From Game of Thrones: "Love is the bane of honor, the death of duty. What is honor compared to a woman's love? What is duty against the feel of a newborn son in your arms ... or the memory of a brother's smile? Wind and words. Wind and words. We are only human, and the gods have fashioned us for love. That is our great glory, and our great tragedy.
I'm still a fan of the Against Empathy thesis - we should seek to have compassion for all, not just concern for those we identify with (our family, our community, our species, etc.). Knowing that we don't want to suffer can be enough to care - sharing specific genes / history isn't necessary.
Parenting changes bodies, identities, capacities, and relationships, yet parental love appears here as a fixed quantity allocated among competing recipients. The harder question is how institutions organize that love: whether it widens identification, converts protection into capture, or makes one child’s security depend on another’s exclusion.
Given how often Paul has invoked evolution as an explanation for behavior I am surprised he omits it in this post. It of course makes perfect sense we’d bend our normal ethical reasoning for the sake of our progeny.
The people running today's oil companies, wars, palm oil plantations etc all have kids... That obviously doesn't make them care about how their actions affect the planets future.
Although I cannot say anything definitively because I have never been a parent, I believe parenthood does not necessarily make people better or worse. Instead, I think it simply makes them nearsighted. This doesn't mean that all parents are going to commit mass murder to keep their own child happy, but this does mean that all parents would, in some way, keep their child as one of their top priorities in life.
I don't think this is a bad thing, though. If all parents are nearsighted in this way, it means that there is not going to be a complete "giver" and a complete "taker" in this game. Parents are unanimously going to try to make the lives of their children better, and this "selfishness" could actually improve the surroundings for everyone.
For example, if I selfishly care about my child and send her to a private school, it seems like I am causing harm towards underserved communities by shifting the balance of educational opportunities. But you never know that twenty years later, my child could grow into a well-rounded doctor with a strong sense of morality, and could in turn help the underserved communities in ways that no one expected twenty years ago.
I have a take that family life is the last truly acceptable form of narcissism. Not to say that all families manifest this. Just that it seems like invoking the family can still justify it. The appeal to nature plays a big role here perhaps. Along with emotional reasoning.
I do know of families (okay, one family) that go out of their way to help those outside of their family unit but I don’t think it’s all that common.
How do we judge what's "better"? Is it a matter of benevolent intentions, or benevolent effects? You are right that parenthood tends to narrow our intended benevolence, but is it possible that striving to provide benefits for our own children may (not will, but may) lead us to cooperate with other parents to improve the situation of children in general (whether defined at the level of the neighborhood, the larger community, or the world)?
More substantively: the bit of Adam Smith you want here his not his discussion of markets, in the Wealth of Nations, but his discussion of conscience, filial love, and parental duty, in Part 3 of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Where he makes *exactly* the argument you want to make here, at length, and based on an extremely plausible psychology. Highly recommend!
Since you're reading The Odyssey, I recommend keeping the classics streak going with Aeschylus’s Agamemnon. It has two things you’d probably find interesting: a truly abysmal parent facing something akin to an utilitarian dilemma.
Agamemnon has to decide whether to sacrifice his daughter and is confronted with two options:
A) Sacrifice Iphigenia: Iphigenia's life is lost, but thousands are saved. His troops survive, sail to Troy, fulfill their oath, and achieve glory.
B) Refuse the sacrifice: Thousands die AND Iphigenia dies. His troops perish from starvation that doesn't spare him or his daughter. On top of that, his bloodline is cursed for generations.
Agamemnon was asking everyone else to sacrifice he had to also. Unfortunately Iphigenia wasn't consulted. That was enough reason for wife to murder him when he got back. Too Cassandra didn't get a say in not being murdered though.
Sorry, I'm not much help here, since I've read it in Croatian. For what it's worth, when prompted to find an accessible and plain-spoken rendition in English, Gemini recommends Oliver Taplin's translation.
There's so many translations of the Odyssey they will all say the same thing. It's like getting a translation of Beowulf. The thing about a translation odd bringing the Greek rhyme and meter from spoken poetry into English. Sometimes it will be lost no matter what a translator does because using some words faithful to the Greek word won't rhyme with the preceding or following phrase. Picking something else is not faithful to the text. Whatever you do get something which is not translated as prose but as poetry.
What I think matters more is the notes. The Odyssey and Illiad are describing a very foreign world even foreign to the Greeks of the Peloponnesian War though it might not appear that way. That's why there's a new translation every fifteen years idiom has changed interpretation has changed and new information comes to light. Who knows maybe the parts which conver more of the Trojan war not just year 10 might show up give us new information. Or one day Linear B gets understood and we get extensions of the Odysseus further adventures. Any translation in the last 40 years is sufficient.
There are many historical examples of classes of people who were forbidden from having children, with the rationale that they would be biased in favour of their children to the detriment of their duties. Some that come to mind: Catholic priests, Vestal virgins, adoptive Roman emperors, court eunuchs. Nepotistic tendencies lead to such things as blood feuds and aristocracy.
From Game of Thrones: "Love is the bane of honor, the death of duty. What is honor compared to a woman's love? What is duty against the feel of a newborn son in your arms ... or the memory of a brother's smile? Wind and words. Wind and words. We are only human, and the gods have fashioned us for love. That is our great glory, and our great tragedy.
