Schopenhauer believes that many seemingly moral behaviors are for selfish purposes, and the two most important reasons are personal reputation and legal norms. For the purpose of moral behavior of personal reputation, it implies satisfying one's own desires and hoping to gain the respect of others, thus producing psychological satisfaction. The moral behavior forced by legal norms is made to escape the punishment of the law and avoid losses. These behaviors have no real moral significance in Schopenhauer's view. The extreme form of this purpose is: everything is mine, and others have nothing.

evil-minded

The second immoral motive is malice, and the purpose is to hope that others will suffer. Schopenhauer believes that malice is everywhere, but generally its degree is slight, which is generally manifested in indifference and disgust between people. Human beings use politeness and cleverness to cover up this motive, so malicious slander and rumors behind it are quite common. The two main sources of malice are jealousy and schadenfreude. Envy is a despicable human nature that nature can't get rid of, because jealous things should be admired and moved. And gloating can be said to be a common appearance of malice. Schopenhauer believes that there is nothing more morally useless than gloating. The extreme form of malice is to hurt others as much as possible, and all cruel acts are just schadenfreude.

Schopenhauer believes that all immoral behaviors can be derived from the above two motives.

sympathize with

Schopenhauer thinks that true morality is very rare, and there are one in ten thousand people with true morality. He said that we will respect those moral behaviors, which just shows that those moral behaviors are different and incredible. He quoted Rousseau as saying that people will not feel the same way with their happy people, but only with our unfortunate people. That is, our direct empathy is limited to the pain of others, not comfort. Therefore, sympathy is essentially empathy for the pain of others, that is, taking others and yourself as one. From sympathy to nobility, selflessness and generosity, all praise for virtue is based on this and nothing else.

Schopenhauer defined the basic principle of ethics based on sympathy as: don't hurt others, try your best to help everyone, and its corresponding two basic virtues are justice and kindness (is kindness a kind of sympathy? )。 Justice shows the negative nature of sympathy, that is, it can't stand the pain of others and forces itself to at least not hurt others. Kindness, on the other hand, shows the affirmative effect of compassion, which is higher than justice, that is, seeing others suffer as if they are suffering, so as to help everyone. Schopenhauer thinks that both of them are extremely rare, but they do exist, and even immoral people can't deny them.

The origin of human nature and compassion

Since all actions are driven by self-interest, malice and sympathy, a person's moral level can be regarded as the proportion of these three in his character. The greater the proportion of sympathy among the three, the higher a person's moral level. Schopenhauer believes that the proportion of the three cannot be changed in a person's personality, and his argument for this view is based on the universal attitude of human beings. People will never trust a bad man who has made mistakes in the past; A person who is regarded as a good person can always gain people's trust no matter what he has done wrong; When attacking each other, we are all attacking other people's character rather than the event itself, because character is considered to be immutable. For example, people often say that a leopard cannot change his spots. Schopenhauer believes that everything has its essence first, and then its essence is brought into play, so all actions come from our personal freedom, which he thinks is absolutely impossible.

Schopenhauer thinks that it is the most difficult problem to demonstrate the moral basis, that is, the origin of compassion. Because the essence of compassion is to feel the pain of others, that is, to think of others, I actually make no difference. In the eyes of egoists and misers, others are absolutely different from themselves, which is the fundamental difference between them and compassionate people. So the origin of morality is to see through the difference between others and self (that is, to get rid of egoism? ), which is the cornerstone of sympathy and morality. To unfold is to realize that there is no difference between all things. Schopenhauer's argument about the origin of morality here has a mystical tendency (the unity of all things), which is essentially the same as China's and Zhuangzi's thought of the unification of things.

Schopenhauer's ethics can be roughly described by this logic: everything has no division-> no division; People are no different from me-> Compassion for the pain of others-> Compassion arises spontaneously-> The establishment of justice and kindness->; Moral construction