A Philosophy of Kindness | Audrey Ledbetter

We've all seen the graffiti on highway overpasses that say be kind, read a headline about the joy of a random act of kindness, or even heard Harry Styles sing treat people with kindness. But what does it actually mean to be kind? When I first thought about this question I was hunched over my computer on zoom puzzling my way through an ethics class. The word kindness is being thrown around as an example of something that we as humans value. I thought oh yeah I know what kindness is, but reflecting I realized maybe I don't. I wanted a strong philosophical definition and I set my mind on finding one. So I went to the library and checked out all the books with kindness in the title and the best way to learn is to teach. So after all this reading I taught a course on the topic to stop searched years. Together we discovered that the word kindness is just the tippy iceberg and that there's a whole world of ideas under the surface. So what did we find? Well we can break kindness down into two secret ingredients. Empathy which motivates us to be kind and vulnerability which can often hold us back. I'll start with empathy. Psychologist Jamil Zaki says when one creature shares in another's emotions seeing pain feels like being in pain and helping feels like being helped. Empathy, feeling a mirror of what someone else is feeling motivates us to be kind. So what does this look like in real life? Imagine I'm on a walk with a friend it's winter in Boston and the sidewalks are icy. She slips falls and twists her ankle. Obviously I'm going to help her up and take her to urgent care. When I look down at her I feel her pain. I'm emphasizing and I anticipate that helping her will make both of us feel good so I decide to be kind. Now let's adjust our example. This time I'm walking by myself and I see a 30 year old healthy looking woman slip and fall across the street. Ow I think that hurts. I know the pain of slipping on icy sidewalks but I make the assumption that she doesn't need any help because I perceive her as able-bodied and unsurprised by the fall. I move on. What I don't know is that she's new to Boston and has a pre-existing ankle injury that makes it extremely difficult for her to get up. She needs help but I've already moved on. My decision not to be kind stemmed from an assumption that I made about this woman. Author Henry James Garrett would call this an empathy limiting mistake where assumptions and ignorance get in the way of our empathy. These mistakes dramatically decrease our kindness and it's easier to make them about people whose lives are different from ours. We know less so we assume more. Kindness is not though just feeling that empathy. It's acting on it. Jordan Green tweeted, niceness is saying I'm so sorry you're cold. While kindness may be, oh you've said that five times, here's a sweater. Kindness is addressing the need regardless of tone. It's about the action. It is only nice if I just express my deepest sympathies for my friend who giving her a hand up and taking her to urgent care. That action is kindness. Taking that step towards kind action can be hard. Even when we are motivated by empathy to be kind, something can still hold us back. With kindness comes risk because it's impossible to know the outcome. This puts us in a vulnerable position and vulnerability is our second secret ingredient. When someone says I love you for the first time on a tv show, my eyes are equally as glued to the screen as I want to tear them away. It's vulnerable and hard to watch. Will the receiver be glad? Will they reciprocate? Kindness is similar in that the response is uncertain. When I take my friend to urgent care, I'm taking time out of my day showing her that I care about her. But in this close friendship, we've already established our care for each other. We've implicitly agreed that when one of us gets hurt, we'll accept the other's help. So the kind action here doesn't make me vulnerable. It's not risky. Some kind actions though are still vulnerable in a close friendship, particularly when the act is random or not in response to a direct need. Sometimes you just want to get your friend a coffee but feel awkward doing something sweet unprompted so you just say the barista accidentally gave me two. Here I act in spite of the vulnerability. There is a risk but we're already friends so it's not too big of a risk. I can find my way around it with a harmless lie about a barista. But when it comes to people we aren't as close to, kindness may keep us from acting at all. Let's think back to the woman across the street. I have the empathy response. Ow, that hurts. But I freeze when it comes to the action part because as we know, I assume she's fine. But also because helping her feels vulnerable. If I, a stranger, approach her, it means I have perceived that she needs help, that I saw her fall. It can be embarrassing. On top of that, I don't even know if she would want my kindness. Would she say that she's fine, that she can handle herself, or would she be glad because she's injured, new to Boston, and now has a friend to tell her where the closest urgent care is. The risk of kindness with strangers is not knowing the answers to these questions. And it's natural to worry that strangers will not accept our kindness. I remember one day after class, a student asked me if she could use our course as an excuse to be kind to people. She wanted to be able to go up to a stranger and say, hi, I'm in this course on kindness and we're supposed to be kind to people. How are you doing? The idea is that oftentimes, strangers get suspicious from random acts of kindness. We want to figure out other people's motives, and we find it hard to believe that people are being kind just for the sake of being kind. So it's easier to both give and receive kindness if you give a reason for it. Explaining kind action as homework, which I have to admit I did not give them, puts both the giver and receiver at ease. It makes us less vulnerable. So what if we were all metaphorically taking a class on kindness and using our homework as an excuse to be kind? Would this inspire more kindness in the world? We can think of this universal homework like a duty. A duty is something that you have an obligation to do, like how we have a duty to not go around killing each other. You're not seen as the beacon of life for abstaining from murder. It's just part of the deal. If kindness were a duty, I might have sprinted across the street immediately to help the woman who fell. Requiring ourselves to be kind relieves us of the difficulties of empathy and vulnerability. So should we do this? Is duty the way for a utopia of kindness? Well, it's not that simple. First, not killing someone just requires that you not do something, rather than actively doing something. It's easy to satisfy. But kindness requires that active doing, which raises the question, how far does this duty demand I go? Do I need to stop by every single person who looks like they could use help? Second, while duty would take away the difficult aspects of empathy and vulnerability, it would also take away those aspects that make kindness so meaningful. Kindness connects us to each other, makes us feel cared for and understood. It lies in those vulnerable and empathetic and empathetic moments between friends or strangers. It's me cooking for my stressed out roommate or her bringing me home my favorite flavor of ice cream for no reason. It's taking the risk to strike up a conversation in a communal bathroom one week into college and making a lifelong friend. Losing these benefits is a high price to pay for making kindness a duty. And it's a price that I am not, and I hope that you are not, willing to pay. And it shows us just why we are so obsessed with saying we should be more kind. It's a deeply human practice that creates relationships and community. So as I close, I want you to think about a moment, small or big, it doesn't matter, when you could have been kind but you weren't. Got it? Think back to how you were feeling in that moment. Was an assumption getting in the way of your empathy? Did the kindness seem risky or too vulnerable? Once you understand the answers to these questions, hopefully you can go forth and as Harry Stiles so wisely puts it, treat people with kindness. Thank you.