One of the most important distinctions to make in any analysis of benevolence, I think, is between transient acts of generosity and those that are more substantive.
A transient act is one that happens in a moment. A single word of kindness, a simply act of charity, a little white lie to keep from hurting someone’s feelings, that sort of thing. After a transient act, you go back to your regular scheduled life where you could either continue to be the biggest bastard in the world or a manifestation of god-like good. In any case, the act of kindness was transient, it may have made you feel good about yourself at the moment and it may have seemed relevant at the time, but afterwards it likely means very little to you and it certainly doesn’t impose upon you any kind of responsibility or place any burden upon you at all.
This is not to say transient acts aren’t important. They may mean nothing to the giver but they may mean everything to the receiver. To take the obvious example, a person in a wealthy nation can donate $5 to a poor family in one of the poorest nations in the world and it could totally transform that family’s life. Less obvious is how being polite to a person you meet in a chance encounter at a store for example could matter to anyone. But it could. Being kind might well boost a person’s self esteem, improve a person’s otherwise terrible day. And that in turn could infleunce his or her thinkings and decisions going onward and in turn effect the others he or she interacts with. Through the great chain of cause and effect for all you know a transient act of kindness could end up being one piece of the puzzle that saves the world.
But that’s a bit (or a lot) of a fallacy of course. You really don’t know that in that exact same situation maybe being a total arse might have the most beneficial consequences in the long run. Maybe by saying something truthful but cruel you force someone to re-examine some key aspect of his or herself and as a consequence of that re-examination he or she ultimately makes different decisions than he or she otherwise would have at key moments. Maybe those choices lead to ultimate good. And you might just have saved the world by being a jerk.
In the absence of being able to tell the difference between these two extremes, it may seem reasonable to hold off acts either kind or cruel unless you have enough information to rationally assess what the most likely consequences of each possibility are. You can do a kind of calculation and make a decisions based on expected outcome. That works rather well actually for transient kindness wherein you have time for deliberation. For example you could do some research and study before donating your $5 to one of that poor family. You can find out what kind of effect doing that will have on their economy, what kind of social consequences there might be for a family so suddenly elevated and whether the organization through which you choose to provide the money is trustworthy and legitimate. Then if it turns out the money will do good you do it and if not you don’t . Either way its back to your regularly scheduled life thereafter. You just had to provide a little bit more of a committment than you were expecting but you can still feel pretty good about yourself when you succeed in being able to provide generosity.
This doesn’t work as well for more spontaneous situations. Do you pick up and give back the wallet that the person walking in front of you just dropped? Again you don’t know what the consequences will be. You don’t have the time to evaluate it and what’s more even if could somehow freeze time and take as much as you need, you still don’t have a whole lot of information on which to go on. The same goes for saying a kind word to a stranger.
Humanity has chosen the default position of kindness in such situations. It is ingrained in our teachings and our traditions. You are taught be example and by rhetoric. Nearly every story written that purports to reflect reality includes some spontaneous act of kindness and ordinarily committed by those characters whom the author wants us to most respect.
Why? Some claim we are simply wired this way as evidence by our tendency to take pleasure in acts of kindness. Others say, it is because we seek some kind of selfish advantage. That is to say, by being kind, I can induce you and anyone who happens to observe my act to have a more favorable opinion of me which in turn could provide a measurable social advantage in the future or at least avoids the social disadvantage of creating an enemy. Others would argue that we do it out of an even more base emotional need. We don’t want others to look down upon us, or we want to avoid conflict and the discomfort that comes from the awkwardness that follows an insult be it perceived or real. Perhaps we just want to fit in.
Personally, I like to think that we are a little more noble a species than that. I don’t deny that those motivations come into the picture and I don’t deny that there is a little bit of hard wiring involves as well. If we are not born to think a certain way at least we are very strongly conditioned by our environment to think a certain way. But even so I think the main reason we choose to be spontaneously kind instead of spontaneously cruel is very rational. We simply engage in a brief hypothetical wherein we imagine how the other being would feel if we were them. What would we want, not necessarily based on how we are feeling right at that instant, but based on how we imagine we would feel in a majority of similar situations if a stranger were before us and made any of a set of possible decisions some of which would hurt us and others would not. We then choose the best , least awkward, and most beneficial of those possible decisions. Now some of us will be more cynical of overt acts of kindness and as such we would be less likely to engage in them ourselves, but all of us tend to choose actions that are not directly harmful and often give a tiny bit of pleasure to the entities with which we interact. Furthermore, we then modify our actions based on a reasonable assessment of how different the person with whom we are interacting appears to be from ourselves. Hence we are likely to be more kind to someone who we perceive as being more needful of kindness than we feel ourselves to be.
I also believe that since this IS a rational decision that some people can you know be better at it than others and that with experience you get better at it. That is to say there are all kinds of examples of people hurting others by doing or saying something that seems to outside observers as being counter to their personality and inordinately cruel. I believe that a lot of times these are just failed reasonings a mistake in a judgment made in a brief instant about how a certain word or action would be perceived by a listener. Rarely is a transient act sufficient evidence through which to judge someone immoral for this very reason. Sometimes what we perceive as an inherent cruelty is rather just a misjudgment about how their acts would be perceived.
I also believe that in making this kind of rational judgment based on limited information we are by and large still perpetuating a greater overall benefit to the world than a detriment. Sure any particular example of a transient act of kindness may well result in harm somewhere way down the line of causation but I believe the sum total of all transient acts of benevolence is overall good. Why do I believe this? Because I think that in receiving transient acts of kindness we perceive in others a kind of kinship. They are perceiving themselves in our situation and acting in a manner that would please themselves and I in turn take pleasure from that action. As a result I am reinforced in my belief in or inherent similarities and by generalization in the inherent similarities of all human beings. That in turn leads me to tend to act in a manner that acknowledges the similarities between peoples rather than rejecting them. I believe that that desire is the core of nearly all good acts, the belief that we are not all that different after all.
That I think is one of the extraordinary aspects of human existence. That is the absence of any need to do otherwise and for no selfish advantage we can choose to do a good thing for no particular reason and those little acts of good can contribute to making the world a better place.
But they are far from enough. Transient acts of benevolence are still just transient. The world can still be horrible. In fact people can still be utterly evil and the transient acts can continue unabashed. For that reason it overwhelmingly important that we understand not just why and for what reason transient kindness persists but also why people choose to engage in more substantive acts of benevolence often against their own interests and often placing huge burdens and responsibilities upon themselves. Of that, I will speak another day.
