Sen's Sympathy & Commitment.

Adam Smith's 'a theory of moral sentiment' made an absurd claim- 'As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. 

This is nonsense. We use language, including 'body language', to learn how other people, or animals, are affected by things which are happening to them even if those things have never happened to us and could never happen to us. It is not necessary for me to imagine what it feels like to have a vagina or to push a baby out of a vagina to know that the thing is painful. I also don't know what it feels like to use a vibrator but can guess by the fact that there is a big market for such things, that people who use them derive pleasure from them. Indeed, there are lots of things, whose use I don't know and don't want to know, which I know to be valuable to certain people who, it is evident, will pay good money to purchase them. I may have no 'sympathy' for such people but am content to say 'different strokes for different folks' and leave it at that.

Though our brother is on the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. 

Even if the person on the rack is a cousin, rather than a brother, we are likely to be discommoded by his piercing shrieks of agony. True, Smith was Scottish and may have been more fortunately constituted. 

They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations.

Nonsense! If people will pay good money to escape the rack, we understand that the thing is best avoided. Moreover, if my boss texts me with a demand that I send Kuy Teav to his hotel room and I don't know what Kuy Teav is, I ask my colleagues. One of them says, 'leave it with me. My wife is from Cambodia'.  I make no further inquiry. I don't care if Kuy Teav means 'rent-boy' in the Khmer language or  if it is a Cambodian dish or type of sleeping garment. All that matters is that the boss is happy. 

 Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case. 

This simply isn't true. Some people may have sufficient imagination to 'put themselves in the shoes' of other people. Most don't. They don't care why people buy or sell a product. They just look at whether they themselves would find it profitable to enter that trade. 

It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy. 

This may be true of people similar to ourselves. But our imaginations 'can copy' tales about Gods and Demons and flying unicorns. I like to think of myself as one of the latter species having marvellous adventures on the rings of Uranus. 

By the imagination, we place ourselves in his situation.

Or the situation of a flying unicorn. So what? Commerce has little need for imagination. It does require a sharp eye for price movements and changes in rates of profitability. As for 'moral sentiments', they may arise from Theology, or a concern for Duty or Reputation or 'Fama', rather than Sympathy. Indeed, previously, people thought 'synderesis'- i.e. innate knowledge of the fundamental principles of moral action- was implanted in all humans by their Creator. 'Sympathy' was just a psychological term Smith used to replace a 'scholastic' one. 

For Amartya Sen, Sympathy differs from Commitment in that

'The former corresponds to the case in which the concern for others directly affects one's own welfare. 

Everything which affects a thing, directly affects it. To say x indirectly affects y means that x directly affects some z which directly affects y.  

Sympathy is a feeling. Sometimes we want to feel sympathy and put ourselves in a position where sympathy is what we have a reasonable expectation of feeling. Affluent Americans who paid money to watch a Satyajit Ray movie about very poor Bengalis, did so because they expected to feely sympathy not derision or boredom. In this case sympathy is part and parcel of welfare just as feeling horror is part and parcel of the pleasure (that is utility or welfare) gained by watching a horror movie. There is 'impredicativity' here which means that a structural causal model can't be constructed. 

'If the knowledge of torture of others makes you sick, 

you have a mental illness or neurosis or phobia similar to what happens when a person feels vertigo when they think of cliff or hear about a person who is threatening to jump while standing on the ledge of a skyscraper.

it is a case of sympathy;

No. You may have no sympathy whatsoever for the terrorist being tortured. It's just that you lose your lunch when you have to hear his screams. 

 if it does not make you feel personally worse off, but you think it is wrong and you are ready to do something to stop it, it is a case of commitment.' 

This is a foolish view. What is being described is queasiness not sympathy. The sight of blood may make a person queasy. They avoid seeing it. They may have no sympathy for injured people who are bleeding to death. Equally, I may be very deeply committed to not dying. Yet, if my Doctor tells me I have to stop eating pizza and drinking sugary drinks while binge watching Netflix in order to postpone death, I am not willing to do so. 

As for commitments- what matters is whether you stick to them. A professional whose fees are properly paid is likely to fulfil this commitment- e.g a hotshot attorney who gets you off on a murder charge even if he thinks you are guilty. What makes the lawyer's commitment credible is his concern for his own professional reputation. A guy who thinks you have suffered a great wrong and who promises to clear your name may be incapable of making a commitment in this respect because he is a drug addict and lacks any type of legal skill. 

