Garfield.txt Page:1 JOURNAL OF BUDDHIST ETHICS ONLINE CONFERENCE ON BUDDHISM AND HUMAN RIGHTS 1-14 October 1995 HUMAN RIGHTS AND COMPASSION: TOWARDS A UNIFIED MORAL FRAMEWORK* A compassionate mind, non-dualistic awareness and The aspiration for enlightenment are the causes of the Bodhisattvas. However, chief among all of these is compassion. Like nurturing a seed with water, in time It ripens the causes of the victors. So I praise compassion above all else. (Candrakiirti, //Madhyamakaavataara//, I:1cd, 2) JAY L. GARFIELD School of Cognitive Science and Cultural Studies Hampshire College Amherst, MA 01002-5001 jgarfield@hampshire.edu COPYRIGHT (C) Jay. L. Garfield 1995 COPYRIGHT NOTICE Digital copies of this work may be made and distributed provided no charge is made and no alteration is made to the content. Reproduction in any other format with the exception of a single copy for private study requires the written permission of the editors. All enquiries to JBE-ED@PSU.EDU. *This essay is a contribution to _Universal Responsibility: A Felicitation Volume in Honour of His Holiness the Dalai Lama on His Sixtieth Birthday_, ed. R.C. Tewari, K. Nath, S.S. Bahulkar, Ven. N. Samten. ABSTRACT Buddhist moral theory takes compassion as its fundamental value, as does Humean moral theory in the West. The currently dominant Western moral systems, on the other hand, take rights as fundamental. These liberal moral theories make compassion an optional, private matter. On the other hand, they seem better suited than Buddhist or Humean moral theories as platforms for the advocacy of human rights. These moral approaches are often taken to be incompatible, and it is often argued that compassion-based ethics cannot account for the central importance of human rights. I argue that an ethics based in Garfield.txt Page:2 compassion can ground a strong theory of basic human rights, but that such a theory is importantly different from classical liberal ethics. TEXT 1. INTRODUCTION His Holiness the Dalai Lama has been a tireless advocate for human rights in a global context. Some leaders and moral theorists of non-Western cultures--and some contemporary Western moral and political theorists--have argued that the assertion of fundamental human rights is merely an accidental feature of the moral outlook of modern Western moral and political theory. The extension or imposition of this moral framework and its demands on non-Western cultures, they argue, is an instance of cultural imperialism and hegemony, incompatible with and disruptive of those cultures. Some in the West have even argued that this framework has outlived its usefulness even in Western cultures and that the overcoming of modernism should include the abandonment of a moral and political discourse grounded in rights. His Holiness has consistently rejected this view, and has urged in his public statements and in his writings on morality and politics that the demand for the recognition of human rights is indeed universal in scope, and that to the extent that a culture deprives its citizenry of fundamental human rights, that culture is morally deficient. It follows from such a view that to demand of a society that it respect some fundamental set of such rights is not an instance of illegitimate cultural imperialism but an instance of mandatory moral criticism, even if it is not so experienced by those to whom such an effort is directed at the time. On the other hand, His Holiness, grounded in, and advancing with considerable eloquence, the tradition of Buddhist moral theory rooted in the teachings of the Buddha, as transmitted through texts such as Aaryadeva's //Four Hundred// and "Saantideva's //Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life// has been a consistent exponent of the view that moral life is grounded in the cultivation and exercise of compassion. He has urged in many public religious teachings, addresses, and in numerous writings that the most important moral quality to cultivate is compassion, and that compassion, skill in its exercise, and insight into the nature of reality are jointly necessary and sufficient for human moral perfection. [1] This view, is of course, not original with His Holiness. It is the essence of Buddhist moral theory. On the other hand, His Holiness is certainly the most eloquent exponent and advocate of this moral position of our time, and his application of this moral vision to public life and to international relations is highly original and of the first importance, justly recognized by the conferring of the Nobel Peace Prize. For instance in one recent discussion His Holiness writes: To me it is clear that a genuine sense of responsibility can result only if we develop compassion. Only a spontaneous feeling of empathy for others can really motivate us to act on their behalf. Garfield.txt Page:3 ...