I'm still a fan of the Against Empathy thesis - we should seek to have compassion for all, not just concern for those we identify with (our family, our community, our species, etc.). Knowing that we don't want to suffer can be enough to care - sharing specific genes / history isn't necessary.
Parenting changes bodies, identities, capacities, and relationships, yet parental love appears here as a fixed quantity allocated among competing recipients. The harder question is how institutions organize that love: whether it widens identification, converts protection into capture, or makes one child’s security depend on another’s exclusion.
Given how often Paul has invoked evolution as an explanation for behavior I am surprised he omits it in this post. It of course makes perfect sense we’d bend our normal ethical reasoning for the sake of our progeny.
Here is a full-throated defense of Darwinian ethics. https://davidgreene.substack.com/p/darwinian-ethics?r=36qk2&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=split
Thanks. I didn’t get into evolution here not because I think it’s irrelevant but because the point seemed too obvious to mention.
The people running today's oil companies, wars, palm oil plantations etc all have kids... That obviously doesn't make them care about how their actions affect the planets future.
Although I cannot say anything definitively because I have never been a parent, I believe parenthood does not necessarily make people better or worse. Instead, I think it simply makes them nearsighted. This doesn't mean that all parents are going to commit mass murder to keep their own child happy, but this does mean that all parents would, in some way, keep their child as one of their top priorities in life.
I don't think this is a bad thing, though. If all parents are nearsighted in this way, it means that there is not going to be a complete "giver" and a complete "taker" in this game. Parents are unanimously going to try to make the lives of their children better, and this "selfishness" could actually improve the surroundings for everyone.
For example, if I selfishly care about my child and send her to a private school, it seems like I am causing harm towards underserved communities by shifting the balance of educational opportunities. But you never know that twenty years later, my child could grow into a well-rounded doctor with a strong sense of morality, and could in turn help the underserved communities in ways that no one expected twenty years ago.
I have a take that family life is the last truly acceptable form of narcissism. Not to say that all families manifest this. Just that it seems like invoking the family can still justify it. The appeal to nature plays a big role here perhaps. Along with emotional reasoning.
I do know of families (okay, one family) that go out of their way to help those outside of their family unit but I don’t think it’s all that common.
How do we judge what's "better"? Is it a matter of benevolent intentions, or benevolent effects? You are right that parenthood tends to narrow our intended benevolence, but is it possible that striving to provide benefits for our own children may (not will, but may) lead us to cooperate with other parents to improve the situation of children in general (whether defined at the level of the neighborhood, the larger community, or the world)?
More substantively: the bit of Adam Smith you want here his not his discussion of markets, in the Wealth of Nations, but his discussion of conscience, filial love, and parental duty, in Part 3 of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Where he makes *exactly* the argument you want to make here, at length, and based on an extremely plausible psychology. Highly recommend!
Thanks. I’m a huge fan of Smith but it’s been a long time since I read the Sentiments book, so I’ll check it out.
He’s the GOAT of Western moral psychology!
* grumble grumble*
That isn't what Keynes meant
* grumble grumble*
Since you're reading The Odyssey, I recommend keeping the classics streak going with Aeschylus’s Agamemnon. It has two things you’d probably find interesting: a truly abysmal parent facing something akin to an utilitarian dilemma.
Agamemnon has to decide whether to sacrifice his daughter and is confronted with two options:
A) Sacrifice Iphigenia: Iphigenia's life is lost, but thousands are saved. His troops survive, sail to Troy, fulfill their oath, and achieve glory.
B) Refuse the sacrifice: Thousands die AND Iphigenia dies. His troops perish from starvation that doesn't spare him or his daughter. On top of that, his bloodline is cursed for generations.
Agamemnon was asking everyone else to sacrifice he had to also. Unfortunately Iphigenia wasn't consulted. That was enough reason for wife to murder him when he got back. Too Cassandra didn't get a say in not being murdered though.
that’s such an interesting suggestion, Solar Sail. Do you have a translation you recommend?
Sorry, I'm not much help here, since I've read it in Croatian. For what it's worth, when prompted to find an accessible and plain-spoken rendition in English, Gemini recommends Oliver Taplin's translation.
There's so many translations of the Odyssey they will all say the same thing. It's like getting a translation of Beowulf. The thing about a translation odd bringing the Greek rhyme and meter from spoken poetry into English. Sometimes it will be lost no matter what a translator does because using some words faithful to the Greek word won't rhyme with the preceding or following phrase. Picking something else is not faithful to the text. Whatever you do get something which is not translated as prose but as poetry.
What I think matters more is the notes. The Odyssey and Illiad are describing a very foreign world even foreign to the Greeks of the Peloponnesian War though it might not appear that way. That's why there's a new translation every fifteen years idiom has changed interpretation has changed and new information comes to light. Who knows maybe the parts which conver more of the Trojan war not just year 10 might show up give us new information. Or one day Linear B gets understood and we get extensions of the Odysseus further adventures. Any translation in the last 40 years is sufficient.
There are many historical examples of classes of people who were forbidden from having children, with the rationale that they would be biased in favour of their children to the detriment of their duties. Some that come to mind: Catholic priests, Vestal virgins, adoptive Roman emperors, court eunuchs. Nepotistic tendencies lead to such things as blood feuds and aristocracy.