Sen says 'The characteristic of commitment with which I am most concerned here is the fact that it drives a wedge between personal choice and personal welfare, and much of traditional economic theory relies on the identity of the two.' 

This is nonsense. Traditional economic theory differentiates between utility and disutility. When you make a commitment you are stipulating that you will taken on a certain level of disutility- e.g. working from 9 to 5- in return for a certain sum of money (this is 'transferable utility) which will enable you to enjoy more utility in your leisure hours. There is no 'wedge' between choice and utility. There is a trade-off between disutility and utility.  

Some people gain utility by showing sympathy while others gain utility by committing to pay money or spend time helping a certain class of people. Sometimes sympathy motivates commitment. Sometimes, a commitment may lead to sympathy (e.g. a lawyer who comes to see that his shit-bag client has had a hard life). But they may be wholly divorced from each other. 

One can have commitments with respect to oneself for wholly self-regarding reasons. If I committed to a healthy lifestyle, I will soon derive more pleasure from eating sushi than I do from guzzling Pizza. I will enjoy jogging more than I currently enjoy watching Netflix. Yet I won't make the change because of the initial discomfort. Also, I'm betting Big Pharma will come up with a pill which fat, lazy, bastards like me can take so as to postpone death. 

Marshallian (i.e. Neo-Classical) Economics had thoroughly grasped the points made above. Sen chose to ignore these developments so as to reinvent a square wheel so as to provide an 'availability cascade' for academics as useless as himself. 

As a case in point, Mark S. Peacock writes

This paper examines Amartya Sen’s concept of sympathy and the oversimplified, ambiguous and sometimes erroneous interpretations of this concept by Sen’s interpreters.

Why examine what is obvious nonsense? 

In the first section, two types of sympathy can be found in Sen’s ‘Rational fools’ essay – a contemplative

i.e. thinking starving peeps would probably really enjoy a nice Pizza 

and an active type

sending some money to a charity so they can buy starving peeps Pizza 

of which the former has conceptual primacy. Following this, active sympathy is examined to ascertain what Sen means by ‘actions based on sympathy’ and why he deems these to be ‘egoistic’.

Coz the guy doing it has an ego.  

Sen’s understanding of egoism means that sympathy is not straightforwardly assimilable to the orthodox theory of rational choice.

Sure it is. I contemplatively feel sympathy for myself- a guy hungry for pizza- and for other hungry guys who would like some pizza. I order a Pizza and hand around slices and feel very good about myself. This is called gaining 'utility' or 'ophelimity' or 'welfare' or 'pleasure' or 'satisfaction'. Rational choice can analyse this well enough. Suppose I order the Pizza on the phone and the guy on the other end says 'that will be two hundred quid' and my reply is 'fuck that! I'll order Chinese!' then we have a data point from which, eventually, my 'price elasticity' for Pizza can be calculated.  

The section after that analyses the place of altruism in Sen’s work

altruism is a Tarskian primitive. It means different things to different people. I believe it involves letting other people smell my farts. They think it involves telling me to fuck off so everybody else can enjoy the dinner party.  

and ascertains that altruism can be aligned both with sympathy and commitment,

and with farting 

depending on the definition one uses.

Nope. The thing is a Tarskian primitive. It has no definition. What you think good for other people is not necessarily what they think is good for themselves and others. 

The final section compares sympathy and commitment and establishes that they are to be distinguished, not according to the welfare a person expects to obtain from making choices, but according to the reason which motivates that person to make a choice.

Nonsense! Sympathy is an emotion. Commitment is more like a promise. A person may be very sympathetic to you but may refuse to promise you any type of support. Equally, another person who has no sympathy for you may credibly commit to help you for some reason of their own. Thus Hamas may feel no sympathy for Shia Iran but its commitment to help that country, for its own reasons, is credible enough. Equally, people who have zero sympathy for Jews or for Israel, may be relied upon to help that country for geopolitical reasons.  

 Introduction In his essay, ‘Rational fools’ (1977), Amartya Sen uses the concepts ‘sympathy’ and ‘commitment’ to capture aspects of human choice which are not straightforwardly conceivable in rational choice theory.