[D]emocracy is [the system] which is closest to humanity's essential nature. Hence those of us who enjoy it must continue to fight for all people's right to do so. ... [W]e must respect the right of all peoples and nations to maintain their own distinctive characters and values. [1992:6-7] Now at first glance, there is nothing surprising about this pair of commitments--that to the universality of human rights and that to the cultivation and exercise of compassion as the foundation of morality. Both seem laudable. Both seem to be prima facie "noble" moral commitments. But a second look may raise deep and difficult questions. A number of influential moral theorists [2] have recently argued persuasively that moral theories grounded in rights (to which I will henceforth refer as "liberal" theories) and moral theories grounded in compassion are fundamentally incompatible with one another. Moreover, they have argued that liberal theories are critically deficient--that they fail to account for and to provide guidance in our morally most important circumstances--matters of interpersonal relations where sentiments, attitudes and behaviors are of moral significance, but where questions concerning the rights and duties of those involved are at best beside the point. If these critics of liberal moral theory are correct, focusing on rights and duties impoverishes our moral discourse and distorts our moral vision and is to be abandoned in favor of a morality grounded exclusively in compassion and attention to interpersonal relations. Importantly, responses to this view have typically defended liberal theories against compassion theories, arguing that the former are indeed adequate to the full range of moral questions, and that compassion theories, to the extent that they get matters right, are no more than restatements of liberal theories. [3] The interesting thing about this response is not whether or not it succeeds, but that it concedes to the compassion-theorist the most important point--that rights and compassion are in tension with one another. And if that point, on which the parties to this debate concur, is correct, then His Holiness' advocacy for both of these approaches to morality would turn out to be incoherent. On the other hand, if his moral vision is-- as I will argue that it in fact is--both coherent and compelling, seeing just how that is so will require getting very clear about the precise relation between compassion and rights. In this essay in honor of His Holiness and in honor of his ceaseless campaign to keep morality and its demands at the center of public discourse I will first explore the //prima facie// tension between liberal and compassion-based approaches to morality. I will then argue that these approaches are in fact not incompatible, but that fusing them into a coherent whole requires a particular ordering: Compassion must be taken as fundamental. Rights can only be coherently formulated and advanced in the context of a moral vision incorporating compassion at all if they are grounded in compassion. It is when we attempt to subordinate compassion to rights and duties, or to give these considerations equal status that incoherence looms. This essay hence defends the fundamental Buddhist insight that Garfield.txt Page:4 compassion is the foundation of moral life as well as the liberal vision of human rights as universal and hence defends His Holiness' moral teaching both against liberal and compassionate critics. 2. WHAT DO WE WANT FROM RIGHTS In coming to an understanding of just what rights are, it is instructive to first ask what work they do. And that question is best answered by noting when they are asserted. That, of course, is when they are violated, or threatened with violation. It is when individuals or groups are threatened with abuse or actually abused that rights are asserted--when people are hurt physically, deprived of opportunities for expression of views, opportunities to practice religion, to move about, etc.... We then speak of a right being violated. Rights can be hence seen as fundamentally protective. They protect individuals against interference. Rights such as this can be called "negative rights." The right to life is such a right. It is a right not to be killed. Fundamental rights typically have this character. [4] To be sure, some rights have a more positive character. For instance, in many countries a child has a right to receive an education. But two kinds of considerations mitigate this observation: First, positive rights such as this require the active construction of the obligations or institutions concerned. A right to a primary education requires the establishment of an educational system and the enactment of appropriate legislation, just as one's right to the repayment of a debt by a borrower, requires the occurrence of the loan and the promise to repay it. Contrast this with the right to free exercise of religion. A nation which does not recognize such a right has not simply failed to confer it; in failing to do so, it violates a right that is more fundamental than any legislative authority. This is what makes possible the liberal moral critique of institutions, as opposed to the mere bland comparison of democracy with tyranny as two interesting alternatives for ordering society. Second, positive rights such as these are always quite specific rights to particular actions by particular individuals or institutions. Fundamental negative rights are rights against everybody. My child's right to an education is a right that the local school system admit him to school. The shopkeeper on the corner is irrelevant to this right: he can neither satisfy nor violate it. But my right to life is satisfied by all who do not kill me, and can be violated by any assailant. [5] We can identify three more specific functions rights serve, and which are central to defining the liberal moral outlook: They create a domain of free expression; they establish clarity regarding life expectations; they enable moral criticism. Each of these functions is complex, and deserves examination. Human flourishing--both at the individual and at the social level--requires the freedom of expression to be realized in a number of ways. For an individual to experience him/herself as creative, as Garfield.txt Page:5 responsible, as a being whose views matter; who is taken seriously; who can interact spontaneously and genuinely with those with whom