<p>Siriuss - I am speechless. You nailed not only the gist but also the finer points of my essay :).</p>
<p>Anyway, I think the proper way to enjoy this essay is to think of someone whom you truly like while listening to the Glee cover of “I Will Always Love You.” It’s how I wrote it. The feeling I had when writing this essay was exhilarating to an extreme.</p>
<p>After reading a few sentences. all i got was 3 letters. H.U.H ??!</p>
<p>I do LD!!! I love it!!</p>
<p>Anyway, I do see the point you’re trying to make. Deontology is very big an abstract, so definitely open to interpretation 
I feel that it is about the attempt of the action, I suppose. The idea of hypotherical imperative tends to discredit my argument.</p>
<p>And as you said in #14, I definitely agree that there is the flaw. As something that is to define the moral, it doesn’t acknowledge the inherent bias and emotion in humanity. It’s paradoxially a strength and a weakness. Which makes sympathy difficult to understand deontologically.</p>
<p>I tend to lean away from a philosophical view to that of more a psychological perspective. I feel that humans are biologically inclined to be sympathetic towards one another. The closer you are to someone to which something occurs, the symapthy increases. And it’s difficult to speculate why, which is what you seem to be trying to find</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>then wouldn’t trying to get to know another person be caring about them?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I’m confused… Isn’t that what all debates are like?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>LOL good point.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I think that by the year 2117, the College Board will have used this essay on its SAT II Literature test :p. And by the 23rd century, my essays will have become an established part of the Western canon. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>You’ve nailed the issue I was exploring in my essay. </p>
<p>Do I care about the person? </p>
<p>Or do I care about the image I perceive of the person? </p>
<p>What we usually perceive is superficial. Yet what we generally perceive is what attracts us. The soft, supple skin. The gorgeous brown (gray?) eyes. The immaculate facial topography. The cute shoes, the perfectly fitted jeans, the sweater (vest?), the lush hair.</p>
<p>When we label people as attractive, we generally do so on the basis of how they immediately appear. We don’t plumb their depths. We know little, if anything, about what’s beyond the epidermis. Magazine spreads. “Oh, she’s gorgeous.” In the hallway. “Man I like that dress.” So? What about the content of their character? Beauty is ephemeral. Enjoy it while it lasts. After the veneer wears away, is there something of substance left? Wit? Intelligence? The ability to carry on deep, meaningful, philosophical conversations?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Depressing, but true. But Siriuss, would you completely insulate yourself from the risk of betrayal you mention? Would you avoid all emotional investment in others?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I think there are three types of getting to know someone.</p>
<p>1) Getting to know someone for immediate gain. </p>
<p>“Oh, so you like Italian food?” </p>
<p>A week later: “Hey, I know you like Italian food; let’s go to Olive Garden.” </p>
<p>“Aww, you’re so sweet!!” </p>
<p>This wouldn’t qualify as caring or compassion; the goal isn’t really getting to know that someone - it’s appearing to care about someone for short-term gain. </p>
<p>2) The second type of getting to know someone is the more genuine kind. Whether this exists in a pure form is debatable. </p>
<p>3) Seeing your psychiatrist.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>So … I take it that you don’t buy the Darwinian explanation of things?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>;)</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>It can drive one mad. As a matter of fact, it has probably driven me insane. It’s why I can never lead an army and tell people to kill. I would spend the rest of my tortured life thinking of what I did. Whose future father did I just order the death of? Who could his child have been? War, nowadays, is so emotionally distant. We engage in drone strikes. We kill innocent civilians. Women, men, children - boys and girls. Who could they have become? </p>
<p>I’ll never know. Perhaps one of them just could have been my “one in a million.” </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>If the news incites a response in you, wouldn’t that mean that you care? Or that you in someway do not feel indifferent? </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>What about parents? Mothers and fathers? Siblings? Brothers and sisters? Kin? Cousins and aunts?</p>
<p>^((This is now false but I think you have an idea what I’m talking about)
No… and well yes.
You go through life making choices. Deciding if the boy who sits behind you in history could be a nice kid. Deciding if the boy who might be a nice kid is worth getting to know. Then later if you might want to date the kid.
You aren’t isolated from the people you make interactions with but you aren’t very close with most people you know. So perhaps you truly do care about them but perhaps you also don’t know them.
Perhaps you can care about someone without knowing them. I shouldn’t know.
Personally, I know people. I consider a few kids my ‘friends’ but when anyone asks who my ‘best friend’ is I can’t answer honestly.
Family is a horse of another color I will confess. I think I care about them, at least I’m forced to feel a connection to them. I see them on holidays and I think I can count on them. Then my cousin stops hanging out with me and starts spending time with her boyfriend (Sometimes she offers to have me come along with a friend). And I’m hurt. It’s not really logical but I’m left feeling replaced.
Humans are too social to be completely isolated but it’s easier (more logical even) to not care.</p>
<p>@Stressedout
Yes-- sort of.
What I mean is that you can’t ever know if your really getting to know /them/. You can talk to them, watch them through binoculars and follow them home but you’ll only see the them they chose to show the world.
