Pity

Overthink

Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D.

Philosophy, Society & Culture, Education

4.7 • 549 Ratings

🗓️ 19 December 2023

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Tell us who you pity and we’ll tell you who you are! In episode 93 of Overthink, Ellie and David guide you through the philosophy behind this “well-meaning” emotion. From Aristotle’s account of pity in theater, to problematic portrayals of disability in British charity telethons, pity has had an outsized role our social and cultural worlds. But who is the object of our pity, and why? Your hosts dissect various archetypes of pity, such as Father Mackenzie (a character in Eleanor Rigby by the Beatles) and the elusive Corn Man (a figure invented by Ellie while in Greece!). Where is the line between pity and compassion? How does pity interact with our social responsibilities and power structures? And, is pity a meaningful part of the good life, or is it an emotion we would all be better off without?

Check out the episode's extended cut here!

Works Discussed

Aristotle, Poetics & Rhetoric
The Beatles, Eleanor Rigby
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature
Kristján Kristjánsson, “Pity: A Mitigated Defense”
Martha Nussbaum, “Tragedy and Self-Sufficiency: Plato and Aristotle on Fear and Pity”
Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
Joseph Stramondo, “How an Ideology of Pity is a Social Harm for People With Disabilities”
Bernard Whitley, Mary Kite, and Lisa Wagner, Psychology of Prejudice and Discrimination

Special thanks to Alexandra Peabody for her support in researching this episode!

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Overthink.
0:15.8	The podcast where two friends and philosophy professors encourage you to
0:19.5	overthink your otherwise unexamined life.
0:22.3	I'm David Pena Guzman. And I'm Ellie Anderson. David, pity is not a very well-liked emotion.
0:30.4	What is your take on it? I am definitely team anti-pity for sure. I think pity is an unfitting response when we're relating to other
0:40.3	people because it involves a sort of looking down on them. There is a dimension of, I guess I would
0:47.7	say condescension when it comes to pity. And this is why it's been such a target of critique
0:51.9	in the disability rights community, as we'll see a little later in the episode.
0:57.6	Yeah. Nowadays, pity has been superseded, I think we could say, by other moral emotions. It doesn't have the same traction that compassion or sympathy or empathy have.
1:08.9	I think, though, whether we think that pity is moral or not, I've been wanting
1:13.9	to do an episode on this because I think pity is a feeling that many of us have nonetheless
1:18.7	at various times in our lives, right? Our senses of what are morally fitting emotions don't
1:25.2	necessarily track with how we actually feel.
1:27.9	We feel a lot of problematic emotions a lot of the time.
1:30.7	Speak for yourself.
1:31.5	Some of us are morally pure Ellie.
1:34.7	Okay.
1:35.5	I could tell some stories.
1:37.1	No, I'm just kidding.
1:37.8	Love you, David.
1:39.8	I do think you're a good person for what it's worth.
1:42.0	Oh, wow.
	...

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