Bennett vs. Hallie

• “The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn”– Conscience: The rational faculty by which

human beings make moral judgments about specific situations, actions, and persons.

– Well and Badly Formed Consciences• Individual consciences can be well or

badly formed, i. e. they can lead one to objective moral truth or objective moral falsity; thus, they are not infallible.

• Everyone has a moral obligation to form his conscience well.

• A person who acts in an objectively immoral way may, nevertheless, be acting in accord with his conscience.

• If so, then the objectively immorally acting person’s conscience has been badly formed.

• A badly formed conscience can, thus, bind as strongly as a well formed conscience.

• Question: Should a badly formed conscience bind just as much as a well formed conscience?

– Sympathy

• Bennett would answer the above question in the negative.

• Bennett suggests sympathy should be developed as a safeguard against a badly formed conscience.

• Sympathy for Bennett covers “every sort of fellow-feeling,” as when one is saddened by another’s loneliness, troubled by someone’s pain, or when one avoids hurting another

• Bennett says that feelings of sympathy must not be confused with moral judgments. The two are different.

• I may help someone who needs help out of sympathy for that person, but sympathy is a feeling it is not a judgment of the intellect about what one ought to do.

– Sympathy and Conscience

• Both sympathy and conscience can make a person act, and it is possible for sympathy and conscience to conflict and pull a person in different directions.

• Our sympathy for a person might even make us do what our consciences tell us is objectively wrong.

• The conflict between sympathy and conscience can occur in cases of a badly formed consciences just as much as in cases of well formed consciences.

– Sympathy and a Badly Formed Conscience• Bennett claims that Huck Finn has a

badly formed conscience because he accepts what he has been taught about slavery. To wit: It is morally permissible.

• Bennett claims Huck acts contrary to his badly formed conscience because of his sympathy for Jim.

• Bennett claims that Huck is morally correct to act thus.

• Bennett claims the badly formed conscience of Heinrich Himmler conflicted with what Bennett takes to be Himmler’s genuine sympathy for the human beings the Nazis exterminated.

• In Himmler’s case, however, the badly formed conscience won out over his sympathy.

• Bennett claims that in letting his badly formed conscience win, Himmler acted immorally.

– The Case of Jonathan Edwards

• Bennett claims that, not only is Edwards’ conscience badly formed, because he seems to subscribe to a hyper-Calvinist view of the Atonement, Edwards also seems completely to lack sympathy because he does not “find it painful to contemplate any fellow-human’s being tortured forever.”

• In other words, Bennett thinks Edwards completely lacks sympathy because he has no “fellow feeling” for those whom God arbitrarily “lets fall to ceaseless flames,” i. e. arbitrarily damns.

• Thus, in Bennett’s view, Edwards is worse than Himmler because at least the latter had sympathy for his victims so that there was a chance sympathy might have saved him (and his victims) from his badly formed conscience.

– The Need for both Conscience and Sympathy

• For Bennett a well formed conscience helps a person avoid doing the wrong thing when one happens to have little or no sympathy at that time.

• Thus, a well formed conscience helps a person do the right thing when sympathy is lacking, due to such things as self-centeredness, depression, and anger.

• Sympathy can correct a badly formed conscience.

• If the dictates of conscience are in conflict with sympathy, that can be a strong indication the conscience is badly formed.

• Wilfrid Owen is Bennett’s example of this.

• Part of improving our moral code is to subject it to the test of sympathy.

• This doesn’t mean that sympathy should always win out when it conflicts with conscience.

• Bennett says, however, “one’s sympathies should be kept as sharp and sensitive and aware as possible . . .” because sympathy and human feelings in general are vital to our humanity.

• Perhaps people without sympathy are less human than those who have sympathy.

• Perhaps, in addition to our capacity for language and abstract thought, what most defines us as humans is our great capacity for experiencing a variety of feelings, including sympathy.

• “The Evil Men Think – and Do”

– Philip Hallie criticizes Bennett for a view of morality which is too simple and too heavily dependent on sympathy to the exclusion of other things, like the effects of actions on victims.

– Hallie criticizes Bennett for placing morality in the mind alone rather than considering the morality of the effects of actions in the world.

– According to Bennett, because Himmler had a sympathetic mind, even though he did terrible things, he is more moral than Edwards because Edwards lacked sympathy.

– Edwards may have been without compassion, and Himmler may have had some compassion, but Himmler was actually responsible for the deaths, torture, and suffering of millions of innocent people.

– The presence or absence of sympathy in the mind is less important than the evil which people actually do.

– Hallie points out that evil is not confined to the mind; evil actions which directly affect people are worse than evil thoughts towards them.

– Evil doing is worse than evil thinking.

– In considering Adolf Eichmann, another Nazi butcher, Hallie says that Eichmann’s evil was not only in his mind but in his actions.

– Hallie says that, if Eichmann had only thought of the evil things which he wished to do to innocent Jews, he would have been “pitiable, not culpable.”

– Because he actually did these things “his evil lay in his deeds” in everything he actually did to real people.

– We have to pay attention not just to the presence or absence of sympathy in a person but to what that person actually does.

– Someone who makes people suffer is worse than the person who makes no one suffer but has no sympathy.

– Hallie: “There is no substitute for seeing the harshness and ugliness of fact.”

– Hallie provides an excerpt from the Nuremberg trial transcript of Otto Ohlendorf, who had participated in the extermination of Jews and Soviet political leaders, to show that Ohlendorf was a moral monster.

– Ohlendorf claims that he had “scruples” about carrying out his orders to kill people but that it was inconceivable to him that he should not follow orders given by a superior.

– A person such as Ohlendorf, who actually does hideous things to real people, is much more monstrous than anyone who has a badly formed conscience, lacks sympathy for the suffering of others, but who never is actually responsible for the suffering of others.