| OCR Text |
Show Chapter VI. Moral Interiority 270 This analysis extends to third-person cases. Consider, for example, the friendship case Blum raises for discussion. Blum thinks it is obvious that when choosing between helping a friend and helping a stranger, (1) one is morally permitted to choose to help the friend simply because he is one's friend. However, this view has bite only if the stranger is stipulated to be in greater need of help. In that case, as it turns out, Blum acknowledges the possibility that (2) if the stranger is in greater need of help, he may have a superior claim on one's compassion (49). In these passages, Blum's discussion treats the psychological fact of compassion as generating normative moral principles, among them that the object of this emotion should be the recipient of one's ameliorative action. But the plausibility of this normative principle depends on rejecting the connections between strict impartiality and compassion for which I have argued here. Specifically, Blum's notion of compassion is consistent with the primitively egocentric view of others described in Section 2, according to which one's treatment toward others is determined by how fully they happen to engage one's feelings. By contrast, my conceptual analysis of compassion, as including satisfaction of the metaethical requirement of strict impartiality, carries no such normative implication. My analysis leaves open the questions whether compassion should be motivationally central in a normative moral theory; whether or not one should act on those principles of aid in a particular case; if so, whether one is most appropriately motivated by feelings of compassion, ties of personal loyalty, or the voice of conscience; and to whom, among the deserving candidates, one should direct one's ameliorative efforts. Nevertheless, the foregoing analysis can accommodate both (1) and (2) above. Friendship, too, is governed by normative moral principles of conduct and emotion. As in the case of compassion, adherence to these principles requires an empathic imaginative involvement with the other's interiority that violates neither 3(a) nor 3(b). Without satisfaction of these two conditions, one's relation to the other is poisoned either by vicarious possession or by selfabsorption. Vicarious possession by another's inner states bespeaks a level of psychological dependency on the other that is patently inimical to genuine friendship. Self-absorption in one's own inner states or self-serving conceptions of the other bespeaks an insensitivity to and disrespect for the other that is equally antithetical to genuine friendship. So genuine friendship presupposes strictly impartial satisfaction of inherently impartial, normative © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
