"Tenderness is a virtue"
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To call tenderness a virtue is to move it from the realm of private feeling into the register of moral obligation. Virtue in the eighteenth-century sense names a cultivated excellence of character, and tenderness becomes not mere softness but a disciplined responsiveness to the fragility of others. Goldsmiths work repeatedly elevates this humane impulse. The Vicar of Wakefield prizes benevolence and familial affection; The Deserted Village mourns a society that trades communal care for wealth and display. Against the brittle polish of status and the market’s brisk calculus, he holds up a sensibility that notices, pauses, and protects.
The moral philosophers of his age, from Shaftesbury and Hutcheson to Adam Smith, described sympathy as the ground of moral judgment. Tenderness gives that sympathy texture. It is attention that refuses to reduce a person to utility, dignity that refuses to humiliate, mercy that checks power when punishment would be easy. Far from weakness, it requires strength: the willingness to be moved, to be inconvenienced, to remain receptive where cynicism would be safer. Goldsmiths comedy often exposes vanity and pretension, but the corrective he proposes is not scorn; it is a softening that allows characters to see themselves and others more truly.
As a civic stance, tenderness counters the anonymity and hardness of commercial modernity by stitching bonds through small acts of consideration. It tempers justice with proportionality and gives charity something better than mere condescension. It also clarifies other virtues: courage without tenderness becomes cruelty; honesty without it becomes aggression; prudence without it becomes indifference. The claim therefore sets a demanding standard. To be tender is to let the fact of another’s vulnerability make a claim on one’s conduct. In a culture quick to outrage and quick to discard, that practice is both difficult and urgent, an ethics of closeness that, for Goldsmith, marks genuine goodness rather than a sentimental pose.
The moral philosophers of his age, from Shaftesbury and Hutcheson to Adam Smith, described sympathy as the ground of moral judgment. Tenderness gives that sympathy texture. It is attention that refuses to reduce a person to utility, dignity that refuses to humiliate, mercy that checks power when punishment would be easy. Far from weakness, it requires strength: the willingness to be moved, to be inconvenienced, to remain receptive where cynicism would be safer. Goldsmiths comedy often exposes vanity and pretension, but the corrective he proposes is not scorn; it is a softening that allows characters to see themselves and others more truly.
As a civic stance, tenderness counters the anonymity and hardness of commercial modernity by stitching bonds through small acts of consideration. It tempers justice with proportionality and gives charity something better than mere condescension. It also clarifies other virtues: courage without tenderness becomes cruelty; honesty without it becomes aggression; prudence without it becomes indifference. The claim therefore sets a demanding standard. To be tender is to let the fact of another’s vulnerability make a claim on one’s conduct. In a culture quick to outrage and quick to discard, that practice is both difficult and urgent, an ethics of closeness that, for Goldsmith, marks genuine goodness rather than a sentimental pose.
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| Topic | Kindness |
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