Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet. Because,ultimately, the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated.
Interpretation
Empathy can create moral dilemmas by blurring the lines between different roles in life.
In this quote, Philip K. Dick explores the complexities of empathy, suggesting that it's easier to empathize with those who are not viewed as predators. He implies that when one extends empathy across boundaries—such as between hunters and prey—it can lead to a confusing moral landscape where success and failure are not easily defined. This challenges the reader to consider the implications of empathy in social dynamics and ethical considerations.
In practice
In a discussion about ethics in literature, this quote could be used to illustrate the moral complexities faced by characters.
We are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, and some alteration in reality occurs. We have the overwhelming impression that we were reliving the present - deja vu.
Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.
On some other world, possibly it is different. Better. There are clear good and evil alternatives. Not these obscure admixtures, these blends, with no proper tool by which to untangle the components.
"Do you have information that there's an android in the cast? I'd be glad to help you, and if I were an android would I be glad to help you?" "An android," he said, "doesn't care what happens to another android. That's one of the indications we look for." "Then," Miss Luft said, "you must be an android."
The universe is information and we are stationary in it, not three dimensional and not in space or time.
A man is an angel that has gone deranged.
A mantra is like meeting the Buddha or Bodhisattva himself.
When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.
Nothing discernible to the eye of the spirit is more brilliant or obscure than man; nothing is more formidable, complex, mysterious, and infinite. There is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul.
Our daily deeds as ordinary South Africans must produce an actual South African reality that will reinforce humanity's belief in justice, strengthen its confidence in the nobility of the human soul, and sustain all our hopes for a glorious life for all.
What does it matter that we take different roads so long as we reach the same goal?
People don't ever have to starve to death; there are solutions. We have failed if we can't eradicate hunger in Africa and Ethiopia.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.