Agent experience
It’s all very simple. There are only two types of people: vulnerable feelers and thinking doers, experiencers and agents. There are those who experience things and feel, and those who do things and act. There are those who have sensations inflicted upon them, and those who do the inflicting.
The simplified analogy for this way of interpreting the world is that at the extremes, the world consists of people who are helpless infants and other people who are emotionless robots. The infants can’t do anything but feel, and the robots can’t feel but only do. Seeing the world this way makes political considerations easy. You have to take up for the infants, after all. Otherwise, what are you? Some sort of heartless machine?
This is one of several questions addressed in the 2016 book The Mind Club, by Daniel Wegman and Kurt Grey. They examine how we perceive others: how we accord them with morality as we try to assess their motivations. And it seems we aren’t really any good at considering others as having both traits at once, feeling and agency.
Something in our own minds even causes us to project the potential for moral agency onto animals or inanimate objects, onto machines like computers or abstractions like corporations. For instance, what makes this confounded machine evil? Why does it insist upon ruining my day by crashing or failing to work as expected? And so on.
Arnold Kling reviewed the book here. And now I think I have to add it to my to-read pile, which is a real heartless bastard!
I think it is far more useful to assess others by their actions versus any assumptions regarding their morality or motives. I’m the husband of Phil’s Executive Assistant. Hi, everyone.
Hmmm, I was always taught there were 10 types of people: those who can code in binary and those who cannot.