Seventy steps from the bottom

I stayed home to care for S who has suddenly succumbed to a bad cold, probably caught from Young L who was very sorry for himself a week ago. With the advantage of Zoom and very active staff, I was able to attend the two team meetings at the start of the day. Subsequent meetings didn't eventuate due to technical issues, and I got some emails done before spending the afternoon on some nonclinical work; reading a couple of papers. 

Over the long weekend I had come across a paper from almost fifteen years ago. On the change in the way compassion is seen. The ancient Greek philosophers regarded compassion as an emotion (pity), which needed to be controlled by rational thought. It was certainly not a virtue, for reasons more than just because pity is an emotional state. The early Christian philosophers likewise discounted compassion, but on the grounds that life on earth was to be suffered through in order to earn paradise.

Beginning with Montesquieu, and taken further by Rousseau, modern philosophy regards compassion as a powerful virtue. Particularly in medicine, compassion is often thought of as central to good medical practice.

I have disagreed with that view in the past, offering a Virtue Ethics argument that empathy can be seen as the virtuous mean between the twin vices of sympathy and compassion, both of which tend to place the object of compassion or sympathy in a subsidiary position vis-a-vis the person expressing either emotion. As the Greeks would have argued, rational thought would dismiss compassion and sympathy as not being useful ways to assist someone in need.

The virtue of empathy is that rather than feeling for (compassion) or with  (sympathy) the empathic doctor imagines and understands the situation of the patient and what is needed to assist her or him, without the doctor's own emotions intruding.

Orwin's argument, which included that compassion allows those who feel it to disown any connection with the object of the compassion, was that "enlightened self-interest" underlies the emotion of compassion (in the world of politics).

Late this afternoon, I did a big circuit on the road to the Snells Beach foreshore and ending by climbing these stairs.