Compassion & terror

Daedalus

Volumn 132, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 10-25

  Nussbaum, Martha C ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77950025216     PISSN: 00115266     EISSN: 15486192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Universi ty Press, 1999).
2. I am drawing on an analysis of compassion for which I argue at greater length in Nuss baum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), chaps. 6-8.
3. C. Daniel Batson of the University of Kansas should be mentioned with honor here, because he has not only done remarkable empirical work, but has also combined it with a conceptual and analytic clarity that is rare in social science research of this type. See in particular The Altruism Question( Hilisdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991)
4. Candace Clark's sociological study is also exemplary: Misery and Company:Sympa thy in Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
5. Clark's empirical survey of American atti tudes finds this a prominent reason for the refusal of compassion for the poor.
6. See my "Duties of Justice, Duties of Material Aid: Cicero's Problematic Legacy," Journal of Political Philosophy 7 (1999): 1-31.
7. Germany is one salient example. In a forth coming book, James Whitman describes the way this central notion has constrained legal practices in Europe generally, especially in the area of criminal punishment. Dignity, he ar gues, is a nonhierarchical notion that has re placed hierarchical orders of rank.
8. Richard Sorabji, Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of the Western Debate (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993).
9. I deal with this question at greater length in "Duties of Justice," and also in "The Worth of Human Dignity: Two Tensions in Stoic Cosmopolitanism," in Philosophy and Power in the Graeco-Ro,nan World: Essays in Honour of Miriam Griffin, ed. Gillian Clark and Tessa Rajak (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 31-49.
10. See Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, 35: "There are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who have no such capacity (when the lack is extreme, we call them psychopaths), and there are people who have the capacity but choose not to exercise it."
11. II.1 trans. G. Grube (Hackett edition).
12. VI.6: "The best method of defense is not to become like your enemy."
13. Based on the translation in Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), with some modifications.
14. It is significant that this adopted emperor did not, as the movie Gladiator shows us, make a principled rational choice of the best man to run the empire. In real life, Marcus chose his worthless son Commodus, tripped up yet once more by the love of the near.
15. Translation from Hadot/Chase.
16. One might compare the imagery of ancient Greek skepticism. Pyrrho, frightened by a dog (and thus betraying a residual human attachment to his own safety) says, "How difficult it is entirely to divest oneself of the human being." Elsewhere he speaks of the skeptic as a eunuch, because he lacks the very source of disturbance.
17. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1978).
18. Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson, Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys (New York: Ballentine Books, 1999).
19. Dan Kindlon, Too Mitch of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age (New York: Miramax, 2001).