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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 269 as in general more important or interesting than others. Unlike cases in which one regards one's own or another's pain as more worthy of favor or consideration because the pain in question is more intense, these cases exhibit personal bias because the attributive basis for ascribing superior value to the one or the other is arbitrary and irrelevant. The mere fact that my headache is mine does not entitle it to precedence in my imagination over your imminent demise from malnutrition. Nor does the mere fact that your suffering is yours entitle it to precedence in my imagination over my sympathetic response to it. Indeed, if my sympathetic response to your suffering is to motivate my ameliorative action on your behalf, your suffering as I empathically imagine it had better not overwhelm my sympathetic response to it. Of course it might happen that the pain of my sympathetic response to your suffering is greater than the pain of your suffering as I empathically imagine it. Conceiving of myself as infinitely more sensitive than thou, I might suffer for you in a way that I empathically imagine you to be incapable of suffering yourself. Hence this is a case not of vicarious possession but rather of surrogate martyrdom. Surrogate martyrdom is distinct from genuine martyrdom because a genuine martyr shoulders the actual suffering of others, not the suffering she imagines they would feel were they as sensitive as she. Since greater pain justifies greater consideration, according to the foregoing account, surrogate martyrdom would seem to warrant more attention to my sympathetic response than to your suffering, without implying personal bias. However, in conceiving of myself as being more sensitive to suffering than thou, I violate 3(b), for I imagine your inner state of suffering as though it were a surface object of imagination in comparison to my own inner, sympathetic state as a depth object. Hence even surrogate martyrdom implies personal bias. The bias consists in arbitrarily ascribing superior sensitivity to myself and weighting my imaginative involvement accordingly. Surrogate martyrdom is therefore distinct from genuine compassion. What about the standard case, in which the magnitude of your pain as I empathically imagine it exceeds the magnitude of my sympathetic response to it? Since neither 3(a) nor 3(b) is violated, surely symmetry is violated by our unequal experiences of pain, without implying personal bias in this case? Not so. This standard case is analogous to that discussed in Section 4, in which your heady pride of achievement outstrips my faintly enthusiastic response to it, and the answer is the same. I may hold in mind with equal vividness both your greater pain as I empathically imagine it and my lesser sympathetic pain-response to it. Symmetry remains inviolate, and therefore strict impartiality does as well. Compassion has the psychological feature that neither the other's suffering as one empathically imagines it nor one's own sympathetic response to it is submerged by the other, regardless of the magnitude of either. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
