Compassion in Traditional and Secular Morality: Religions, A Scholarly Journal, 2011, Charity and Compassion, 65 (original) (raw)
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Introduction: The Moral Psychology of Compassion
At first sight, it is hard to imagine a full account of our moral and social lives that has nothing to say about compassion. The moral value of compassion is emphasized in many religious traditions; and many moral theorists have taken compassion to play a foundational role in our moral lives. Yet there is no agreed account of what compassion is. There is disagreement, too, about compassion's value – how, exactly, it might contribute to morally admirable or flourishing lives; what its limitations and dangers might be; and even whether it is important in our moral lives at all. Finally, assuming that compassion is morally valuable, we might wonder how it is to be cultivated. In this introduction, we shall sketch some of the background to these debates, before introducing the chapters that follow.
Compassion in contemporary philosophy is a rare jewel. Not only because contemporary philosophy is modeled on argument and competition, but the word ‘compassion’ itself rarely makes an entrance. Instead, philosophers have tended to speak of altruism, and its opposite, egoism. But I would suggest that our age is sorely in need of reengaging with the idea of compassion. This paper gives a review of the philosophical idea of altruism, and then considers how the faith traditions might inform a contemporary reengagement with the practice of compassion. The paper was written for an address to a lay audience at a philosophy event.
The role of compassion in moral actions
Most would think that compassion plays an important role whenever we perform moral actions such as saving a drowning child in the pool. The Chinese philosopher Mencius provides an example:
This paper is a discussion of the emotion of compassion or pity, and the corresponding virtue. It begins by placing the emotion of compassion in the moral conceptual landscape, and then moves to reject the currently dominant view, a version of Aristotelianism developed by Martha Nussbaum, in favour of a non-cognitive conception of compassion as a feeling. An alternative neo-Aristotelian account is then outlined. The relation of the virtue of compassion to other virtues is plotted, and some doubts sown about its practical significance.
The sociology of compassion: A study in the sociology of morals
Journal for Cultural Research, 1998
This essay analyzes the theoretical foundations of collective interest in the sufferings of strangers. Concern with the suffering of others, accompanied by the urge to help, is compassion. This study develops the social and historical conditions under which public compassion emerges. Two broad interpretations of these developments are suggested. The democratization perspective suggests that with the lessening of profoundly categorical and corporate social distinctions, compassion becomes more extensive. A second perspective is linked to the emergence of market society. By defining a universal field of others with whom contracts and exchanges can be made, market perspectives extend the sphere of moral concern as well: however unintentionally. Public compassion is part of the language of modernity. This gives compassion the possibility to be also part of a newly emerging 'Second Modernity'.
The Event of Compassion. In: Considering Compassion: Global Ethics, Human Dignity, and the Compassionate God, Frits de Lange & L. Juliana Claassens (eds.), Pickwick Publications (Wipf & Stock), Eugene OR 2018, 17 - 30.
This essay is about ethics and compassion. But I do not do not want to look here at compassion from the perspective of ethics, but conversely, I want to question ethics from the perspective of compassion. Instead of situating compassion somewhere within ethical theory, I rather seek to question the ethical enterprise as a whole from the perspective of compassion. More precisely, my argument is that the event of compassion deconstructs the “ethical subject” as the center of moral agency, i.e., the presupposition of most of the modern ethical theory. I suggest that in ethics, we, as moral subjects, do not know who we are. And that is exactly who we are. Instead of defining more precisely our moral identity, ethics benefits of its unsettlement. In the first part of this essay, I will approach compassion not as an ethical concept, or a moral emotion, virtue or principle, but as a phenomenon that, if taken seriously, precludes the possibility of speaking about moral agents as closed subjects, centers of interior reflection on their outward behavior. In the second part of this essay, I illustrate this perspective with a reading of the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan that is one of the most powerful stories ever told on the subject of compassion.