s/he lives it is essential that s/he be able to express his/her views without fear of persecution. Moreover, for a society to flourish it is essential that as many voices be heard as possible, and that no views be suppressed. The suppression of speech harms not only the individual whose voice is silenced but also the community deprived of what might have been the correct view of a crucial matter, or the beauty of a work of art never created. And of course a society of individuals each of whom fears to express his/her views is a miserable one. Social and individual flourishing hence require respect for the right to free speech. But of course not all speech is protected absolutely. Speech may be slanderous. Speech may be used to menace, or to deceive. So it becomes important to demarcate the domain of speech to be protected. This is notoriously difficult, and almost certainly cannot be done explicitly by any clear set of general principles. But we can at least note, given the general motivations just sketched for the protection of speech, central cases of speech that merits protection: Speech critical for individual self-development, such as that related to scholarship, art, or the development of bonds of friendship of family is clearly to be so protected. Moreover, speech related to the political process, to debates regarding social policy, and to the pursuit of religious practice is also to be protected. In short, those domains central to individual and collective flourishing, in order to contribute to those goals, must be domains in which one can advance views free from the fear of censorship. This is what the freedom of speech is. But rights protect not only discourse and discursive practices such as the creation of art and the practice of religion. They also allow us to organize our lives rationally, and to plan our lives with the confidence that our plans have some chance of success. That is, rights ensure a relative clarity of expectations. That others will respect our rights to property, for instance, allows us to plan to put that property to use. That others will respect our right to move freely allows us to plan travel, and to plan a career or course of action that will involve travel. And it is of course the recognition of these rights and their instantiation in a set of institutions enforcing them that allows this confidence necessary for rationally lived lives, free from the terror of the unexpected crushing of legitimate expectations. Rights have yet another central role in our moral lives. They make moral criticism possible. It is important to remember that among our most ethically significant activities is our criticism of ourselves, our fellows, and of alien practices. The role of rights is most central in the latter case. For, sadly, we often find ourselves encountering in the world practices that we find morally abhorrent and wish to condemn and even to extirpate. And we often find that those engaged in those practices not only show reluctance to abandon them, but defend them as morally acceptable. And to make matters more disturbing, the participants in these practices may urge that our Garfield.txt Page:6 condemnation represents an illicit--even culturally imperialist-- universalization of the parochial moral prejudices of our own culture to their very different context. They argue that just as they don't interfere with our moral practices, we should leave their very different culture intact and mind our own business. A case in point is the rejoinder of the government of The People's Republic of China to pressure from Western governments and from non-government human rights advocacy groups, as well as the statements made by representatives of this government at the 1994 conference on human rights in Asia. In these statements this government asserted that such putative fundamental rights as that to free speech, freedom of emigration, freedom to practice religion, etc..., and indeed the entire framework of individual human rights are artifacts of Western liberalism, and that any attempt to impose respect for such a set of rights on Asian cultures is simply a new version of imperialism. Now, leaving aside how the debate between the Chinese leadership and its critics ought to turn out, let us notice what the liberal discourse of rights does for its exponents in this debate: To put the matter simply, it makes the criticism of these practices possible in the first place. For absent the liberal framework, the most that we can do is notice that the Chinese government adopts different practices from our own, and comment that we, given our preferences, would prefer to live under our system than under theirs, and perhaps even that so would many of the Chinese and colonial subjects of that government. But that fact doesn't allow us, as outsiders, to intervene in that system, or even, with any justification, to criticize it in a way that its practicioners should take seriously any more than our noting culinary differences between us and the Chinese, and our preference for our food would justify criticism of Chinese gastronomy. For they can respond to us in a parallel fashion: They could note that we liberals have a different system. They could remark that they, the Chinese, would prefer not to live in it, and prefer their own. However, they could remark, they acknowledge that they have no grounds on which to criticize our system, and ask that just as they refrain from doing so, we do likewise with respect to them. What makes moral criticism possible for the liberal is that the discourse of rights presents itself as a universal discourse in an important sense. It