Ethics and the Sympathetic Imagination

“The Character Ethic taught that there are basic principles of effective living, and that people can only experience true success and enduring happiness as they learn and integrate these principles into their basic character.” (P.18) In Convey’s book, the inside-out method point out that quick-fixes are useless, but if your honest with yourself, that’s when you achieve “true success”. The contrast to character ethics is personality ethics, which is when you get what you want “through charm and sill and pretending to be interested in other people’s hobbies.” (P.22) When people rely on others recognition to uplift their own self-worth that’s an example of a quick-fix, that usually doesn’t work long-term.

Ethics


Another point made in Convey’s book, is the effective usage of a positive attitude. “Sometimes the most proactive thing we can do is to be happy, just too genuinely smile…We can be happy and accept those things that at present we can’t control, while we focus our efforts on the things that we can.”(P.90) Getting angry about anything is always taking the easy way out, it is much harder to keep your temper under control. When you do control your emotions you are taking a step toward self-control as well as self-awareness.

Positive


Empathy was mentioned both in Convey and the anthology book, because the term has such a broad yet important definition. In Convey, it says that when we empathize we are taking the time to really listen, without judgment and not jumping to a diagnosis before we’ve examined the entire situation. “When people are really hurting and you really listen with a pure desire to understand, you’ll be amazed how fast they will open up.” (P.252) In the anthology book, empathy is defined as “the power of projecting one’ personality into (and fully comprehending) the object of contemplation.”(P.274L) In other words when you can recognize what someone else is feeling and you’re someone they can turn too.

Empathy