The Dangers of Putting Regulations Before Human Emotion
In today’s world, the creation of objective, universal norms that regulate human behavior is highly valued. The underlying presumption is that as long as these regulations are continuously enhanced, a better, more just world will result. But there’s a serious price to this rule-obsession: the subjective, interpersonal aspects of what makes us human are marginalized.
Formalized regulations aim to be unbiased and apply to everyone equally by definition. Compassion, empathy, and spontaneous kindness are examples of more particularistic human qualities that are directly at odds with this goal of objectivity and universality. The richness of our ability to provide personalized care and emotional sensitivity is ultimately sacrificed as we objectify more and more parts of the human experience into codifiable standards.
This is not to argue that rules are always harmful; on the contrary, they are essential to enabling successful coordination and cooperation among big groups of people. The issue emerges when we permit the pursuit of objective, universal laws to turn into a goal in itself rather than a method of promoting human flourishing. We risk missing the deeper sources of human significance and connection if we place an excessive value on rules.
Think about the area of family and parenting. This is a place where any externally imposed set of norms must yield to the particularistic ties of love, sacrifice, and caring. It is an attempt to lose the profound essence of a relationship with parents when one attempts to limit the unwavering love that parents give and receive to a set of objective rules. There is just no general checklist that can replace a mother’s invaluable ability to recognize her child’s specific needs at any given time.
When taken to the extreme, an obsessive focus on rules can become anathema to the very circumstances essential for human survival. If pushed to its extreme, the dedication to impartiality would render closeness, devotion, preferred affection, and any type of customized care abnormal and deviant. An impartial world without context-sensitive compassion is poor.
The idea is not that regulations are useless, or that we should abandon standards of impartiality and fairness. Rather, we must strike a careful balance between the universal application of principles and the particularistic recognition of individual uniqueness and passion. A society devoid of spontaneous compassion and solicitude is as dehumanizing as one without a fair legal system.
As we face the constraints of attempting to govern our way to a better society, we must have the humility to recognize the worth of virtues that go beyond impartial codification. Compassion and empathic attunement may frequently resolve problems and bridge gaps more efficiently than a slew of increasingly complex laws and regulations. An ethical society provides reasonable allowances for both the impartial and the specific.
In our admirable goal of global justice, we must be careful not to overlook the deeper genius loci of human kindness. Because attention, spontaneity, and warmth in our person-to-person interactions show our core belongingness and remind us of all that the cold language of rules can never represent.
