Morality from Compassion

"According to Arthur Schopenhauer, compassion is the basis of morality. He sees concern for justice as a negative form of compassion, directed at not harming anyone, as opposed to the more far-reaching, positive form of benefiting. He thinks a higher degree of compassion involves realizing that the spatio-temporal separation of individuals is illusory and that in reality they are all identical. Such compassion is impartial and all-encompassing. Compassion is suited to be the centre of morality because its object are negative feelings, and only these are real. Contrary to these Schopenhauerian claims, it is here argued that compassion must be supplemented with attitudes like sympathy and benevolence because positive feelings exist alongside negative feelings; that a concern for justice, though morally essential, is independent of these attitudes which are based on empathy; that these attitudes involve not identifying oneself with others, but taking personal identity as insignificant in empathically imagining how others feel. Schopenhauer is however right that, though these attitudes are spontaneously partial, this can be corrected. His morality is also interesting in raising the question rarely discussed in philosophical ethics of how moral virtue relates to ascetic self-renunciation. Both of these ideals are highly demanding, but the book ends by arguing that this is no objection to their validity." -- Amazon Cover 1 Morality from Compassion 4 Copyright 5 Contents 6 Acknowledgements 8 1: Schopenhauer on Compassion as the Basis of Morality 10 1.1 Morality Based on Compassion by an Empirical Method 10 1.2 Compassion and Other Moral Attitudes Based on Empathy 16 1.3 Moral versus Anti-Moral Attitudes 26 1.4 Justice-Based Attitudes 31 1.5 The Aim of This Book 34 2: Morality and the Distinction between Oneself and Others 40 2.1 An Ambiguity in Parfit’s View 40 2.2 Well-Being Accessed from the Inside and the Outside 44 2.3 Reasons of Justice, and Coexisters 56 2.4 Schopenhauer on the Metaphysics of Compassion 64 3: The Partiality and Moral Importance of Empathy 76 3.1 Bloom and Prinz’ Attack on the Moral Importance of Empathy 76 3.2 Spontaneous Empathy and Voluntary, Reflective Empathy 85 3.3 Further Objections to the Moral Importance of Empathy 94 3.4 Morality and Self-Renunciation 102 4: Biases in Favour of theNegative 116 4.1 Negativity Biases and Negatively Weighted Utilitarianism 116 4.2 Compassion as the Source of the Strict Negativity Bias 126 4.3 The Negativity Bias and Prioritarianism versus Egalitarianism 131 5: Demandingness as an Objection to Norms 134 References 148 Index 152 Schopenhauer saw compassion as the basis of morality. Ingmar Persson argues that compassion must be supplemented with attitudes like sympathy and benevolence, and that morality essentially involves a concern for justice which is independent of attitudes based on empathy.