On kindness

Generosity and kindness are my two favorite qualities.

I tend to put them together when I’m thanking someone because I trust there isn’t much else to keep in mind if you want to be a good person. Everything else can help, but it’s optional.

True kindness is an expression of generosity that turns us toward benevolence, toward the golden rule that asks us to treat others as we’d like to be treated. And since most of us seem to like being treated well, this tacit clause saves our definition from a pathological circularity.

Consequently, being kind doesn’t require foolish altruism (or sacrifice) and can be traced back to a very selfish interest in being treated well.

Life in society, that peculiar necessary evil, would be especially difficult to navigate if, for example, we had to keep deciding how to act every time we ran into someone unpleasant, without being able to fall back on the rules of courtesy and kindness.

Of course, these supposed rules of behavior are neither obvious nor self-evident, which explains both the popularity of ethics among the branches of philosophy and the enthusiasm for conversations about how someone conducts themselves. Prying into other people’s lives is a pastime few can resist.

But while ethics concerns itself with the problem of how to lead a “good life,” it aspires to establish universal principles, and the details are usually left as homework, especially if you study philosophy.