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Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

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Magnus Vinding

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“To look into the eyes of a vulnerable person is to see yourself as you might be. It’s a more harrowing experience than one might readily admit. There is a version of yourself made powerless, status diminished, reliant upon the goodwill of others. One response is empathy: to shore up your reserves of charity and trust, in hopes that others will do the same. Another is denial: If you refuse to believe you could ever be in such a position — perhaps by blaming the frail for their frailty or ascribing their vulnerability to moral failure — then you never have to face such an uncomfortable episode of imagination. You come away disgusted with the weak, but content in the certainty you aren’t among them. Or they make you feel helpless, just by dint of how little you can do to stop what’s being done to them. The temptation in that case is to look away, let it all be someone else’s problem, or deny that there’s a problem in need of resolution in the first place.”

SufferingSinSexual Assault
Author:Elizabeth Bruenig
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“The inmates of Belsen or Buchenwald did not have to die hallowed by their sufferings, or with a brave resignation to their fate, or conscious of themselves as world-historical figures, or exulting in the thought that, though they themselves might perish, the human spirit itself is invincible, in order to earn the title of tragic. They simply had to be men and women in an intolerable situation. The banal truth is that one does not need to do anything in particular to qualify as a tragic protagonist. One simply has to be a human being at the end of one’s tether. One does not have to be virtuous, only virtuous enough not to deserve the wretchedness to which you are reduced.”

TruthSufferingTragedyVirtuousBanalTragic Protagonist
Book:Tragedy
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