Compassion and Moral Guidance

Chapter 4. Objections to an Ethic of Compassion

Chapter four ObjectionstoanEthicofCompassion Is compassion, with all its faults, our best hope as we try to educate citizens to think well about human relations both inside the nation and across national boundaries? . . . Or is it a threat to good political thinking and to the foundations of a truly just world community? . . . The enemies of compassion hold that we cannot build a truly wise concern for humanity on the basis of such a slippery and uneven motive; impartial motives based on ideas of dignity and respect should take its place. The friends of compassion reply that without building political morality on what we know and on what has deep roots in our childhood attachments, we will be left with a morality that will be empty of urgency—as Aristotle puts it, a “watery” concern all round. —Martha C. Nussbaum, “Compassion and Terror” There are potential objections that apply to any compassionate ethics , for there are objections to compassion itself as a source of moral guidance . The question of partiality has already appeared in previous chapters, and now it must be directly addressed. Compassion must ultimately reject impartiality, and if this is not found to be a deficiency, detractors may suggest that a compassionate ethic slips too far in the other direction. In other words, to be overly partial in one’s ethical concerns is to risk being selfserving , but if selfless compassion avoids this pitfall, it opens itself to the charge of being self-abusive. Other objections pertain to the roots of the model of compassion developed over the preceding chapters. The cultural histories of Confucianism and Buddhism are fraught with racism, sexism, and cultural elitism. If an ethic of compassion is to get off the ground, it must not be given to the biases Objections to an Ethic of Compassion 133 latent in the histories of the traditions that give rise to it. Finally, there is the question of whether an ethic of compassion is too demanding. If moral standards are set so high that virtually no one can reach them, perhaps the moral theory that sets those standards is not worth following. In this chapter , I address each of these potential problems. Partiality and Nepotism Impartiality has long been hailed as a hallmark of any reasonable moral philosophy . The standard of impartiality dictates that our ethical thinking is supposed to be grounded in facts, logical principles, and, broadly speaking, objectivity. It pays little heed to personal relationships, emotions, or that which is only contingently true. In his early work, Kant went so far as to say that empirical data itself was too contingent to be relied upon in forming ethical maxims, though he later softened on this position. There is no shortage of ethicists who praise the merits of impartiality nor any dearth of arguments in favor of its necessity. John Rawls’ argument stands out among the best of them. His ideas of the veil of ignorance and the original position constitute an excellent summation of the metaethical merits of impartiality. The “veil of ignorance” is a conceptual shroud in a thought experiment. It masks all the contingent facts one knows about oneself and attempts to strip one’s conception of oneself down to its most basic and universal elements. If I don the veil of ignorance, I surrender the knowledge that I am Caucasian, male, a native speaker of English, a U.S. citizen, and so forth. I no longer know my tax bracket, sexual orientation, religious preference, ethnicity, age, health status, educational background, geographic location, or anything else that sets me apart as an individual in a particular time, place, and set of relationships . Nor do I have such knowledge about anyone else; in this thought experiment, all human beings are positioned equally. This is what Rawls refers to as the “original position.” In the original position, behind the veil of ignorance, I am now supposed to think about what sort of civil society would be the most advantageous for me. In present-day American society, I benefit substantially from my status as a straight, white, English-speaking male on the right side of the 134 compassion and moral guidance poverty line. But the same social forces that benefit my demographic group cause other groups to suffer. In the original position, I do not know which demographic group is mine, so if I am smart, I will see those social forces as potential threats. In...