Sympathy

Journal of Ethics

Volumn 3, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 73-87

  Taylor, C ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF STIRLING   (United Kingdom)

^b LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Compassion; Hume; Primitive responses; Schopenhauer; Sympathy

Indexed keywords

EID: 70350272947     PISSN: 13824554     EISSN: 15728609     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1009719902691     Document Type: Article

References (18)

1. S. P. and P. M. Oliner, The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of the Jews in Nazi Europe (New York: The Free Press, 1988), p. 228.
2. S. P. and P. M. Oliner, The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of the Jews in Nazi Europe, Ibid.
3. Lawrence Blum gives an interesting analysis of this work which contrasts quite sharply with my analysis of the passage I have quoted. See L. Blum, "Altruism and the moral value of rescue: resisting persecution, racism, and genocide," in Lawrence Blum, Moral Perception and Particularity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). See also footnote 11.
4. Roughly, explanations of the first kind, inspired by David Hume, explain human agency generally as flowing from some deliberation over beliefs and desires, and add that among our desires is some desire for the welfare of others; explanations of the second kind, inspired by Immanuel Kant, take it that we have reason, merely in virtue of our rational nature, to pursue the interest of others and not just our own.
5. So, for example, Bernard Williams has suggested that what moves an agent to act in some way is always some element in what he has called that agent's "subjective motivational set S". According to Williams, while the elements of S might be described formally as desires, this set in fact contains "such things as dispositions of evaluation, patterns of emotional reaction, personal loyalties, and various projects, as they may be abstractly called, embodying commitments of the agent" [Bernard Williams, "Internal and external reasons," in his Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 105].
6. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, P. Didditch (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). Hereafter referred to as "Treatise!"
7. According to Hume, "[t]is from the prospect of pain or pleasure that the aversion or propensity arises towards any object: And these emotions extend themselves to the causes and effects ofthatobject, as they are pointed outto us by reason and experience ..[and] 'tis plain that, as reason is nothing but the discovery of this connexion, it cannot be by its means that the object is able to affect us." (Treatise, p. 414)
8. D. Hume, Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, P. Didditch (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). Hereafter referred to as "Enquiries."
9. Arthur Schopenhauer, On The Basis of Morality, E. F. J. Payne (trans.) (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965). All references to Schopenhauer are to this work.
10. I should note here that Schopenhauer discovers a third motive for the will, distinct from both egoism and compassion, that is, malice. Malice, which need not concern us here, is that motive through which we pursue another's misfortune and which, as Schopenhauer says, "goes to the limits of extreme cruelty." (p. 145)
11. Schopenhauer's argument here is founded on Kant's Transcendental Aesthetic .To summarize, according to Schopenhauer, Kant there discovered that the idea of plurality is a distinction that occurs only in space and time, "the forms of our faculty of intuitive perception" (p. 206). And, therefore, this distinction could not apply to "our innermost essence-in-itself, that which wills and knows" (p. 206)
12. through this very faculty. What follows from this, according to Schopenhauer, is that the distinction between individual human beings "belongs only to the phenomenon" so that it remains possible that "one and the same essence ..manifests itselfin all living things" (p. 209).
13. And now it is this possibility that explains a person's being moved by another's weal and woe as he is by his own. For what occurs here is that "he recognizes that it is his own self [his innermost essence-in-itself] which now appears before him" (p. 212).
14. So, for example, my argument here applies equally to Lawrence Blum's recent suggestion that our sympathetic responses to others are to be explained as flowing from what he has called our "altruistic emotions." See Lawrence Blum, "Altruistic Emotions as Moral Motivations," in Lawrence Blum, Friendship, Altruism and Morality (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980).
15. Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 29-30.
16. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, G. E.M.Anscombe (trans.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1959), part II, iv.
17. In an extreme kind of case, however, it may be that some intense passion like hatred, so completely blocks a person's sympathetic responses to any and all human beings that such responses are no longer primitive for that person, so that in fact there is now for them nothing to be suppressed. In such a case, I think it makes some sense to say that a person has indeed lost something important of what it is to be human.
18. I have claimed that sympathy is a primitive response to the suffering of another. However our understanding ofthe ways it is possible for a human being to suffer itselfdepends on a good deal of reflection. For this reason, one would expect that our most basic responses to physical suffering will be properly modified in the light of such reflections. To illustrate how that might be consider the following example. A friend of mine once attempted to help a bag-lady on the street by buying her a loaf of bread. Her response was to throw the loaf back in his face. One way of understanding this exchange is that he offened or hurt the woman's pride. But that clearly depends on our understanding that humiliation is also a form of human suffering, one that may require us to modify our responses to hunger and other forms of mere physical distress.