Abstract
Compassion lies at the centre of Nussbaum’s project to articulate a set of political emotions that can serve the aspirations of the liberal state. I argue that while the inculcation of compassion might be pragmatically useful for the ends of liberalism, compassion is the wrong answer to the question of what we owe each other, morally speaking, in a society like that of the contemporary United States. In such a society, the privileged ought to feel not compassion, but instead a moral emotion that registers their complicity in the suffering of the oppressed. Moreover, Nussbaum’s suggestion that the state should inculcate a spirit of compassion in the politically oppressed is in itself, I will suggest, morally suspect. But the real disagreement between Nussbaum and myself, I argue, is over a descriptive rather than normative issue: whether the US counts, as Nussbaum says, as an ‘aspiring’ if imperfect liberal society.
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Notes
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In Upheavals of Thought (2001), Nussbaum argues that the cognitive elements of emotions (whether or not emotions have non-cognitive elements) are sufficient conditions of the emotions. That is, she believes that either the emotions are entirely constituted by their cognitive elements, or that the cognitive elements of emotions reliably produce the non-cognitive elements. If one fails to have an emotion where the emotion is appropriate, it’s necessarily the case that one is exhibiting some sort of cognitive failure.
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Employing categories of the ‘oppressed’ and ‘oppressors’ is of course an oversimplification, since many people are at once oppressed and oppressors, for example those who are economically oppressed but racially privileged, or gender-oppressed but economically privileged.
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Srinivasan, A. (2022). The Politics of Compassion. In: Brooks, T. (eds) Political Emotions. Palgrave Studies in Ethics and Public Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91092-1_6
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