I am excited to get started as a new contributor to A Philosopher’s Take by engaging with a captivating post by APT peer David Boutland (co-authored by Trudy Govier) titled “The Pitfalls of Compassion,” which touches on the main points of his recent, similarly titled publication (which can be found here).
First off, many thanks to David for generating a conversation about compassion in such a provocative way. For those who have not read their article, he and Trudy define compassion (and which I am inclined to agree with) as an other-regarding emotion that moves one to feel entitled to act in response to the other’s non-trivial suffering. They offer a number of case studies that demonstrate the limitations of compassion in guiding moral action, a detailed recount of which is beyond the scope of this post, but on David and Trudy’s account, these limitations suggest that compassion is insufficient for guiding moral action, though they are not denying it as a morally valuable emotion.
Herein, I want to try and answer two of David’s calls for feedback at the end of his post, which ask whether their concerns about compassion are warranted and how we might go about mitigating them. An issue that comes to mind when I consider the potential pitfalls of compassion that David and Trudy admirably demonstrate is that they do not tell us how to determine the right thing to do in response to situations that evoke compassion. Must the value of ethics lie ultimately and solely in its leading us to solve moral dilemmas by rational means? As many contemporary philosophers – from Peter Singer to O’Nora O’Neill – would agree, the goal of ethics involves not only describing cases and what is right or wrong about them, but also helping us determine how to respond – not just to them but to a wide range of more or less similar cases – in ways that are appropriate or called for. With this in mind, I will try to show that David’s and Trudy’s concerns about compassion in moral action are not as troubling as they might think because they can be completely avoided, or mitigated, with a particularist framework I offer here for fruitfully achieving meaningful moral deliberation.
To this end, I employ Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of lebensform (or “form of life”). For Wittgenstein, a form of life is a background of experience, values, practices, social norms and expectations, basic metaphysical beliefs and language. So, forms of life are not culturally bound and they may or may not overlap across cultures, communities and people. They shape human judgment about moral principles and thus inform the correct applications and contents themselves of such principles.
Ample room for various permutations inherent in the forms of life theory makes it useful because even if we reached the Enlightenment ideal of universal moral principles on which everyone agreed, such as “everyone ought never to act solely according to compassion,” Wittgenstein thinks we would still not be guaranteed ubiquitous agreement about what the correct application or contents such a principle might entail; but, against any given form of life, the right way to establish and follow a moral principle for any given situation emerges.
Throughout the Philosophical Investigations, the notion of a form of life is contextualized in language learning, understanding, and the possibility of mutual intelligibility. Basically, to share a form of life with someone is to understand or come to understand one another. “Understanding one another” can be taken as “making oneself intelligible to another” and vice versa given the contexts in which Wittgenstein invokes forms of life.
But intelligibility of such interactions does not require that the two agents fully adopt another’s form of life. For example, Wittgenstein writes, “…there are countless kinds [of assertions, questions and commands]; countless different kinds of things we call ‘signs,’ ‘words,’ ‘sentences’” (PI, 11). If speaking a language is “part of an activity, or of a form of life,” then knowing which of these things are which – i.e. assertions, questions, signs, words, etc. – means sharing or understanding another’s form of life.
Sharing a form of life might involve overlaps, but it is not reducible to a set of overlaps; rather, along with the cultures and practices around them, such sets may be part of any form of life. In learning a language, one learns the meanings of a certain set of words, but also how to use those words in new ways outside of the way they first learned it. For Wittgenstein, coming to understand which language applications will communicate successfully necessarily involves coming to understand the form of life that involves speaking that language. Conversely, for example, just because I have not yet learned German does not mean that I cannot come to learn it or that I find the people of Berlin utterly unintelligible.
Here it may be helpful to yield the notion of the human form of life, as Daniele Moyal-Sharrock has distinguished it. I can come to learn German (and therefore understand the form of life that involves speaking German) and find Berliners intelligible in the process because we still share a form of human life – the human form of life. So, the ability to share a form of life is inherently human. To maintain the language learning analogy of this innate capability, please reference Noam Chomsky’s Linguistic Nativist theory about language acquisition devices in humans.
While settling moral dilemmas is certainly an important aim of ethics, an equally important aim is telling us how moral rules or principles should be understood and applied in order to take appropriate moral action in the first place. And yet, coming to make effective decisions about the right or wrong actions in a given situation requires that one has a profound understanding of the needs, beliefs, and other background elements of all who the action in question will affect in order to reach a moral resolution.
