Understanding Sympathy and Economic Perspectives

Understanding Sympathy

1. Earthquake in China vs. Pinky

2. Using imagination to understand someone else’s pain

3. Challenge of 'blind' sympathy

Adam Smith described sympathy as an automatic reaction. Whenever we see people in pain, we cringe. Whenever we see people happy, we cannot help but smile. Through our own faculties and senses, we attempt to imagine what it is like to feel another person’s life with our own. But the sympathy we feel for others is limited by their relative closeness. We tend to sympathize with those closer to us in a single moment than a multitude of people we have never met. Smith uses the example of an earthquake in China against the threat of a severed finger. Although people claim the loss of a finger is nothing to a life, when a knife is actually used and the threat becomes real, the lives of others become less important, especially if one has never met them. Smith says that people would choose their finger all the time over the lives of many strangers. As we move towards a more globalized economy, the challenge of 'blind' sympathy will need to be addressed. People will have to interact with others without faces or names and feel sympathy toward them. Without this sympathy, the economy would not be as efficient and robust as the work of the combined taskforce. Sympathy is not pity or compassion. His use of sympathy is closer to the modern usage of the word empathy. Sympathy is an ongoing process.

Economic Perspectives

Friedman: who believes in a free market with little government intervention. He believes efficiency can be highest when there is less government control. And also he believes that the market will fix itself so it is okay for things like discrimination to exist without government control because it will not be profitable.

Aristotle: believes that government restrictions help us grow. Restrictions are aimed to benefit in the long run. All communities and partnerships may not aim at the same thing.

Bishops would keep certain things that would affect the community negatively out of the market because economics is what forms the community. They would also try to limit private property and wealth because it's really uneven at the moment.