In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Kindness and the Good Society: Connections of the Heart
  • Patrick Shade
Kindness and the Good Society: Connections of the Heart. William S. Hamrick. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. 320 pp. $81.50 h.c. 0-7914-5265-4; $27.95 pbk. 0-7914-5266-2.

Few of us deny that kindness enhances the moral quality of individual and communal life. Typically, though, philosophers consider it of secondary importance. Just how fully, after all, can we ground the good life in something as personal and emotional as kindness?

Quite fully, argues William Hamrick in Kindness and the Good Society. In response to neglect of the topic by philosophers, Hamrick provides an extensive, critical, and insightful examination of kindness and the role it plays in the good life. Key to his analysis is demonstrating that kindness is a complex phenomenon with both affective and cognitive features. Hamrick structures the book in three parts. The first offers a phenomenological description of kindness, while the second provides a hermeneutical critique that allows him to develop a critical ethic in the third. In chapter 1, Hamrick embraces a phenomenological method to uncover the central features of kindness manifest in concrete everyday examples. He describes the kind act as intentional, voluntary, and aimed at the welfare of the recipient. Drawing on the work of Merleau-Ponty, Hamrick locates the site of kindness in the social experience of the lived-body, where needs and the acts to meet them are manifested. One who would act kindly must be sensitive to the needs of others and have the resolve to address them. Such sensitivity requires connection to the world of feelings; disconnection blinds us to others' needs and impedes our ability to meet them.

The second and third chapters move from acts to persons, focusing on four qualities that denote a kind person. These include the capacity for habitual performance and the possession of a disposition of openness, warm generosity, and finally self-mastery. Hamrick identifies the emotional basis of kindness, though he does not bifurcate feeling and reason. He argues that kindness requires a way of encountering others that is both emotional (attuned to their needs through the world of feelings) and rational (attentive to the reality of their situations and able to calculate possible responses to their needs). Kindness calls for a practical wisdom that is imaginative, speculative, and calculative, blending understanding of rules with contextual sensitivity. In sum, kindness requires a specific kind of disposition plus factual understanding of the situation we hope to remedy through kindness.

Chapters 4 and 5 explore kindness in broader social contexts. Though they have a nonattributable agency, we can gauge the kindness of social atmospheres, technologies, institutions, and even our relation to nature via their very real effects. Hamrick identifies examples of unkindness in the American social [End Page 351] atmosphere such as body-images influenced by fashion models and the dumbing down of education (manifest in grade inflation). Unkind technologies disconnect us from ourselves (when we commercialize our bodies) and from nature (when we only value nonhumans for their uses). Hamrick calls for a new, appreciative instrumentalism that does not reduce the value of things to their use for us.

After this descriptive account of kindness, Hamrick turns to hermeneutic interpretation to distinguish genuine kindness from specious forms that rightly make us critical of the value and efficacy of kindness. Hamrick here develops a hermeneutic of suspicion by offering a detailed analysis of several examples (e.g., Frederick Douglass's relation to slave owners and Nora's relation to her husband in A Doll's House) in which apparently kind agents actually hurt their intended recipients. The problem in each case is blindness to others' feelings due to intellectual commitment to a principle (e.g., that slaves are inhuman, that women are possessions of men) bolstered by social practices (e.g., slavery and sexism). This section of the book provides a sobering and critical examination of the abuses of kindness that enables Hamrick to address criticisms of an ethic of kindness.

The lesson of the hermeneutic of suspicion is that we must be aware of the possibilities of coercion and exploitation in acts...

pdf