For example the person I act like in school is as me as I’m willing to let the world see. I don’t act shy, I say what I’m thinking and I ask questions. But I never share all of me with one person. Most of them won’t know I spent my summer with horses and that I get all As. I pick what I tell people and so two people might see me in different ways.
Does either of them know the real me? No.
So they are caring (if they do care) about the me they think they see not the me I am.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Quoted for truth. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>It might be irrational to feel compassion for someone else. Why invest so much without a guarantee of a return? You’ve broached the idea of irrationality, as proposed by Kierkegaard. We must sometimes take a leap of faith and believe in the irrational. As he tells in Either/Or, we must break out the dichotomy of the aesthetic (hedonistic) and the ethical life. To truly live a fulfilling life, we must seek a relationship with God. We eventually get bored of our hedonistic exploits. Boredom seeps in and poisons our days. The ethical life similarly has pitfalls. Only by believing in the irrational - God - can we truly start living.</p>
<p>Love is similarly irrational. We substitute our own concerns for someone else’s concerns. But in doing so, God stands beside us. Although we might forget ourselves in caring about others … God will still remember us. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>^
Perhaps.
I don’t believe in God but in all logic I should. I’ve been (am being as Im not capable of telling my parents)raised as a Catholic girl who goes to church every Sunday.
I hear about all of the love and compassion every week in church and yet I can’t help but think ‘Really?’. Here I could delve into why I don’t believe in God but I won’t.
It’s not my place.
So here I can’t agree with you although I don’t think you are inherently wrong.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Kierkegaard isn’t arguing for one to believe in God on a rational basis. He argues that we should just do it by taking a leap of faith. But I understand one’s reluctancy to believe in God. I don’t believe in God either. But I still sympathize with the assertion that love, a component of which is compassion or “care,” is irrational. </p>
<p>For months I invested my time, my sweat, and my sleep in caring for someone. Looking back, my decision to do so was clearly irrational. I wasn’t especially appreciated. I didn’t really get much of a return on my investment. But what made the experience worthwhile was the mirage, the illusion, that I was in something serious. Walking down the hallway together, bumping shoulders. Talking occasionally at lunch. The magnitude of the experiences definitely dwarfed anything I had experienced before. I acted irrationally by investing so much while subconsciously knowing that we weren’t likely to get anywhere. But do I regret it? No. The illusion was everything. The illusion is still everything. On this point I disagree with you that we shouldn’t take any risks at all; that we shouldn’t care about other people at all. Although my compassion may not have been reciprocated, I still revel in the memories. If one needs any evidence, one needs simply read any one of my recent essays. Additionally, what would life be without the peaks and troughs? The illusions and epiphanies :p?</p>
<p>Ultimately, Siriuss, it seems that we agree that love is irrational. Correct?</p>
<p>Woah this thread is still going?? Haha.</p>
<p>It is very stimulating :).</p>
<p>Why do you believe love is irrational? Is it just because you fell from a cloud of “love” in hs? So many people confuse love with other things, and no LD debates aren’t the only types. There are 2 in highschool: LD and a team one that I forgot(took the class in my freshman year). And you know what, from what I gleam from the way you write, you are an educated, well-thought, deep guy. Don’t let one experience which you already said was an illusion make you feel that certain emotions are irrational. People are irrational! (Most of the time, why do you think we fight so hard for control?)</p>
<p>Well put.
Yes irrational but as you stated not necessarily wrong. Our world is made of illusions this has always been so. It’s what we feed ourselves to keep ourselves going. The lies we promise, knowing as we say them that we can’t keep them.
It’s the cheap thrills we seek just to feel alive. We exploit our emotions because we feel them. It keeps us from believing we are small and unimportant. The idea that we could be important to someone sometime. Just the idea.
Where would we be without the illusions?
Lost in all probability. Hopeless. The realization that everything we do is for naught. Eventually there will be a time when humans don’t exist and everything that they have done will be forgotten.
So we care and we love because we hope that they will care back.
I’m sure that love feels good. Humans so often do things for the pleasure of it. I would argue Ive never desired any sort of love but Id be lying.
I’m a victim of chic-flics and free chocolate as well even though I pretend I’m not. I can’t imagine anyone really not being. The illusion of love is such an impossible one to escape.</p>
<p>Siriuss … well-put - as always.</p>
<p>@IceQube
It always makes me laugh when you say that. 
It’s hardly even pretending to be up to par with your writing.</p>
<p>I skimmed through the thread. I think it’s silly to say that all care is unreasonable. Are any of you fellow biology nerds? If so, then you know about kin selection. The theory of kin selection states that evolutionary processes have prompted the development of self-sacrificing actions in many species that preserve one’s family members. </p>
<p>By sacrificing yourself to save a family member (or many), you are preserving your genetic material indirectly, as you have much in common genetically with your family. Care is a necessary component of such a sacrifice (as in, you wouldn’t sacrifice yourself unless you cared for the person(s) you would save in some form). For humans, however, this doesn’t only apply to relatives. Since we are already adapted to care for people, we can apply this adaptation to any person, related or not. </p>
<p>In this sense, care is perfectly reasonable. It’s an evolutionary response that allows humans to help one another, which promotes social welfare.</p>