makes claims that transcend cultural difference. The rights posited are not American rights, Tibetan rights, or Buddhist rights, Western rights, or Men's rights, etc...: They are precisely human rights, which are self-evidently possessed by any person. A social structure that abrogates them is not, on this view, simply different from our own in that respect: it is morally wrong in that respect. [6] And to the extent that we can make the liberal framework precise--and that turns out to be a very great extent [7]-- we can specify precise ways in which such a system in wrong and in which it must reform or be reformed. Garfield.txt Page:7 3. RIGHTS, DUTIES AND PRIVACY Rights entail duties on the part of others. Where I have a right to something, you have a duty to respect that right. Moreover, duties towards specific persons entail rights on the part of those to whom duties accrue. If you--say as a consequence of a loan--have a duty to pay me a sum of money, I have a right that you do so. If I have a right to practice my religion, you have a duty not to interfere with that practice. Since, as we have noted, rights divide into positive and negative rights, duties similarly divide into positive and negative duties. Negative rights and duties are those liberals regard as universal. And all of the fundamental rights we have noted are of this character. Positive rights are accorded by particular kinds of institutions, such as government structures, laws, employment contracts or voluntary agreements or associations. These last may be more conventional, less universal, and as such are generally justified on pragmatic grounds or on grounds of mutual agreement, rather than on universal moral grounds. The important consequence of this mutual entailment between rights and duties for present purposes is that any moral theory that takes rights as foundational //ipso facto// takes duties as foundational. To the extent that our collective moral landscape is defined by our human rights, our collective moral landscape is equally well defined by our duties. While this may seem like a trivial restatement, it raises a problem: I will argue below that compassion has a defining characteristic an intention and aspiration to benefit even those to whom we have no particular duties, and who have no particular rights against us. We act compassionately, I will argue, precisely when we act not from duty, and precisely when we do not simply respect the rights of others, but when we positively benefit or refrain from harming where there are no rights and duties. Moreover, as we shall see, compassion governs our interactions in a private sphere where talk about rights would seem bizarre, e.g. relations between parents and children. [8] To the extent that we define the moral landscape by rights and duties, we appear not to define it through compassion. [9] Liberalism and Buddhism are apparently at odds. We can sharpen this point by attending to the deep connection between the liberal conception of the private/public distinction and the liberal discourse of rights and duties, and the consequent centrality of this distinction and of the demarcation of a specifically private sphere to liberal moral theory. This point is conceptual, but can be usefully illuminated through attention to the history of liberal theory. Modern liberal moral theory has its origins in the work of the Western philosophers Locke and Kant (as well as Hobbes and Rousseau). Each was concerned in his own way to defend the rights of individuals against hegemonic powers that militated against individual liberty--in the case of Locke the British Crown which threatened the development of constitutional democracy and mercantile capitalism, and in the case of Kant ecclesiastical authority that threatened academic freedom and the development of science. Each saw it to be necessary to demarcate that sphere of life in which one's liberty is properly limited by Garfield.txt Page:8 legitimate public authority from that in which one is properly regarded as autonomous, and so to demarcate a private sphere. For Kant the most important domain to protect as private is that of thought, and as such he is properly seen as the earliest forceful exponent of a fundamental right to freedom of thought and expression. [10] But for Locke, his philosophical predecessor, the original private domain is the home, and the most important right to privacy is the right to property, and to the non-interference with one's use of one's property and conduct in one's home. [11] Both strains of privacy theory are influential in the contemporary world's most influential articulation of liberal moral and political theory--the Constitution of the United States of America. The constitutional protection of the right to privacy has been forcefully articulated in a series of interpretively important decisions in this century according to which the boundaries of the private sphere are demarcated by rights against self-incrimination, against the intrusion of the state into one's home and documents, against religious coercion, against the abridgment of speech, etc..., and against the dictation of one's decisions regarding one's family size and structure. [12] These have been summed up by one Supreme Court Justice in the famous epigram, "The most important right is the right to be let alone." [13] This epigram in a certain sense simply sums up liberal moral theory. Liberalism is predicated on the demarcation of a private sphere in which one is free to articulate one's ideology, daily life and vision of the good as one sees fit. What one does there may be the subject of comment by