Transcript BENNETT v. HALLIE

Bennett vs. Hallie
• “The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn”
– Conscience: The rational faculty by
which human beings make moral
judgments about specific situations,
actions, and persons.
– Well and Badly Formed Consciences
• Individual consciences can be well or
badly formed, i. e. they can lead one to
objective moral truth or objective moral
falsity; thus, they are not infallible.
• Everyone has a moral obligation to
form his conscience well.
• A person who acts in an objectively
immoral way may, nevertheless, be
acting in accord with his
conscience.
• If so, then the objectively immorally
acting person’s conscience has
been badly formed.
• A badly formed conscience can,
thus, bind as strongly as a well
formed conscience.
• Question: Should a badly formed
conscience bind just as much as a
well formed conscience?
– Sympathy
• Bennett would answer the above
question in the negative.
• Bennett suggests sympathy should
be developed as a safeguard
against a badly formed conscience.
• Sympathy for Bennett covers
“every sort of fellow-feeling,” as
when one is saddened by another’s
loneliness, troubled by someone’s
pain, or when one avoids hurting
another
• Bennett says that feelings of
sympathy must not be confused
with moral judgments. The two are
different.
• I may help someone who needs
help out of sympathy for that
person, but sympathy is a feeling it
is not a judgment of the intellect
about what one ought to do.
– Sympathy and Conscience
• Both sympathy and conscience can
make a person act, and it is
possible for sympathy and
conscience to conflict and pull a
person in different directions.
• Our sympathy for a person might
even make us do what our
consciences tell us is objectively
wrong.
• The conflict between sympathy
and conscience can occur in
cases of a badly formed
consciences just as much as in
cases of well formed
consciences.
– Sympathy and a Badly Formed
Conscience
• Bennett claims that Huck Finn has
a badly formed conscience
because he accepts what he has
been taught about slavery. To wit:
It is morally permissible.
• Bennett claims Huck acts contrary
to his badly formed conscience
because of his sympathy for Jim.
• Bennett claims that Huck is morally
correct to act thus.
• Bennett claims the badly formed
conscience of Heinrich Himmler
conflicted with what Bennett takes
to be Himmler’s genuine sympathy
for the human beings the Nazis
exterminated.
• In Himmler’s case, however, the
badly formed conscience won out
over his sympathy.
• Bennett claims that in letting his
badly formed conscience win,
Himmler acted immorally.
– The Case of Jonathan Edwards
• Bennett claims that, not only is
Edwards’ conscience badly formed,
because he seems to subscribe to
a hyper-Calvinist view of the
Atonement, Edwards also seems
completely to lack sympathy
because he does not “find it painful
to contemplate any fellow-human’s
being tortured forever.”
• In other words, Bennett thinks
Edwards completely lacks sympathy
because he has no “fellow feeling”
for those whom God arbitrarily “lets
fall to ceaseless flames,” i. e.
arbitrarily damns.
• Thus, in Bennett’s view, Edwards is
worse than Himmler because at
least the latter had sympathy for his
victims so that there was a chance
sympathy might have saved him
(and his victims) from his badly
formed conscience.
– The Need for both Conscience and
Sympathy
• For Bennett a well formed
conscience helps a person avoid
doing the wrong thing when one
happens to have little or no
sympathy at that time.
• Thus, a well formed conscience
helps a person do the right thing
when sympathy is lacking, due to
such things as self-centeredness,
depression, and anger.
• Sympathy can correct a badly
formed conscience.
• If the dictates of conscience are in
conflict with sympathy, that can be
a strong indication the conscience
is badly formed.
• Wilfrid Owen is Bennett’s example
of this.
• Part of improving our moral code is
to subject it to the test of sympathy.
• This doesn’t mean that sympathy
should always win out when it
conflicts with conscience.
• Bennett says, however, “one’s
sympathies should be kept as
sharp and sensitive and aware as
possible . . .” because sympathy
and human feelings in general are
vital to our humanity.
• Perhaps people without sympathy
are less human than those who
have sympathy.
• Perhaps, in addition to our capacity
for language and abstract thought,
what most defines us as humans is
our great capacity for experiencing
a variety of feelings, including
sympathy.
• “The Evil Men Think – and Do”
– Philip Hallie criticizes Bennett for a
view of morality which is too simple
and too heavily dependent on
sympathy to the exclusion of other
things, like the effects of actions on
victims.
– Hallie criticizes Bennett for placing
morality in the mind alone rather than
considering the morality of the effects
of actions in the world.
– According to Bennett, because
Himmler had a sympathetic mind,
even though he did terrible things, he
is more moral than Edwards because
Edwards lacked sympathy.
– Edwards may have been without
compassion, and Himmler may have
had some compassion, but Himmler
was actually responsible for the
deaths, torture, and suffering of
millions of innocent people.
– The presence or absence of
sympathy in the mind is less
important than the evil which people
actually do.
– Hallie points out that evil is not
confined to the mind; evil actions
which directly affect people are worse
than evil thoughts towards them.
– Evil doing is worse than evil thinking.
– In considering Adolf Eichmann,
another Nazi butcher, Hallie says that
Eichmann’s evil was not only in his
mind but in his actions.
– Hallie says that, if Eichmann had only
thought of the evil things which he
wished to do to innocent Jews, he
would have been “pitiable, not
culpable.”
– Because he actually did these things
“his evil lay in his deeds” in everything
he actually did to real people.
– We have to pay attention not just to
the presence or absence of sympathy
in a person but to what that person
actually does.
– Someone who makes people suffer
is worse than the person who makes
no one suffer but has no sympathy.
– Hallie: “There is no substitute for
seeing the harshness and ugliness of
fact.”
– Hallie provides an excerpt from the
Nuremberg trial transcript of Otto
Ohlendorf, who had participated in
the extermination of Jews and Soviet
political leaders, to show that
Ohlendorf was a moral monster.
– Ohlendorf claims that he had
“scruples” about carrying out his
orders to kill people but that it was
inconceivable to him that he should
not follow orders given by a superior.
– A person such as Ohlendorf, who
actually does hideous things to real
people, is much more monstrous than
anyone who has a badly formed
conscience, lacks sympathy for the
suffering of others, but who never is
actually responsible for the suffering
of others.