Emotions we feel may have a utility of their own. I may pay to watch a movie about the Holocaust so as to feel sympathy for the victims just as I may pay to watch a horror movie so as to experience the emotion of fear. Equally, I may gain utility by committing to show up for work so as to get paid even though I am wholly out of sympathy with the notion that doing work is good for the character or for one's self-respect. Rational Choice theory has a theory of disutility just as much as it has a theory of utility. It is Sen whose theory is vacuous. Why, if he feels sympathy for famine victims, did he not become a soil scientist like his father so as to boost agricultural output, or else join the FAO under another relative of his- B.R Sen? Why was his actual 'commitment' only to lecturing on useless, stupid, shit? The answer is provided by Rational Choice theory. Sen's sympathy was overridden by the great disutility he would have experienced if he had actually done something useful.  

Sympathy has been treated by Sen’s interpreters as the weaker sibling of the pair, and Sen himself is partly responsible for the modest reputation which sympathy has. He has not, for instance, developed the concept of sympathy in his later opus in a manner similar to the reworking which commitment has undergone. And sympathy is less seditious vis-à-vis the orthodox theory of rational choice than commitment, something which makes the latter concept of more interest to Sen than sympathy. 

Commitment is merely a credible type of promise though, no doubt, it is defeasible by a change in opportunity cost. I am committed to buying a Pizza we can share till I realize I might have to cut back on my purchase of other things I want if I actually bought the pizza. There is nothing particularly interesting about this. I suppose Sen gasses on about it because he wants to fool us he is 'committed' to helping the poor rather than posing as a sort of Mother Theresa. 

Similarly, in my work on sexology, I put more stress on having a ginormous cock than on being a tender and sensitive lover. To be clear, I want people to think I have a big cock. I don't care if they think I won't go down on a woman even if that's the only way I've ever been able to get a girl to climax. 

... Sen means... states that commitment involves counterpreferential choice.

Sadly, we don't know what preferences are. We do know what revealed preference is and we can speculate whether a particular person would really have preferred something else.  

 Sen ultimately, in his work of the 2000s, concludes that sympathy can be incorporated into an extended version of orthodox rational choice theory which maintains the assumption that individuals pursue their self-interest in all their endeavours.

There is no need for any such assumption which, in any case, is either tautological or incapable of being controverted by any empirical observation whatsoever.  

Fabienne Peter and Hans Bernhard Schmid discuss three types of motivation which Sen distinguishes. One is ‘(narrow) self-interest’: ‘One acts from self-interest when one aims at maximizing one’s own welfare’.

Again, no one can say whether this isn't the case. Suppose you say 'I will go to the shop and buy the dress which makes me look most horrible even though I yearn for praise for my beauty and elegance.' I may reply, 'I don't believe you. You are only saying this so I will think some dress could make you less hideous than you actually are, Mummy.' 

Sympathy, they write, is also a type of motivation: ‘One acts from sympathy when one’s own welfare is affected by how others are doing, as in the case where helping others makes one feel better’.

But one can be very sympathetic to a person one likes to see suffer. A doting husband may poison his wife so as to have the pleasure of nursing her. Suffering has ennobled her. She no longer compares my dick unfavourably to that of the Pizza delivery boy.  

The third motivation is commitment which, as Peter and Schmid write, is ‘motivationally unrelated to the agent’s welfare, however broadly conceived’. I

This is impossible. There is no way to prove that commitment won't benefit one in some indirect or unexpected way.  

n this section, I contrast self-interest and sympathy and turn my attention to commitment in the final section of this paper. Peter and Schmid’s depiction of self-interest and sympathy is noteworthy for three reasons. First, that self-interest marks a type of motivation is clear from their mention of the aim behind an agent’s self-interested action – to maximise her welfare.

Nonsense! Under Knightian Uncertainty, Rational Choice involves regret minimization not Welfare maximization. The same is true for reasons connected to cost of information acquisition, complexity, computability, concurrency etc. 

 is sympathy always egoistic?

yes. Chairs don't have an ego but can't be sympathetic. The cat can be sympathetic but it is very egotistical.  

Pettit qualifies his statement when he discusses what Sen calls ‘altruism through sympathy’

which does not exist. We may say 'that person's sympathy for the suffering led them to act in an altruistic manner'. We don't say 'that torturer's sympathetic enjoyment of his victim's screams are altruistic.'  

which, writes Pettit, ‘is not self-interested in the sense of being pursued with an instrumental eye to securing some personal benefit … [but] that the person we favor is someone whose welfare matters to us, intuitively, in the same manner as our own; let them fare well and we feel good’ .

In which case we get a personal benefit.  

Favouring somebody whose welfare is as important to us as our own does not sound egoistic.

Nor does favoring Saturn over Uranus. But it is equally irrelevant.  

