Modern Empathy: A Moral Development Journey
Where do modern moral sensibilities come from? It seems to me that becoming a more moral human being has always been a process. And likewise, becoming a moral human being in the modern sense, is both an individualized moral development process and one occurring within a broader shared cultural and collective moral development journey we're all taking together.
Moral development as moving from... "Because Someone Says So" (Extrinsic/External Motivation) ...to... "Because I Personally Care and Act Accordingly" (Intrinsic/Internalized Motivation)
Human beings have a natural capacity for empathy. But having a capacity to do something is not the same thing as having a habit of actually doing it. This is where individual moral development comes into play.
When a parent sends their child to their room and tells them to think about what they did, what are they asking them to think about? Did they fight with their sibling? Did they say something unkind or tease someone? Did they take or steal something from someone else? Did they hit or otherwise cause someone to be hurt or in pain? Did they damage someone's property or disrupt what someone else was doing for fun? More often than not, the thing to think about is empathy. How was what I did experienced by the other person.
When we're younger, we can be on moral "training wheels" as it were. The rules given to us by our parents and other adults are a structure to help keeps us on the track. And early in our moral development, consequences for following or breaking the rules - the extrinsic motivators of rewards and punishments - can be very important and helpful (e.g. loss of privileges). Yet without empathy, this extrinsic motivators have their limits (i.e. what can I get away with?).
But later in life, if our upbringing has equipped us well, we'll have moved beyond the idea of following the rules cause someone else says to - merely to make an adult happy or because if we don't, we might get in trouble. Instead, if our moral development has taken us beyond the adolescents of a primarily extrinsically-motivated morality, we'll have internalized the reason and care that inspired the rules in the first place. What is valuable or important that the rules are in place to ensure or protect? Have we come to internalize valuing that which those who made the rules valued? If so, we'll no longer follow them simply cause someone said to. At best, we might now follow those rules (if they be noble) almost as if we had personally written and enshrined the rules into law ourselves.
What is the fundamental goal of our moral development? What is the goal of a parent trying to raise a child to be a good person? When they've matured and become an adult, do they care how their behavior effects other people?? If the answer is "yes", I'd say such a parent was a roaring success in the raising children of character department. And while this should be expected, it can not be taken for granted. Read the news or look around in society - or across global affairs and across history. It is clear than not all humans internalize this value by the time they reach an adult age. This is worthy of much praise and celebration!
But it's also clear that moral development is not just an aspect of an individual human's life journey. It is not simply a matter of an individual learning from personal experience, trial and error and private reflection. Moral development isn't simply a result of an individual's accumulated "lessons learned" from their single life alone. Instead, it is informed by the influence of parents and other adults and more broadly for many, exposure to the culture's shared history.
Critically, this shared history - if told truthfully - includes many morally-troubling cultural "sins" of the past that decidedly lacked empathy towards one oppressed group or another. As such, our personal upbringings can be both a result of our personal journey's (direct private experiences) and our culture's collective journey of centuries of cumulative "lessons learned" from failings to more fully utilize our capacity for empathy towards other human beings. A meaningful side-note, perhaps, is how powerfully a sort of reversal of our history's empathy-failures can be internalized through the modern power of film, transporting us in our imaginations into the perspectives of those experiencing many of our culture's historical oppressions.
With an ocean of waves of such failings washing over us from across our collective history and with an increasingly connected and intermingled world of diverse cultures integrated into many of our daily lives, we are compelled to embrace and commit to a resulting tribalism-overcoming value to break the historic pattern. We are in this rich context, inspired to exercised our empathy muscle to avoid repeating this many failings by affirming this ideal: "the inherent value and worth of every individual". Or in short, we come to believe and feel deeply that: Everybody matters.
As a humanist, I affirm this value. First, cause I believe each individual's experience matters to them. And by having come to internalize a disposition of empathy towards my fellow human beings by adulthood, I share in the aspiration that we can all matter to each other - and that laws can best serve us by protecting this value.
Reaching the point of embracing this value is not a merely the result of philosophical equation or reasoned to conclusion (though there is much basic ground we can cover morally using these tools - e.g. enlightened self-interest). Ultimately, because we are inherently capable of empathy but not necessarily habitually empathetic, embracing this value from a place of having internalized it - that is, having become a person who reflexively cares how your behavior (and that of others) effects others, no matter who they are, is fundamentally a result of emotional and psychological growth or transformation. It is not simply a conclusion that one reaches by reason alone. That said, reasoning in combination with this psychological state of being is nevertheless invaluable as we seek to live out this value effectively once we have come to embody it.
And this transformation - having exercised our human capacity for empathy into a more habitual state of being - and especially to the point of also embracing a modern moral ideal of equality - is one we are capable of as a result of not only our personal moral development journeys - but those journeys informed and contextualized by a broader collective cultural moral development journey: our shared history. By developing our own empathetic outlook in light of a broad human history - with many memorably horrifying empathy failures (the crusades and inquisition, slavery, the holocaust, Japanese American internment camps, etc.) - and also some celebratory moments of progress: those failures in retreat (abolition of slavery, woman's right to vote, civil rights, same-sex marriage rights, etc), many of us are sufficiently compelled to couple our more habitual empathy for those around us with the belief in an ideal that seeks to cancel out this pattern of empathy failings at its core: everybody matters.
As such, it is both this personal and collective moral development journey that results in our modern moral sensibilities.
To put this another way, for the part that reason plays, it is not fundamentally that we must first reason as to why we "should" care in the first place (i.e. as a philosophical matter of moral obligations). For our capacity for empathy is a distinct and critically central variable here that makes it not foundation-ally a matter of exercising our capacity for reason alone (philosophical, theological or otherwise). Instead, having through personal and collective experiences come to a place of habitually empathizing with others (such that we already fundamentally do care) - and being therein compelled to commit to an ideal of doing so now equitably, we from this well established starting point of fundamentally transformed character do simultaneously reason as to how we might best live in light of this caring that has solidified within us.
It is from such a place of caring that we are also compelled to pass on this caring and ideal of equality - by such means as above - to our children and onward generationally. For if we care how behavior effects others, then we also care how our children's behavior effects them. And if we find we are more happy by living in a way that positively effects others (and vice versa) than we will also want to raise our children to experience this happiness for themselves.
We will unite with others who by similar means have become people of the kind with a reflexive and equitable disposition of empathy. And for any who have not yet reached this "internalized" stage of moral development, we will work to limit the harm they can cause and give them the feedback and consequences that they might yet reform toward a place of living with greater care. And along the way, the fact that people who willfully refuse to care how they effect others will almost certainly always exist in the world, this will do nothing to change the fact that we do care nor dissuade us in our determination to see that care prevail.