So, one needs to share or come to share another’s form of life in order to decide how to properly act when a moral dilemma concerns them both because the process of understanding or coming to understand another’s form of life, as I have interpreted it, is necessary and sufficient for productive moral decision-making, action and thus resolution.
Reasoning in this way is crucial in making effective decisions about the right or wrong way to respond in the face of moral dilemmas, especially when different cultures are involved, because it is always available to us; we all share the human form of life so we have the means to take moral action in the face of any moral dilemma across any culture or community.
Given how much tends to be at stake in the types of situations that evoke compassion, a challenge in the forms of life theory that may concern David and Trudy lies in the great amount of effort and imagination required to fully project ourselves onto the form of life of the person toward which we feel compassionate. But my interpretation of forms of life allows for that because we all, at the very least, share the human form of life; there is no reason to think that just because the emotional power of compassion may be hard to make sense of and act on (it can be hard enough to understand what someone means by their words, let alone the reason for one’s suffering) that determining the right moral action in light of compassion is somehow beyond reach. It is hard to imagine a moral dilemma capable of evoking the notion of compassion we have in mind where the person susceptible to compassion ought to disqualify it completely. After all, and I think David and Trudy would agree, compassion is all we have to go off in the face of many moral dilemmas because compassion is different from empathy, sympathy, and other emotions in its allowing us to comprehend suffering and moving us to act; if anything, compassion only further enables our understanding of other’s forms of life.
If compassion appears to have led someone to act in response to another’s non-trivial suffering, and that action is deemed irrational in retrospect, as in many of the examples David and Trudy use such as poverty porn, then it is not compassion that has limited someone; rather, they were limited because they did not sufficiently understand the other’s form of life, and so their compassion was misdirected. So even if compassion remains insufficient for determining the correct moral action, we need not worry about its potential limitations because both the virtues and pitfalls of compassion only inform our developing understanding of others’ forms of life for assigning contents and applications to an ethical rule or principle in the pursuit of moral action.
Please comment any thoughts, questions or concerns that this post may raise for you. I’m excited and grateful to now be a part of this community, and I look forward to your feedback.
you can find Olivia on twitter at @Oliviascheyer
Justin Caouette
May 2, 2018
Really nice post, Olivia.
I think that David and Trudy can agree with everything you said here and still hold that compassion can be problematic though; Im fond of virtue ethics myself (which seems interestingly compatible with some of the things you said about life forms) and I can say that compassion (as with all of our emotions) must be calibrated such that we feel the right amount of compassion toward the right people at the right times… So even just a straight-forward (VE) Aristotelian approach to ethics seems compatible with recognizing both that compassion need-not lead us astray but often does in the ways that Dave and Trudy spelled out. Moral failure can be spelled out in terms of the emotion wrongly motivating us (compassion is the issue), or in ignorance of the facts (some cognitive failure), or in rationalizing properly (some story about values maybe), one need not take a stand a strong stand on how the process works, I don’t think, to show that compassion can be problematic. After all, couldn’t one hold that what it means to be compassionate is to also be mindful of the requirements of the life forms around them? In (VE), there is much debate over the unity of the virtues and the connection between intellectual virtues and practical virtues that would be relevant here as well. I’m just saying that I think what you wrote here is compatible with also agreeing with Dave and Trudy. Now, you haven’t said that they couldn’t adopt your view, only that they didn’t put forward a theory explaining how moral failures take place. Given their space limitations they couldn’t do that but I do think they were hoping to provide a guide that stood agnostic on the moral views on offer
as to to how compassion can go astray.
Anyway, I liked the originality of the “life form” discussion. It reminded me a bit of Michael Thompson’s (Pitt) work in “Life and Action” (Harvard Univ. Press 2012) and the work of one of Wittgentsein’s students, Elizabeth Anscombe. If you’ve read them I’d be interested in hearing if that’s the sort of thing you had in mind (I’m especially thinking of Thompson here).If not, my apologies for getting us a bit off topic.
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Olivia Scheyer
May 4, 2018
Thank you very much, Justin, for your comment. It’s true that I did not suggest that David and Trudy adopt my view, for I agree that both views can lie compatibly next to each other. I mention that the goal of ethics ought to not only establish moral ends, but also tell us how to reach moral ends as a good in and of itself, so I sought to think about compassion in a different sense that accomplishes both goals simultaneously.
