I agree that compassion is a feeling, not a behavior. But it seems that in the modern world, ethical norms have changed. In the past they have been more norms-based, rule-based, today it is more like people are expected to figure out of how each other feel and act in a way to make each other feel good. This is precisely the point of the survey here. A few generations ago, speech was regulated by strict norms of etiquette, and basically people were both expected to talk in a way that conforms to them and also not not feel offended as long as the speech of the other person was within the rules. Today, there are hardly any rules to etiquette, people can call their boss on his first name yet it seems today you are expected to figure out what offends others personally and avoid it.
My point is, that probably we need a new word.
We need a word that roughly means "behavior norms that are not based on rules but on expecting people to be guided by compassion".
We could try to call it empathiquette, i.e. unlike old etiquette, which had formal rules, it is more about an onus to use empathy in every case.
People should really work on toughening up and growing a thicker skin, it is actually possible.
Having a society where people don't cooperate with each other and disassociate their needs isn't a worthwhile goal. It leads to people defecting and a lot of social problems. People die in wars and having more compassion reduces the amount of wars fought.
All true, just not relevant. I do think there is a serious problem of having too thin skins today and it is not directly relevant to compassion. As late as in the 1960's, in the hippie age, people were listening to Zen Buddhist masters and similar gurus, like Osho, who would telling them you are not helpless with your feelings. You can choose how you feel. You can train your mind to react to events differently. One of the last remnants of this era is a Danish guy called Lama Ole Nydahl, sometimes called "the hippie lama" (because he is both a Tibetan Buddhist lama and an ex-hippie) running around the world and telling everybody there is no such thing as "he made me angry". The other person merely caused a situation, but it is entirely in the jurisdiction of your own mind if it gets angry over it or not. Needless to say, I find this absolutely great.
At any rate I see on younger people who were not exposed to the hack-your-mind spirit of the hippie era, not even in this second-hand way I was (as I am not even 40), that this self-awareness, this thick skin is missing. Todays 25 years old seem to literally think other people control their emotions, other people can make them angry or sad, and from this grave mistake they make their whole system of ethics, they say making others sad or angry is wrong, that it is basically the responsibility of person A how he made person B feel and not person B's responsibility to police his own emotions and so on.
This I find incredibly bad and I think it is only tangentially related to compassion. Compassion is giving barefeet people shoes. But this is more about people refusing to wear shoes and instead demanding that the road should not contain any object that can hurt their feet. That is the issue I see here, the assumption that whatever happens to you, whatever others do to you 100% determines your feelings and you have no way and no responsibility over your feelings.
This is the issue. This is not as much as calling for less compassion but calling for a more efficient kind where there is more focus on training people to get tougher and control their emotions and gain some distance from events, rather than basically treating everybody as if they were super fragile.
Distance is Lama Ole's favorite way to explain it. That something bad happens, like you rush to work and run late and then get into a traffic jam, or someone says something offensive, or stub a toe, and if you don't have much distance from it, then it will feel like the event grabs your mind and literally makes you feel frustrated, angry or sad. But if you have more distance to events then you can choose how you want to react to it ,how you want to feel about it. This is what we need here. True compassion would be teaching people to have more distance from painful events. The distance is basically the same thing as the outer view discussed on LW. I may stub a toe and feel the pain and feel my neck is turning red in anger, but if my viewpoint, my camera is not something located in my head, but more like three meters away looking at the whole situation from an external viewpoint, then through this distance I can decide how to feel.
What about 'he baited me yesterday and today and likely will tomorrow, even though he can, when it suits him, hold his tongue'? I can work with someone even if I am angry, but that doesn't change my disposition towards the person.
My hidden secret goal is to understand the sentiments behind social justice better, however I will refrain from asking questions that directly relate to it, as they can be mind-killers, instead, I have constructed an entirely apolitical, and probably safe thought experiment involving a common everyday problem that shouldn't be incisive.
Alice is living in an apartment, she is listening to music. The volume of her music is well within what is allowed by the regulations or social norms. Yet the neighbor is still complaining and wants her to turn it down, claiming that she (the neighbor) is unusually sensitive to noise due to some kind of ear or mental condition.
Bob, Alice's friend is also present, and he makes a case that while she can turn it down basically out of niceness or neighborliness, this level of kindness is going far beyond the requirements of duty, and should be considered a favor, because she has no ethical duty to turn it down, for the following reasons.
1) Her volume level of music is usual, it is the sensitivity level of the neighbor that is unusual, and we are under no duty to cater to every special need of others.
2) In other words, it is okay to cause suffering to others as long as it is a usual, common, accepted thing to do that would not cause suffering to a typical person.
The reasons for this are
A) It would be too hard to do otherwise, to cater to every special need, in this case it is easy, but not in all cases, so this is no general principle.
B/1) It would not help the other person much, if the other person is unusually sensitive, the problem would not be fixed by one person catering to them. A hundred people should cater to it, after all there are many sources of noise in the neighborhood.
B/2) In other words, if you are unusually rude, reducing it to usual levels of rudeness is efficient, because by that one move you made a lot of people content. But if you are already on the usual levels of rudeness and an unusually sensitive person is still suffering, further reduction is less efficient because you are only one of the many sources of their suffering. And these people are few anyway.
C) Special needs are easy to fake.
D) People should really work on toughening up and growing a thicker skin, it is actually possible.
Polls in comments below
Please explain your view in the comments.