In Response to Israel Diaz (3/14/2010)

Q:"What if humans were radically compassionate? Would that be dangerous?"

I honestly have trouble thinking of ways that radical compassion could be troublesome for the human race. If each human only cared about others completely then things could only improve for the human race from where things stand now.Many of the major problems with humans relates to our tendency to make egotistical decisions. Many of the rich seem to only care about getting richer; they do not have intrest in helping people below them in socio-econmic staus. An example of this would be the Walton family,the owners of Walmart.Each member of the family owns billions of dollars, but as a family, they have donated less than 1% of their wealth. It seems that our society could greatly benefit from more compassion no matter how radical it is. The only major problem that radical compassion would create would be the results that decision making would have on the people making them; if people only made decisions for others and they did not care at all about themselves it could be troublesome. Before a person learns to take care of others, they first need to be able to take care of themselves. If radical compassion involved people unable to take care of themselves then I believe it would be extremely dangerous, but if people could be radically compassionate while still engaging in personal care, this type of compassion would have no problems. I actually think that our society as whole needs to have a lot more compassion, and to question whether compassion could cause problems is ludicrous. I understand that it is scary to imagine if there were no egotistical values in our society, but it is hard to find any problems that more compassion would create. With that said, it seems that like the Walton family, many people in our society do not have a large amount of compassion. This is why I am wondering whether our society encourages compassion or discourages it.

Do you think our society encourages compassion for others? (Why or Why Not)