The third noteworthy point about Peter and Schmid’s portrayal is that, whereas they associate self-interest with the maximisation of one’s welfare,

which makes one feel better. Nobody likes knowing they missed out on an opportunity or ended up paying more than they had to.  

sympathy, in the form of helping others, makes one ‘feel better’. Feeling better presumably includes cases in which my helping another person maximises my welfare, but feeling better might also involve increasing, but not maximising, my welfare.

If there is no Knightian Uncertainty, then whatever you do maximizes your Utility. The theory is tautological.  

A question raised hereby concerns the relationship between sympathy and welfare maximisation.

It is the same as the relationship between either of them and farting. This is not a question worth answering.  

In what follows, I undertake a close examination of Sen’s pronouncements on sympathy, particularly those of ‘Rational fools’. My argument issues in the following conclusions: (a) sympathy is not necessarily a type of motivation for action

Sympathy is an emotion. It is likely to be a 'Darwinian algorithm of the mind'- i.e. it exists for an evolutionary reason. This means it necessarily is a type of motivation for action which, however, may be overridden by some stronger emotion or by a rational calculation. 

but can consist solely in a person’s feelings in which case sympathy is contemplative;

in which case the action that is motivated is 'contemplation'.  

(b) Sen places an epistemological condition on contemplative sympathy which requires that a person, A, can only feel sympathy if she knows and does not merely believe that the welfare of another person, B, with whom A feels sympathy, has changed.

This is the reverse of the usual view- which is that it is right and proper to have contemplative suffering for a fictional character- e.g. Tess of the d'Urbervilles- but not for a woman of flesh and blood whom you could help with a charitable donation. 

(c) pace Sen, ‘uncertainty’ does not necessarily leave the formulation of sympathy unaffected;

Not if Sympathy is indeed a 'Darwinian algorithm of the mind'. Evolution occurs on an uncertain fitness landscape. Thus uncertainty leaves untouched whatever formulates emotions.

(d) contemplative sympathy is the primary but not sole type of sympathy,

it is neither save by arbitrary stipulation. But I could say there is a type of sympathy only expressible by a ruminative fart and another whose origin is the sniffing of such a fart.  

for there is another, active, type of sympathy which Sen clearly delineates;

does it involve farting? 

(e) Sen’s understanding of egoism does not imply that the actor seeks to maximise her welfare when she performs actions based on sympathy;

Because Sen's understanding of everything is defective. Egoism is the trait displayed by things with an 'ego' or sense of possessing a self.  

(f) actions based on sympathy are ‘altruistic’ only

by subjective stipulation. We don't what is or isn't truly altruistic. Still, to have a reputation for altruism can be very beneficial. But, under different circumstances, so is having a reputation as a right bastard.

on a narrow (self-interested) understanding of that term; only commitment is compatible with a non-selfinterested understanding of altruism which Sen identifies;

The only way to have a non self-interested understanding of anything is by not being the sort of self which evolved to be self-interested- in other words, not being a human being. But there are an infinite number of way of not-being human.  

(g) choice based on commitment is

not a choice. Mummy offers you a choice between pizza and Chinese takeaway for dinner. You say no. You have a prior commitment to eating the shit your bride insists on cooking for you. I only came back to get my Teddy-bear. Hopefully, it will be able to keep me safe from her tonight.  

distinguished, not by the expected welfare effects it has for the agent who makes that choice, but by its reason-based (as opposed to preference-based) motivational structure.

A preference is a reason though you may have a reason for overriding a particular preference because of a prior commitment.  That's pretty much all that can be said on the topic.  Sen, however, wanted to say more. He wanted to show that if Preferences exist then it must also be the case that Democracy prevents Famine while Freedom causes Development and that true Democratic Freedom for India would involve the banning of Hinduism. 

True, Sen was and is merely a virtue signaller. He has no sympathy or commitment to anything save his own self-aggrandizement but must pretend to be a brown monkey incapable of understanding why other brown monkeys, who have a bit of money, remain in India despite the fact that lots of brown monkeys there are as poor as shit. Surely, a person with proper Smithian 'moral sentiments' would run the fuck away from India so as to be a Professor of useless shite at Harvard? How can you explain Manmohan or Mohammad Yunus staying on in their shit-hole homelands? The answer is obvious. They don't have good moral sentiments. They make a fetish out of 'Economic Growth' which is a code-word for raising productivity and therefore Income for vast numbers of people. Clearly this is incompatible with Freedom as Development as the Capability to Evaluate the Freedom to Develop without having any fucking Freedom or Development whatsoever.