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Show Chapter VI. Moral Interiority 260 agency and the inner states you empathically imagine me egocentrically to conceive you as having. Thus both require your voluntary submergence in my imaginative but primitively egocentric reconstruction of your inner state. This imaginative reconstruction treats my own inner states - including those I egocentrically conceive you to have - as depth objects, and your actual inner states as surface objects of imagination. Again the symmetry required of an appropriate imaginative involvement is lost. When the other's experience is one of suffering, the appropriate imaginative involvement that satisfies both 3(a) and 3(b) is one of compassion. Compassion comprises at least three further distinguishable responses. First, it includes empathic understanding of the other's condition. Second, it includes sympathetic "fellow feeling" in reaction. And third, it includes a consequent disposition to render aid or show mercy to the other. So compassion includes cognitive, affective, and conative components respectively. To render aid, mercy or restitution to another is not the same as acting unreflectively on a momentary feeling of concern. It is rather to act consistently and reliably in such a way calculated to relieve the other's distress. That is, it is to act in accordance with a normative principle of moral conduct that itself has application to a variety of situations. By contrast with occasional stirrings of sympathy that may or may not spark fleeting impulses to help, compassion is a principled, transpersonal moral emotion that moves one to a course of action in accordance with a normative requirement of rendering aid. As is the case with all normative moral principles of conduct, the requirement to render aid is a requirement that one strike a symmetrically balanced accommodation between the condition and demands of the self and the condition and demands of another. Striking a symmetrically balanced accommodation between these two different sets of interests and demands requires that the self be vicariously possessed by neither, but that it have a deep imaginative involvement - one that is antithetical to self-absorption - with both. Vicarious possession by the other's inner state would constitute a sacrifice of the integrity of the self to the inner deprivation or suffering of the other. It would be to take on the other's suffering as an internal condition of one's own. This would mean paralyzing or incapacitating oneself, in the ways earlier described, from consistent and principled agency in the service of relieving that suffering. When altruistically inclined agents worry that an active, participatory commitment to solving an intractable social problem (such as inner city poverty) will "suck them dry," it is the fear of this very real kind of incapacitating self-sacrifice that they express. But incapacitating self-sacrifice, and the sacrifice of one's own needs and interests that accompany it, is a consequence of vicarious possession by the other's suffering. It is not a consequence of compassion properly understood. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
