Kindness

Kindness is voluntary action with one of two aims. One aim is to decrease the real harm of a different agent. The other aim is to help them to the things that they choose when they can choose. Kindness does not cross their boundaries, and it does not override the consent of a capable agent. Kindness is offered, not owed. No one can demand, enforce, or take it. A thing that a person forces on a different person is not kindness. It is harm, with no attention to its name. For a capable agent, kindness obeys refusal: help only with permission, or in manners that do not cross their body, property, or agreements. Some persons temporarily do not have the capacity to know a real risk, for example a young child, or a person who temporarily cannot act. For them, kindness can include guardianship. That guardianship is the minimum necessary temporary guardianship that prevents harms that they cannot yet measure. Such guardianship always has one purpose: to make self-ownership full again as soon as they are able. Guardianship that goes above the necessary minimum, that continues without an end, or that stops the growth of capacity, is not kindness. It is control. Kindness is not reciprocity, not justice, and not love. Kindness does not erase guilt, does not close moral debt, and does not require a bond that continues. Kindness is good when it obeys consent and makes no unwilling victim. Kindness is not good when it overrides autonomy, when it hides deception, or when it says that capable adults cannot choose.