The Science of Sympathy: Morality, Evolution, and Victorian Civilization
The Science of Sympathy: Morality, Evolution, and Victorian Civilization
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同情心的科学：道德、进化论和维多利亚文明
DOI：
10.1080/00033790.2017.1318172
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发表时间：
2016
影响因子：
0.3
通讯作者：
Rob Boddice
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Rob Boddice
罗布·博迪斯 (Rob Boddice) 对三个问题进行了引人入胜的探讨：活体解剖、疫苗接种和优生学，这三个问题在维多利亚时代后期引起了很多争论。然而，博迪斯真正关注的是十九世纪后期的科学文化如何挪用和运用同情心，这个术语是维多利亚时代的人从十八世纪的道德哲学家那里继承来的，并为他们自己的道德目的而运用。这项研究的主要论点是，进化论——尤其是查尔斯·达尔文的著作——对同情心的含义以及同情心在政策和实践中的表现方式进行了彻底的、有时令人惊讶的重新配置，并被认为有利于社会整体。这种修改甚至转变的同情概念涉及新的精英、新的地点和新的程序。它重新定义了性别和阶级行为的概念，并促使人们对个人与国家之间的关系进行彻底的重新评估。博迪斯认为，科学是感性的，受其自身的“禁忌、责任和罪恶”驱动。通过在 19 世纪的背景下“陌生化同情”，他的书旨在让我们“批判性地思考同情和道德的含义以及科学和科学家在我们日常生活中的作用”（第 25 页）。前面的章节奠定了基础。在《人类的起源》中，对达尔文的论点进行了讨论，即同情心是社会动物中发现的一种本能，并在人类社会中发展起来，这表明了这个术语的复杂性，即使在进化论辩论中也是如此。同情心既是本能，又是习惯，是一种感觉，也是理性的结果。博迪斯的目的是找出科学世界特有的“同情心”，并解释它对维多利亚社会和文化道德价值观念变化的特殊贡献。生理学、细菌理论和种族统计学的进步伴随着对其伦理力量的争论，同时创造了一种特别具有同情心的“现代科学自我”。然而，在博迪斯的论点中，这种“同情心的科学”是深奥的，在科学界之外很少有人理解，因此，注定会逐渐减少，几乎没有留下任何持久的痕迹（第11、6页）。“当我切割时，我会做好事”，这是博迪斯在将活体解剖实践确立为道德实践时赋予活体解剖者的带有道德色彩的咒语。这项生动的研究中持续存在的问题是“同情心”是否真的是至关重要的。如果同情被剥夺了通常所理解的含义——即某种形式的想象的（或者实际上是肉体的）认同——它还能成为有意义的同情吗？时不时地，这个争论会因为矮胖子坚持认为“当我使用一个词[……]时，它的意思就是我选择它的意思”而困扰。尽管如此，博迪斯是对的，科学家们（他们主要是男性）大量讨论了同情心，并且在他们的辩论中发挥了重要作用。特别是在有关活体解剖的争论方面，反对者和支持者都表示同情。英国的反活体解剖游说团体组织良好，利用主流媒体和专门出版物，如《Zoophilist》（反活体解剖维多利亚街协会的机关报）。在撰写有关批准砍伐动物如何危及同情心的文章时，他们经常强调性别问题（部分原因是弗朗西斯·鲍尔·科布等女性活动家的突出地位）和国籍问题。在关于“共同同情心和疯狂科学家”的一章中，博迪斯回顾了伴随着欧洲大陆生理学扩张而引起的一些众所周知的争议，随着《生理学手册》的出版……
Rob Boddice has provided an engaging exploration of three issues that were the source of much debate in the later Victorian period: vivisection, vaccination and eugenics. Boddice’s real focus, however, is on how scientific culture in the later part of the nineteenth century appropriated and deployed sympathy, a term the Victorians had inherited from the moral philosophers of the eighteenth century and put to work for their own ethical purposes. The driving argument of this study is that evolutionary theory—and especially the work of Charles Darwin—produced a radical and sometimes surprising re-configuring of what sympathy could mean and how it was manifested in policy and practice that was argued to benefit the social whole. This modified—or even transformed—notion of sympathy involved new elites, new locations and new procedures. It produced redrawn notions of gender and class behaviour and prompted radical reassessment of the relation between individual and state. Science, Boddice argues, is emotional, driven by its own ‘taboos, duties, and sins’. By ‘defamiliarizing sympathy’in its nineteenth-century context, his book aims to make us ‘think critically about the meanings of sympathy and morality and the role of science and scientists in our own everyday lives’(p. 25). Early chapters establish the ground. Discussion of Darwin’s argument, in Descent of Man, that sympathy is an instinct found in social animals and developed in human societies, pinpoints the complexity of the term, even within evolutionary debate. Sympathy is both instinct and habit, a feeling and an outcome of reason. Boddice’s aim is to identify a ‘sympathy’specific to this scientific world and to account for its peculiar contribution to changing notions of moral value in Victorian society and culture. The advance of physiology, germ theory and racial statistics was accompanied by arguments about their ethical power, creating at the same time a ‘modern scientific self’characterized as especially sympathetic. In Boddice’s argument, however, this ‘science of sympathy’is esoteric, little understood outside the scientific community and, as a result, destined to dwindle with little lasting trace (pp. 11, 6).‘As I cut, I do good’, is the morally-flavoured incantation Boddice ascribes to the vivisector as he established his practice as ethical. The problem that persists in this lively study is whether ‘sympathy’is really what is at stake. If sympathy is divested of what it was generally understood to connote—namely some form of imaginative (or indeed corporeal) identification—can it still meaningfully be sympathy? Every now and then, the argument feels haunted by Humpy Dumpty insisting that ‘When I use a word […] it means just what I choose it to mean’. Nevertheless, Boddice is right that sympathy was much discussed by scientific men (and they were mainly men) and was importantly implicated in their debates. In relation especially to arguments about vivisection, it was opponents as much as advocates that kept sympathy in view. The anti-vivisection lobby in Britain was well organized, using the mainstream press alongside dedicated publications like the Zoophilist (the organ of the anti-vivisection Victoria Street Society). In writing about how sympathy was endangered by the sanctioned cutting of animals, they frequently foregrounded issues of gender—in part because of the prominence of women campaigners, like Frances Power Cobbe—and nationality. In a chapter on ‘Common Compassion and the Mad Scientist’Boddice rehearses some of the well-known controversies that accompanied the expansion of physiology in continental Europe which, with the publication of the Handbook for the …
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