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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 271 principles of mutual sensitivity, respect, and psychological independence; and therefore satisfaction of the symmetry requirement. Therefore friendship presupposes strict impartiality. And when a friend suffers, this strict impartiality is expressed in compassion for her condition. When a friend and a stranger suffer with equal intensity and one empathically imagines the inner states of both with equal vividness, a compassionate person will feel equal sympathy for both, and equally moved to ameliorate the suffering of both. Because the inner state of each bears the same relation to one's own, namely satisfaction of the symmetry requirement, compassion evinces a strictly impartial concern for the stranger's as well as the friend's condition. What finally determines one to render aid to one's friend instead of the stranger is not one's heightened compassion for the friend. What moves one to help the friend are the bonds of mutual trust, loyalty, shared history, responsibility and respect that uniquely define the relation of friendship. This conclusion departs from Blum's in two respects. First, Blum seems to think that there is a psychological connection between liking someone more, or having a more intimate relationship with him, and feeling greater compassion for him. In Section 4 I rejected this connection, on the grounds that compassion is strictly impartial with respect to irrelevant attributes that might bias one either towards or against the sufferer. But moreover, the psychological connection may work in the opposite way: it may happen that the more intimately one knows a person, the more one becomes accustomed to his suffering, and the more emotionally inured one becomes to it. Hence friendship may undermine compassion rather than promote it. Second, Blum believes there is a prescriptive connection between having a more committed or intimate relationship with someone and feeling greater compassion for her suffering. I reject this connection on the grounds that it prescribes stronger feelings of empathy and sympathy, and a more motivationally effective disposition to render aid on grounds irrelevant to the magnitude of the pain felt by the sufferer, and irrelevant to the magnitude of her need for aid. That is, it prescribes feeling more compassion for people we know than for people who are in greater pain. I find this prescription unacceptable, but not only because it expresses clear bias towards an attributive basis that is irrelevant for feeling compassion. It is also unacceptably exclusionary in the presence of those for whom the conditions of survival make friendship an unattainable luxury and whose magnitude of suffering clearly surpasses that which anyone we know is likely to experience first-hand. Compassion demands a generosity of spirit that is incompatible with narrow and arbitrary restrictions of scope. So I insist on satisfaction of the symmetry requirement in compassion for normative as well as psychological and conceptual reasons. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
