UM: Helen:
"Suffering is either meaningful or not, either redemptive or simply unpleasant."
Helen, three paragraphs later:
"Alleviating poverty is a kind of anti-suffering policy I can get on board with; not all suffering is sacrificial/redemptive/awesome."
Which leads, I think, to the conclusion that poverty is unpleasant? Surely it's more than that, and the fact that it is motivates much thinking on social and global justice. Once one drops below a particular threshold, poverty becomes a combination of pernicious and preventable.* Thus the attitude "that the only way they can think to respond to suffering is to want it stopped as soon as possible" is a polemical and theoretical response to the fact that most people are happy to do nothing.
*Not saying, btw, that all poverty can be eliminated, but rather that effort will produce at least some effect.
"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
No comments:
Post a Comment