our most evil things happen when we create systems that allow us to remove the humanity from one another
This alienation is, incidentally, why conscientiousness is more reliable than empathy as a mechanism for ensuring people are good to one another.
Empathy doesn’t scale. It’s possible to have empathy for people that one knows closely, or sees often. But empathy for incidental strangers is harder, and empathy for those one only “sees” abstractly is even harder than that. Empathy isn’t built for extension to millions or billions of people.
Conscientiousness – for example treating people fairly because it’s the right thing to do, as opposed to treating them warmly because it feels good to do so – is actually scalable. You can make a commitment to treating everyone fairly, and then you don’t need to rely on feeling good about a person in order to do right by them.
Related to Dunbar’s number. The human brain is only capable of really recognizing around 100 people as actual people and understanding interactions with them. Everybody else in the world is only a person in a vague, nebulous sort of way.
This alienation is, incidentally, why conscientiousness is more reliable than empathy as a mechanism for ensuring people are good to one another.
Empathy doesn’t scale. It’s possible to have empathy for people that one knows closely, or sees often. But empathy for incidental strangers is harder, and empathy for those one only “sees” abstractly is even harder than that. Empathy isn’t built for extension to millions or billions of people.
Conscientiousness – for example treating people fairly because it’s the right thing to do, as opposed to treating them warmly because it feels good to do so – is actually scalable. You can make a commitment to treating everyone fairly, and then you don’t need to rely on feeling good about a person in order to do right by them.
Related to Dunbar’s number. The human brain is only capable of really recognizing around 100 people as actual people and understanding interactions with them. Everybody else in the world is only a person in a vague, nebulous sort of way.