Sympathy and the Mechanics of Character Change
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sympathy’s susceptibility to interpersonal relations is problematic for Hume because even though sympathy is crucial for making moral judgments, it biases our character judgments in favor of those closest to us. This essay will argue that despite his emphasis on these negative effects and his insistence on the need to correct sympathy in order to attain universal moral judgments, Hume also offers resources for thinking that uncorrected, relation-susceptible sympathy plays a powerful role in the formation of character and in the refinement of one’s character ideals. This positive role emerges from Hume’s claim that close relations to other persons maximize the pains we feel in response to their disapproval, suggesting that our interactions with these persons strongly motivate us to become critical of morally questionable traits and sufficiently determined to abandon them. Focusing on this function of sympathy enables us to understand the importance of situatedness and attachments for our moral development and reveals how spontaneous affections can usefully feed into our more reflective moral insights.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it