Srinivasan, Amia;
(2022)
The Politics of Compassion.
In: Brooks, Thom, (ed.)
Political Emotions: Towards a Decent Public Sphere.
(pp. 99-114).
Palgrave MacMillan: Cham, Switzerland.
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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.
| Type: | Book chapter |
|---|---|
| Title: | The Politics of Compassion |
| ISBN-13: | 978-3-030-91091-4 |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1007/978-3-030-91092-1_6 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91092-1_6 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1542197 |
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