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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 267 conception of the self as motivated by essentially self-interested concerns, to which impartiality is the corrective and compassion the exception. That is, compassion (as well as friendship and altruism) in Blum's account functions as though it were a counterexample to a generally valid empirical generalization about the de facto prevalence of self-interested motivation and judgment biased accordingly. 6. Strict Impartiality In Volume I of this project, I have gone to some lengths to argue that the Humean conception of the self is inadequate as a descriptive model of human motivation; and in the present volume, that other-directed motives such as sympathy and altruism can play a more central role. Does this mean that we may dispense with strict impartiality as a virtue as well? Clearly not. An altruistic person may give unjustifiably short shrift to his own interests in devoting his energies to others. Or a sympathetic person may be uncertain to whom, among the many claimants on her sympathy, she should direct her sympathetic response. Strict impartiality has a central role in the analysis of compassion, because so many claims on our sympathy regularly confront us, including those of our own interests and preferences, that we are compelled to adjudicate among them. As we have seen in Sections 3 and 4, a healthy compassionate response to others demands that we navigate between the Scylla of self-absorption and the Charybdis of vicarious possession. It demands that we find a principle for distinguishing between unhealthy fortifications or transgressions of the boundaries of the self, and healthy social expressions of it. A principle of strict impartiality meets this demand. The symmetry requirement on compassion as an appropriate imaginative involvement with another's suffering implies that compassion presupposes strict impartiality of modal imagination. We have already seen in Section 4.3 that unlike occasional and unpredictable stirrings of concern, or impulsive attempts to be helpful, compassion involves a disposition to respond to the suffering of another in a consistent and discriminate manner, i.e. in accordance with universal and general normative principles of aid, mercy, or restitution that, like all normative moral principles, require a symmetrically balanced accommodation of the demands and interests of the self with those of the other. Compassion achieves such an accommodation by avoiding both vicarious possession by the other's distress and self-absorption by one's own, and so by disposing the self to action that sacrifices the inner integrity of neither self nor other. Moreover, satisfaction of the symmetry requirement implies that compassion as a moral motive is consistent with personal dislike or revulsion toward the object of one's compassion, because the empathic comprehension of the other's suffering, the sympathetic reaction to it, and the respect in which compassion disposes one to extend oneself on the other's behalf in order to © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
