Compassion and Moral Guidance

Introduction

Introduction “Compassion” is a word we use frequently in everyday conversation, but it is rarely used with anything close to philosophical precision. Indeed, one could go so far as to say we have lost the meaning of the word. As we generally use it, “compassion” appears in similar contexts with words such as “empathy,” “sympathy,” and “love” and may even be equated with one or more of these. Roget’s Thesaurus lists “compassion” as having each of the following distinct connotations: “sensitivity,” “philanthropy,” “pity,” “mercy,” “forgivingness,” “consideration,” “leniency,” “unselfishness,” and “kindness.” Other lexicons include “concern” and “care” as synonyms. Although at times compassion may closely resemble any one of these, it is not identical to any of them. A precise understanding of the word, if ever we had one, has faded into obscurity. When I say “we,” I include myself in two camps. One is the camp of philosophers ; the other is that of North Americans, including everyone who is swayed by the cultural and linguistic influences that predominate here. I would not presume to suggest that the word is misused globally, but at least where I live, “compassion” is almost invariably used to mean “commiseration ” (or else to mean nothing at all: The word is now used so loosely that a politician can describe his nakedly self-serving aggression as “compassionate conservatism” without being laughed out of office, and in fact without risk of being denied the highest political aspirations). I contend that it is a mistake to equate compassion with commiseration, and that one important difference between the two is that the former can serve as a foundation for ethical judgment, while the latter is not sufficiently sturdy to do so. This is admittedly an unorthodox usage of the word “compassion,” but its unorthodoxy is the very point of this book. My goal here is to flesh out what compassion really means (as opposed to how we conventionally speak of it) and to show its application in moral reasoning. xii Introduction I shall risk a short defense of my unorthodoxy before moving on. Imagine a brand of utilitarianism that expressed no concern for promoting overall happiness and instead focused solely on minimizing overall suffering. (In utilitarian terms, the concern would be only with reducing disutility and never with maximizing utility.) This theory guarantees happiness to no one; in fact, no one’s happiness will even be a goal to strive for. The only goal is to alleviate suffering. Some may argue that a world without suffering is a happy world, and indeed such a world would surely be happier than this one, but a life without suffering is not yet a happy life. It is an apathetic life, neither miserable nor satisfied. Given two versions of utilitarianism, one like I have just described and one that seeks not only to minimize suffering but also to actually promote our satisfaction (i.e., the traditional utilitarian method), the latter is arguably the stronger theory, for it promotes happy lives while the former only promotes apathetic ones. Analogously, commiseration concerns itself solely with the misery of the other, and as such the ethics of commiseration would ultimately prove to be insufficient. If compassion is understood to concern not only feelings of suffering but also of satisfaction, then the ethics of compassion will not fall short on this count. This is, as promised, only a brief defense of my unorthodox use of “compassion,” but more shall be said in its defense as the book progresses. One of the first observations to make in examining the moral role of compassion is its prevalence in the ethics of some cultures and its lack of prominence in others. Buddhism takes compassion—or, more precisely, wise compassion—as its ethical cornerstone, and as I will argue later, compassion is vitally important to Confucian and Daoist ethics as well. On the other hand, when we examine the ethics of Kant, Bentham, Mill, Aristotle, and most of their philosophical successors, we see that compassion plays almost no role at all. Indeed, Kant and Aristotle would arguably describe compassion as an impediment to good moral reasoning. The observation here is not a reductionistic comparison of East and West, whatever those might mean; the matter is more complex than that. Indeed, “love thy neighbor as thyself” is about as succinct a mandate for compassion as one could ask for, and Christianity heavily influenced all of the so-called [3.146.35.203] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 12:00 GMT...