor [New York: Harper & Row, 1964], AA 6:401, 452); as a moral pedagogue, however, he affirms the preliminary significance of a benevolent “good heart” (The Doctrine of Virtue, AA 6:479; Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, AA 7:253.).
Here I leave unexamined the relation between an individual’s conscious, often benevolent sense of fellowship with other agents and the social constitution of action as it is theorized in the traditions of Marx or Mead. I do not think that my account of benevolence would be invalidated by anything that can reasonably be asserted about social structures and processes necessarily involved in humanly meaningful action. But I acknowledge that the question is always worth raising whether a representation of benevolence or “partnership” depends on a false conception of individuality or community.
On the conditions for actualizing practical fellowship see Michael Bratman, Shared Agency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) and Margaret Gilbert, Joint Commitment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
See Tomasello, Natural History, on the practical logic of interdependence at the level of the whole group.
Benevolence theory can argue that the moral justice concern with everyone’s exerting themselves adequately and deservingly, “pulling their weight,” presupposes a benevolent concern for other agents being able to succeed at all and welcoming them into partnership. Nonbenevolent justice loses moral quality in shifting to a quid-pro-quo footing.
See Daniel L. Wann and Jeffrey D. James, Sport Fans: The Psychology and Social Impact of Fandom, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2019), pp. 26–82, and Alexander Regina, A Phenomenological Investigation of Sport and Fandom Through Hans-Georg Gadamer and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Ph.D. dissertation, Duquesne University, 2017), pp. 84–93.
In a philosophically rare observation of sympathy with actions, Adam Smith observes that “we writhe and twist while watching a dancer on a rope”—The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1976), p. 48. But we also writhe and twist while attending to other components of a complex action—for example, while wishing a launched ball to find the goal or miss it.
On a more morally ambiguous interpretation, celebrating the “classy” and clapping for the recovering athlete is prescribed audience participation in a sport drama, not really on a different level than cheering for the “good” pro wrestler.
In his theory of drama, Aristotle asserts that a plot must not involve good fortune coming to a bad person because that would outrage the audience’s philanthropia. Poetics, trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932), 1453a.
Smith, p. 408.
Ibid.
Ibid. 175–176.
Ibid. 179.
Ibid. 195 (actions rather than intentions), 408 (submission to the successful).
Ibid. 195.
Smith runs the issue of the moral color of fortune together with the issue of lighter punishments under the law for unsuccessful criminal attempts (186–189). He sees the reason for lighter punishment in the lesser degree to which we feel harmed. But it is not unreasonable to guess that an unsuccessful criminal trier is objectively less dangerous. In the case of the agent who is saved by accident from executing a bad intention (188–189), it is not entirely unjust that the agent feels less remorse afterward: in not going through with it, not having had to come to grips with all the elements of the situation, the agent’s intention may well never have been as bad as we would have reasonably judged it to be had the agent succeeded. (Such judgments could not be certain; it is not hard to imagine a non-succeeder at murder more wicked than a succeeder at murder.)
I am grateful to two anonymous reviewers for prompting many important refinements of my argument and presentation.
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Smith, S.G. Benevolence Toward Efforts. J Value Inquiry (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-022-09925-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-022-09925-2