Princeton, 1973: the topic of the talk made no difference, and being late made a great deal.
Compassion
Concern at another's suffering together with the wish to relieve it - and the question of whether the feeling is what does the work.
- Theme
- Ethics and character
- Tradition
- Cross-tradition
- Term
- करुणा · karuṇā
- Term fixed
- c. 450 BC
In plain terms
Compassion has three parts that usually arrive together and can be separated. Noticing that someone is suffering. Being moved by it. Doing something.
The interesting fact is how weakly the parts are connected. People who feel a great deal frequently do nothing, and people who do a great deal are not always the ones who feel most - some of them describe feeling very little at the time, which is what lets them work.
And the noticing is the part that fails most often, in a way nobody notices from inside. Whether you register the person in front of you as suffering depends heavily on what else is happening, how much of a hurry you are in, and whether they belong to a group you attend to. That is an uncomfortable finding and it is one of the better-established ones in the area.
As a philosopher would put it
The Buddhist treatment makes karuṇā a trained capacity, one of the four immeasurables, and distinguishes it from anukampā and from mere distress at another's pain. The Māhayāna development makes it constitutive of the bodhisattva ideal, joined with wisdom, so that compassion without emptiness is held to be sentimental and emptiness without compassion cold.
The European tradition treats it as sentiment. Hume and Smith build moral psychology on sympathy - Smith's spectator mechanism explains moral judgement by imaginative projection into another's situation - and Schopenhauer makes Mitleid the sole basis of morality, on the metaphysical ground that the separation between individuals is illusory.
Against this stands a substantial tradition of suspicion. The Stoics classify pity as a passion to be eliminated, while requiring the actions it would have prompted. Kant holds that acting from feeling has no moral worth. And Nietzsche's attack is that pity is contemptuous of its object and preserves what should perish - the sharpest version of the objection that compassion is about the one who feels it.
Where you meet it
In 1973 John Darley and Daniel Batson recruited students at Princeton Theological Seminary for a study they were told concerned religious education. Each was asked to prepare a short talk and walk to another building to deliver it. For some the topic was the parable of the Good Samaritan.
On the way, each passed a man slumped in a doorway, coughing and groaning. The variable that mattered was time: some were told they were late, some that they were on schedule, some that they had a few minutes. Of those in a hurry, about ten per cent stopped. Of those not in a hurry, about sixty-three per cent did.
The topic of the talk made no significant difference. Several students on their way to speak about the Good Samaritan stepped over the man. Batson's own conclusion was not that they were hypocrites but that a person in a hurry is genuinely less likely to notice - that the failure is often in perception rather than in the will, which is a different and less comfortable finding.
What is actually disputed
Whether compassion should guide action.
The case against is that it is innumerate and partial: it responds to one identifiable person far more strongly than to a thousand statistical ones, it is easier to feel for those who resemble us, and it burns out under sustained exposure. Bloom's argument for rational compassion is that the feeling should be replaced as a guide by concern that can be counted.
The case for is that the alternative has never worked as advertised. Detached calculation is what produces the decisions everyone later regards as monstrous, and the feeling is what makes anyone attend to the case in the first place.
The older objection is different and harder. If compassion is directed at suffering, it takes the sufferer as an object of concern rather than as an equal - which is Nietzsche's charge, and the reason several traditions insist that compassion must be joined to respect or it becomes condescension with better manners.
Commonly confused with
- being nice Compassion sometimes requires telling someone what they do not want to hear, or acting against their stated wishes.
Defined against
- Objectivity Compassion is essentially partial - it responds to the person in front of you - which is exactly what an impartial standpoint asks anyone to set aside
Philosophers
- Buddha Compassion as trained rather than natural
- Arthur Schopenhauer Mitleid as the sole basis of morality
- Adam Smith Sympathy and the impartial spectator
- Friedrich Nietzsche The attack on pity as contemptuous
- Epictetus The Stoic separation of the action from the passion
Works
- Bodhicaryavatara Compassion as the ground of the whole path
- The Theory of Moral Sentiments Sympathy as the mechanism of moral judgement
- The World as Will and Representation Compassion grounded in the illusion of separateness
- On the Genealogy of Morals The attack
- Discourses and Enchiridion Pity as a passion to be corrected
- In a Different Voice Responsiveness to the particular as moral reasoning
Schools
- Early Theravada Buddhism Where karuṇā is trained as one of four
- Madhyamaka Buddhism Where it is joined to emptiness
- British Empiricism Where sympathy grounds moral judgement
- Early Stoicism Where pity is a passion to be removed
- Nietzscheanism Where it is attacked as decadence
- Confucianism (classical) Where the heart that cannot bear suffering is the root of virtue
Related concepts
Care 1982 · Suffering c. 450 BC · Ren c. 480 BC · Ahiṃsā c. 500 BC · The Other 1961
Karuṇā is one of the four immeasurables and is trained rather than assumed; the European tradition treats compassion as a natural sentiment, which is a substantially different claim about where it comes from.