In defense of empathy

There’s good & evil, no gods needed to explain it. It’s good to help other people. It’s evil to hurt other people. It’s simple. You need proof?

See the joy, the pain in others, how does it make you feel? That biological response is the result of a long evolutionary process, never discarded and spread throughout most, if not all, of humanity. So I’m guessing it’s pretty important. It’s the reason we can live together, a most essential biological necessity for community to exist.

Sometimes there might be a need for hurting other people, for defense for example. To choose the lesser of two evils. That does not mean it is not evil, it means that it can only be done with careful consideration and should be sought to be eliminated going forward.

You can only be expected to act in a good way, if your essential needs are met. If you or a loved one is starving or in danger, you must do what is needed to rectify this. It is commendable if you do not resort to evil, but if your basic needs are not met, the situation is evil and you must do what needs doing. However, if you have enough to drink, to eat, if you have a safe place to live and you still choose to hurt others, then you are evil. It is simple.

It also means that there is no way around this. If you accept evil in others, saying it is all relative, then you are evil. It is the most basic foundation of human relations and cannot be gradated.

For society to exist, you do not necessarily need for everyone to act in a good manner, you just need for evil to be banished or punished. As long as you do not hurt others and allow them to live as they wish, then you can expect not to have others do evil to you, to not interfere in how you live your life. Don’t start none, won’t be none, as the old saying goes.

I reject your reality and substitute my own. An old hippie saying, used to undermine the group-think of the fifties. Unfortunately it got co-opted by the right, by the people who could not accept reality and lead to relativism. This is one of the most dangerous ideas of the 20^th century, that you can choose your own reality, that there is no objective truth. Of course, finding certainty is hard, so hard, but that does not mean you can just fill in your own phantasms. We might not be able to ever find an objective truth, but that does not mean we should not try.