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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Pathological Altruism |
| 2013-06-16 |
| h/t Instapundit We don't think we'd ever heard of Oakland University, a second-tier institution in suburban Rochester, Mich., but Barbara Oakley, an associate professor in engineering, may help put the place on the map. Earlier this week Oakland's Oakley published a fascinating paper, "Concepts and Implications of Altruism Bias and Pathological Altruism," in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. ...Oakley defines pathological altruism as "altruism in which attempts to promote the welfare of others instead result in unanticipated harm." A crucial qualification is that while the altruistic actor fails to anticipate the harm, "an external observer would conclude [that it] was reasonably foreseeable." Thus, she explains, if you offer to help a friend move, then accidentally break an expensive item, your altruism probably isn't pathological; whereas if your brother is addicted to painkillers and you help him obtain them, it is. As the latter example suggests, the idea of "codependency" is a subset of pathological altruism. "Feelings of empathic caring . . . appear to lie at the core of . . . codependent behavior," Oakley notes. People in codependent relationships genuinely care for each other, but that empathy leads them to do destructive things. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #1 Spot on. I have continually fought people who were this way and felt it was their "christian" duty to behave this way. What's interesting about this tidbit is that it casts the preachers who exploit and encourage this dependency as the "drug dealers" of the problem. Dr. Jonathan Haidt's work on moral maturity is very much worth looking at, since it helped me to understand leftists of my acquaintance better. (Quick summary: there are five areas of morality that the professor identified and developed tests to measure how developed a person was in each area of morality. Self-identified leftists/liberals score very high in two of them, but very low in the other three, while self-identified conservatives score high in all five. He likened leftists/liberals as morally colorblind: able to "morally" see, but unable to see the full spectrum, and thus contemptuous of conservatives for factoring in moral qualifications that they (leftists) assert do not exist.) |
| Posted by: Ptah 2013-06-16 14:38 |