others, but not of moral criticism. One's duties concern what one does in the public sphere. Restrictions of one's prerogatives in the private sphere are always //prima facie// violations of rights. [14] I may be obligated to pay my taxes (a public matter) but I cannot be required to give money to my temple (a private matter) and if I do so it is not out of any duty (unless I have established one through a promise). Failing to come to work on time is a breach of duty to my employer (a public matter) but failing to go to bed at a reasonable hour is a private matter--perhaps stupid, but nobody's business but my own. Or so liberal theory would have it. Liberal theory, in sum, gets us the goods adumbrated earlier-- security of thought and conscience, security in planning our lives, access to the good ideas and beautiful works of others, and a platform for moral criticism--simply by restricting the zone of such criticism to the public, and establishing the sanctity of the private. [15] Now to a certain degree, I have overstated my case. For liberal moral theory does not in fact ignore moral phenomena other than rights completely, and indeed the most prominent liberal moral theorists often have a great deal to say about character and about virtue. To do justice to all of the nuances of the liberal tradition would take us far beyond the scope of this discussion. For now, these few remarks will have to suffice to emphasize the contrast to which I Garfield.txt Page:9 wish to draw attention: First, while liberal moral theory is indeed richer than one might believe were one to focus solely on its discussion of rights, liberal political theory is very much concerned to articulate a framework of rights as an exclusive characterization of the moral structure of the public sphere. (Indeed the separation of the moral from the political is another respect in which liberalism diverges from compassion-based moral theory.) Second, even within the moral domain, there is a preoccupation in liberal theory with an articulation of rights which often obscures other moral concerns, and a preoccupation within liberal theory generally with the articulation of the political dimension of our moral lives to the detriment of attention to the private sphere, a preoccupation explained by the demarcation of that sphere within liberalism in the first place. Finally, even when liberal moral theory does turn its attention to matters of character and virtue, the account of these phenomena is often grounded in a primary account of rights and duties. [16] 4. THE LIMITS OF RIGHTS IN MORAL DISCOURSE We are now in more of a position to see what is problematic about liberal theory if we want compassion to have an important place in our moral life. When rights are taken to be fundamental, too much comes out morally permissible. Since, for instance, nobody to whom I have no particular contractual arrangement has any right to my generosity, I am in no way obligated to be generous. Since no one has a claim on my concern, I need not be concerned for anyone else. Compassion is hence, on this view, strictly optional--one of the many permissible ways to address the world. [17] This highlights the most important limitation of liberal moral discourse: It is in an important sense silent about character. Since a person's character--his or her fundamental values and set of virtues, vices, dispositions and attitudes--is a private matter, and the first principal of liberal moral theory is to protect individual liberty in the private sphere, liberal theory can in no way by itself recommend or condemn any particular qualities of character. [18] To the extent that we find character to be a morally significant phenomenon, this is deeply problematic. In particular, to the extent that the cultivation of compassion is of genuine moral significance--and for any Buddhist moral theorist it must be--then liberalism is at least deficient in its neglect of this attribute, and at worst wrongheaded in characterizing it as optional. [19] But there is yet another difficulty afflicting the foundation of liberal theory, one which is indeed acknowledged by the social contract tradition, but which is never satisfactorily resolved: The general duty to respect the rights of others requires a justification. Or, to look at the other side of the coin, the claim that persons have natural rights at all must be justified, antecedent to the task which often occupies most of a liberal's attention, that of specifying exactly what our rights and duties are. And of course one cannot simply appeal to a right to have one's rights respected, Garfield.txt Page:10 or a duty to do one's duty, on pain of infinite regress. The social contract tradition adopts one of two strategies: Theorists in this tradition sometimes argue that the sanction of the rights and duties we recognize lies in an explicit or implicit original agreement to which we are all either tacit parties or heirs. [20] Aside from the odd historical problems this raises, and the problems with the status of implicit or inherited contracts, there is a stunning logical problem with this kind of reasoning. For the original agreement to be in any sense binding there must already by duties to keep one's word and to be bound by agreements presupposed, and correlatively rights that others abide by their agreements. The regress just adumbrated is merely ignored by talk of social contracts as binding. The second strategy is to argue that it is in each of our self-interests to abide by the hypothesized or hypostasized right-establishing contract--that the alternative is a social disintegration that benefits none