In their argument, David and Trudy assert that compassion is useful and valuable, but it is not sufficient for telling us how to reach valuable moral ends. Their argument is apparently utilitarian – compassion does not accomplish the ethical goal of reducing the suffering of others around us on its own. This is where my focus parts ways with theirs: since, in accordance with their argument, compassion is unique when compared to empathy, sympathy, and a many other emotions in its moving us to both relate to one’s suffering and also act upon it, how could another form of reasoning, another emotion, be more sufficient for guiding moral action if compassion is all that is informing our urge to act? If we fail to carry out a compassionate act in the utilitarian sense, then compassion is problematic, or insufficient for guiding moral action.
So I thought that if we could adopt a view of compassion in a more Kantian-inspired, deontological sense, then we can avoid the problems that compassion causes in the utilitarian sense for guiding moral action. Even if we act solely according to compassion and do not succeed in reducing the suffering of the person toward which we feel compassion, that consequence does not deem our action wrong; the action would only be wrong if our will were not intrinsically good in the sense that its maxim was not in accordance with the moral law. So at this point, compassion could still be problematic. But the “moral law” that I offer comprises innately understanding or coming to understand others’ forms of life and seeks to move past the particularist/universalist (including virtue theorists) impasse around moral law by offering a form of reasoning that is available to every rational agent in any situation no matter the cultural differences between agents involved. If our will is good, the consequences of acting on compassion do not compromise the good of those actions. Compassion, then, can never lead us astray because we have a sufficient way of reasoning about acting on principles that are in accordance with the moral law, our duty.
I simply believe that to think about compassion in the deontological sense and bracketed within the forms of life theory is in our best interest because we often only have compassion to go off of, or we at least need to be able to navigate compassion fruitfully because it is inherently an emotion that moves us to act. Keeping that all in mind both allows for the difficulty in making the ethical decisions that compassion leads us to and also liberates us from the ethical “dead-end” that David and Trudy claim results from making ethical decisions solely according to compassion. While their view is important for reaching moral ends, I believe that the view I offer simultaneously meets the other goal of ethics – i.e. to tell us how to act in any situation.
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Olivia Scheyer
May 4, 2018
And I did not have in mind the works you mentioned, but I certainly would agree with a lot of Thompson’s argument, so thank you for pointing me in their direction!
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Justin Caouette
May 7, 2018
My pleasure!
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David Boutland
May 10, 2018
Thanks for the thoughtful response Olivia. I can’t say that I’m very familiar with Wittgenstein but your application of the “form of life” concept to compassion is interesting and seems like it could provide a promising strategy to avoid some of the pitfalls we discuss. As Justin mentioned, I agree our views are largely compatible, insofar as we outline a number of potential pitfalls one can associate with compassion, and you seem to be offering an outline on how one might avoid these. I would be interested to read a bit more about how your approach avoids some of the specific pitfalls we discuss. For example, how does your approach ensure one is able to avoid compassion fatigue?
Further, you mention that cases of misdirected compassion are not problems of compassion itself but with not understanding another’s “form of life”. But I don’t see why we would not still say that the vulnerability to such cases lies with compassion, and a potential solution is to better understand other’s “forms of life”.
I would also like to comment on a point you mention in your reply to Justin, specifically the distinction between utilitarian and Kantian approaches to compassion (and the limits thereof). You claim our view appears utilitarian, and while I agree that our view and the pitfalls we describe can be understood through the utilitarian lens, I don’t see why such problems are not equally understood in Kantian terms (or virtue ethics, and various other ethical viewpoints). I acknowledge that one potentially serious problem with the pitfalls we mention is that the suffering of others is not dealt with in the most effective way. From a utilitarian perspective, this is problematic because, at the very least, this results in more suffering. But can’t we understand theses pitfalls as factors that interfere with our ability to act according to duty, or in a virtuous way? Take compassion fatigue for example. Compassion fatigue occurs from the overexposure to the suffering of others and can result in the dulling of one’s ability to feel and direct compassion in the right way. This can surely be understood as a problem for the utilitarian, as maximizing utility in cases where compassion fatigue takes hold is unlikely. But compassion fatigue seems equally a threat to acting according to duty or acting in a virtuous way. Of course, I think the Kantian, virtue ethicist and utilitarian can offer a reasonable response here, and each theory can recommend ways of mitigating and avoiding the pitfalls we mention. I think your original post also provides insight here. But it seems fair to associate these pitfalls with compassion itself, rather than with a utilitarian understanding or application of compassion.
