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Show Chapter VI. Moral Interiority 268 ameliorate it, is independent of attributes irrelevant to those picked out by the principle of rendering aid to the needy. Where personal dislike of the sufferer precludes sympathy with his distress, symmetry is violated, skewing the self toward self-absorption; and bias thereby precludes compassion from taking hold. Impatience with the other's personal vanity or disgust at his malodorous garb may coexist with the feeling of compassion because the object of that feeling is his suffering and his need, not his self-estimation or his sartorial habits; and because the resulting disposition to action is directed to the amelioration of his suffering and his need, not to the improvement of his personality or sense of style. Strictly impartial conformity to an inherently impartial, substantive prescriptive principle of compassion rules out as attributively irrelevant both sacrifice of self or other in the amelioration of suffering, and also bias toward popular or charming sufferers over unpleasant or socially repulsive ones. The strictly impartial application of such principles thus requires an absence of personal bias, both toward the other's inner state and toward one's own. One exhibits personal bias toward another's inner state to the extent that one's imaginative involvement with it is weighted toward vicarious possession: one appropriates the other's suffering as one empathically imagines it into one's self and replaces one's own with it, as described in 4.2(1)-(3). By contrast, one exhibits personal bias toward one's own inner state to the extent that one's imaginative involvement with the other's recedes towards self-absorption, with primitive egocentrism and narrow concreteness constituting the extreme. But why describe these as cases of personal bias, rather than of mere imaginative excess and failure respectively? A bias, unlike a merely unbalanced imagination, presupposes a value judgment, i.e. that the object of bias is more worthy of favor or consideration than the alternative. The basis for this judgment is the possession by the object of bias of some specific but irrelevant attribute that the alternative is perceived to lack. In the case of an imaginative involvement with one's own experience or that of another, personal bias occurs when one evaluates either as more worthy of favor or consideration than the other on the basis of a specific but irrelevant attribute that the one has and the other is perceived to lack. For example, one may regard another's pain as one empathically imagines it as more worthy of consideration than one's own as one directly experiences it, because one regards other people in general as more important or worthy than oneself; or because one regards other people's inner states as intrinsically more interesting or worthy of investigation than one's own. In either of these cases, the irrelevant attribute that directs one's personal bias to the other is the attribute of being other than oneself. Conversely, one may regard one's own pain as more worthy of consideration simply because it is one's own, or because one regards oneself © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
