A doctoral student receives a prestigious fellowship to pursue the study of kindness -- a topic with very personal meaning.
Caroline Lundquist comes across as someone who should write about kindness. Her personality is warm, her cheeks are rosy and she smiles while confirming that kindness is exactly what she studies.
A philosophy doctoral degree candidate at the UO, she was recently honored with a prestigious Newcombe Fellowship and awarded $25,000 for a full year of research support on the subject of her dissertation: the moral significance of kindness.
Lundquist traces this interest to her freshman year of college when back surgery left her unable to attend classes. Professors delivered a pile of books to her bedside. Among them: Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism.
These writers led to her first deep consideration of ethics and behavior. “I was immediately attracted to the questions about the foundations of our value system—if and why humans act selflessly, and the importance and meaning of friendship in our lives,” she recalled.
But it wasn’t until the day she received her master’s degree in philosophy several years later that she began to think about the profound human impact of kindness—or lack of it. Only hours after her graduation ceremony she was shaken to receive news of her cousin’s suicide.
“He was one of those kids that was picked on a lot. I just thought, what if someone had been kinder to him? What if someone had treated him better? What difference can that make in people’s lives?”
These questions led Lundquist on the road toward a theoretical exploration of what it means to be kind and the relationship between kindness and a moral life.
In her dissertation, she argues that kindness is one of the defining characteristics of being human.
“The decision to be kind, when we could do otherwise, when we could say or do a hurtful thing, is the most valuable expression of our freedom as conscious beings,” she said. “In an act of kindness, we assume another’s worth.”
This position contrasts with the perspectives of some famous thinkers.
For instance, in Nietzsche’s view, kindness belongs to what he termed “slave morality” (as opposed to “master morality.”) “Nietzsche basically says we act kindly as a way to make ourselves feel better when we can’t achieve power or choose not to,” said Lundquist.
Kant, while more generous, does not conclude that kindness is our highest attribute. “He thinks our worth lies in our rational autonomy, not our interdependence,” she explained.
In other ethical works, she finds the concept of kindness simply lacking in rigorous study, a gap she hopes to fill.
Lundquist plans to turn her dissertation, “The Problem of Luck and the Promise of Kindness,” into two books: one, a popular volume for a public audience and the other for professional ethicists.
The Newcombe Fellowship is one of the nation’s largest and most prestigious awards for PhD candidates in the humanities and social sciences addressing questions of ethical and religious values. Of the 585 applicants for the 2011 fellowship, only twenty-one received fellowships.
—Patricia Hickson
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