Finally, I had a question about your own view as it relates to compassion. I was wondering if/how your view allows for the feeling and directing of compassion toward non-human animals. You include a lot about the human “form of life”, which appears restricted to human interaction, but it seems to me one could branch this out a bit to easily include sentient animals as following a similar pattern. Perhaps you could speak a bit to that as well.
Thanks again for the thoughtful response and engagement.
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Olivia Scheyer
May 10, 2018
Thank you very much, David, for replying to my comments. Point blank, I could definitely use a solid 10,000 words more than a blog post allows for to get into the nitty gritty of case studies, etc.to really push the soundness of my argument. I am very glad to engage this discussion further, and I will answer your questions below.
1. For example, how does your approach ensure one is able to avoid compassion fatigue?…Further, you mention that cases of misdirected compassion are not problems of compassion itself but with not understanding another’s “form of life”. But I don’t see why we would not still say that the vulnerability to such cases lies with compassion, and a potential solution is to better understand other’s “forms of life”.
I might go so far as to say that understanding or coming to understand forms of life is a priori of compassion. I’m glad you brought up compassion fatigue because even if my first statement here were true, I don’t think that I can avoid compassion fatigue with my forms of life argument. And the reason is that the way you present compassion fatigue renders the subject incapacitated. My forms of life view only applies to rational agents (in the Kantian sense). So in the case of compassion fatigue, then, I think we’ve moved out of philosophy territory at least on morally sound grounds. If someone cannot sustain a certain degree of compassion, there are detectable “symptoms”, and then there are myriad therapeutic options available to remedy this understandably debilitating condition. But philosophically speaking, any rational agent should be able to avoid compassion fatigue by their being a rational agent in and of that fact because they inherently can understand or come to understand another’s form of life in any situation. I certainly allow for the challenges that arise herein, but they do not give us any reason to think that compassion fatigue is a threat to any rational agent in any situation. Vulnerability to such cases cannot lie with compassion or else we’d theoretically be doomed in the hands of our brain surgeons – and I don’t think anyone is prepared to tell brain surgeons to avoid feeling compassionate altogether. And for the ones that do fall victim to compassion fatigue, compassion cannot be what rendered them fatigued because compassion does not have agency; a (very understandably so) limited cognitive capacity to process another’s suffering may, however, and then it’s no longer a philosophical issue in my view.
2. I don’t see why such problems are not equally understood in Kantian terms (or virtue ethics, and various other ethical viewpoints).
“Dulling of compassion”, as you mention in the case of compassion fatigue, causes problems for the utilitarian because the consequences that result are unethical, not ideal, or what have you. This does not, in fact, cause any problems for the Kantian-inspired view. “Acting in a virtuous way” keeps in mind the capacity to which the agent can act, and whatever that capacity may be is virtuous so long as one would expect anyone else in their position to do the same (the categorical imperative). There cannot be a problem with compassion because there is always a “right” way to act no matter its influence, and with the forms of life argument, we even have an innate means for distinguishing those. Thinking about compassion in this way creates room for its pitfalls, or the situations in which it can lead us astray, without allowing them to get in the way of solving moral dilemmas or guiding moral action. And if we’re positioned to act in this way, I think the problematic nature of the pitfalls of compassion goes away.
3. I was wondering if/how your view allows for the feeling and directing of compassion toward non-human animals.
Thank you so much for asking! I have been thinking about this exact question lately. I agree that the human capacity to feel and direct compassion toward non-human animals is something that the forms of life argument can encompass. I don’t think Wittgenstein would agree, because we cannot speak the same language as a lion, but I think, similarly to how we all share THE human form of life, we can adopt a notion of THE LIVING form of life. Insofar as we can detect through empirical study of behaviors when a lion is hungry or defensive, we can come to share a form of life with them – the number of forms of life that we can come to share with a lion is far fewer than those we can share with another human, but one is enough!
I highly recommend Christine Korsgaard’s argument for the moral standing of animals, which relates to the nature of the discussion at hand.
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