>>Compassion starts with natural human empathy. Human beings and some other animals feel a
sense of pain when they see someone else suffering pain. Compassion is more than empathy though.
It is not just a feeling. It is acting on that feeling to alleviate the suffering of
others. If someone feels bad when they see a suffering person but do nothing about it,
are they compassionate? I think not. In ethics for the third millennium the Dalai Lama says
that compassion is a universal virtue recognized by all religions. He thinks we are not likely
to agree about the metaphysical beliefs that divide religions from each other but we can
agree about the value of compassion. Compassion might not help to make people cooperate if
they don’t like each other but at least it prevents them from treating each other
and some of the worst ways. In Goya’s painting Self-Portrait with Dr. Arrieta we see compassion
portrayed by an artistic genius. In 1792 Goya developed a sudden serious illness, which
included dizziness, weakness, delirium, abdominal pain, deafness, and partial blindness. When
the illness recurred his physician Eugenio Arrieta nursed him back to health and in gratitude
Goya painted his last self-portrait with Dr. Arrieta in 1820, a year after the illness.
In the painting we see Goya at the grip of a painful and debilitating disease. Clutching
his bed sheet as if it is about to slip away with his life. The doctor is loving and gentle.
Supporting Goya’s body while he encourages him to take his medicine. I don’t know if
you can see the shadowy figures in the background that seem to be from another world, a world
of darkness that perhaps Goya expected to enter soon. But he recovered and he lived
another eight years. How compassionate are we? For a pessimistic answer consider the
famous good Samaritan experiment. The subjects were Princeton Seminary students who were
asked to give a talk in another building. Some were to talk about seminary jobs, others
were to talk about the parable of the good Samaritan. On the way they encountered a man
they didn’t know was participating in the experiment. He was slumped in a doorway. As
they passed him he coughed twice and gave a small moan. The man’s appearance was intentionally
unclear. He could be hurt or perhaps inebriated. Some students were told they were late and
had to hurry to make it on time for the talk. Others were in a lesser hurry. Still others
were not in a hurry at all. Overall only forty percent offered some help to the victim. In
low hurry situations sixty-three percent helped. In medium-hurry situations forty-five percent
helped. And in high-hurry situations only ten percent helped. It did not matter whether
the participant was giving a talk about the Good Samaritan or a neutral topic. Knowing
they were going to talk about the Good Samaritan did not make it more likely that they stopped
and the majority did not stop or offer any aid. What are we to think about this? Does
that mean that most people lack compassion? Or that promptness is more important to people
than compassion in an ambiguous situation? I don’t know what the participants in the
study were thinking but many people have expressed shock at their behavior. Still there are other
indicators of high compassion among ordinary people. For example, after the Christmas Eve
typhoon in the Philippines in 2006 an enormous number of people responded with donations
to help the victims. Was it because it was Christmas or for some other reason? We are
sometimes better at helping the suffering far away than we are the suffering lying right
next to us. What explains that? An interesting issue about compassion is the kind of help
that is appropriate. It is hard to make intelligent choices about the kind of aid that really
works. And I don’t think that it’s always clear what the compassionate act would be.
If you give money to a panhandler that shows compassion, but what if the panhandler uses
the money to buy drugs? And what if you have reason to think that is what he will do with
the money? Maybe you should give money as a way to show the person that you’re not
ignoring him, that you feel empathy for his plight. But why should you do something that
will hurt him? That is something we will talk about in class. Is compassion an Aristotelian
virtue in the sense of a mean between extremes? As we saw in the last lecture courage is a
good candidate for Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean because cowardice and full heartiness
seem like two extremes with courage in between. Cowardice is a deficiency in facing danger
and full heartiness is an excess. There’s obviously such a thing as a deficiency in
feeling sorry for a suffering person. But is it possible for a person to have an excess
of feeling bad for somebody else and trying to help him. Some people have a sentimental
rush of tears when faced with suffering that prevents them from having a judicious response.
Or maybe they help so much that they smother the recipient. We might say that either one
of those responses is too much of whatever compassion is supposed to be. I don’t know
of a word for that. If you can think of one please post it on the website. Another issue
is the difference between compassion and pity. Compassion is not a controversial virtue but
pity is morally ambiguous. I think that is because pity implies a sense of superiority
to the suffering person where as compassion does not. People will sometimes say she’s
pitiful in a pejorative sense but there’s no comparable word for the object of compassion.
We do not say she is compassionable, but if we did I don’t think it would imply anything
pejorative. The Goya painting expresses another virtue just as much as it depicts compassion
and that is the virtue of gratitude. Goya’s gratitude for Dr. Arrieta is just as uplifting
as Arietta’s compassion for Goya. Both men are exemplars of virtue but different virtues.
Gratitude is not a popular virtue these days because recipients of compassion are sometimes
said to be receiving something they have a right to expect. If that is right then compassion
is a requirement of justice and gratitude is not the appropriate response for receiving it.
That seems wrong to me but we will pursue that problem also in discussion.