of us. There are at least two problems with this form of reasoning, though: First, for most of us most of the time, it is simply false. It is often in fact, in terms of the kind of narrow self-interest to which morality is supposed to be a countervailing force, precisely in our self-interest to shirk our duties, and to violate the rights of others. This is not surprising. It is one of the reasons for the prevalence of evil. But more deeply, even were this true, it would be the wrong kind of justification for a structure of rights and duties. For it would then be the case that our having rights and duties would be contingent upon the supposed fact that it is in others' and our own self-interest to respect them. And again, the very point of rights and duties is to restrain action that, while justified from the standpoint of narrow self-interest, is morally wrong. Such restraint clearly demands independent justification. Now of course the demonstration of the inadequacy of these routes to the justification of liberalism as a foundation for morality does not show that no route will succeed. But if some route is to succeed, it will require a lot of argument to show how. And it does appear that the reasons for the failure to provide a truly adequate foundation for liberalism are principled: Valuable as rights are, they are not self-justifying, and broad as their scope is, it is not broad enough to encompass all that is morally significant. It is therefore appropriate to look for a broader foundation for our moral life, and to hope that such a foundation will allow us to preserve what goods rights promise, while giving us moral guidance in those areas where rights fail us. It is with such hopes in mind that we turn to an examination of compassion. 5. WHY IS COMPASSION MORALLY SIGNIFICANT? The first thing to notice about a discourse grounded in compassion is that such a discourse allows us to address moral life in what the liberal regards as the private domain. [21] That is, we Garfield.txt Page:11 can assess relations between parents and children; between spouses; between friends and siblings with regard to whether the interactions in question are compassionate or not, and with regard to whether they are of a kind conducive to the cultivation and encouragement of compassion. This is important not only because so much of moral life happens in precisely these domains, and because liberalism is so problematically silent about these domains, but also because our moral sensibilities, even though they are often played out on a more public stage, are cultivated in these domains. The importance of attending to the nature of our "private" affairs hence transcends the already great moment of those affairs themselves in our lives. [22] Moreover, regarding our moral life in this way allows us to talk about a broad range of choices we make regarding morally significant behavior about which liberalism is silent simply because of its focus on rights and duties. So my choice to give or not to give to a beggar or to a temple; or my choice to treat my fellows with patience or courtesy become matters--as they ought to be--of moral evaluation. In short, speaking in terms of compassion significantly broadens the sphere of morality to encompass more of what we pretheoretically place in that domain, and more of what is recognizably foundational even to that which liberalism puts at center stage. [23] In addition, we can make greater sense of moral development from the standpoint of compassion than we can from the standpoint of liberalism. There is a certain mystery about moral development as seen by the liberal: How do we come to be good persons? Since for the liberal to be a good person is to be a respecter of rights and a discharger of duties, moral education would seem to require and to comprise exactly education regarding duties and rights and training in discharging and respecting them. But if we actually examine what kind of upbringing in fact leads to the development of morally admirable persons, it just doesn't look like this. Loving families, close relationships, and exposure to kindness seem as a matter of fact to be the necessary conditions for satisfactory moral development. This makes little sense if moral development is liberal moral development, but makes perfect sense if to develop morally is to develop compassion. For children learn modes of interaction and attitudes to which they are exposed in childhood. Children brought up compassionately learn to be compassionate. And it is these children who grow to moral maturity by any standards. They are precisely the individuals who respect the rights of others and who discharge their duties. Grounding that moral maturity in their compassion makes moral development comprehensible. Grounding moral theory in compassion has an interesting consequence: The public/private distinction so fundamental to liberal moral theory vanishes. That divide is, as we saw above, the divide between what is of moral concern--one's public life--and what is a matter of personal taste--one's attitudes and values. Liberalism constructs that divide because of its essential concern with the right to privacy as the fundamental moral good to be protected. But when we take compassion as the primary object of moral concern there is no basis for the primacy of such a divide. The concerns of morality are, from this standpoint both broad and Garfield.txt Page:12 uniform. The same questions can be asked about my behavior in my home that can be asked about my behavior in the street. The same standards of evaluation apply to my business and political relations that apply to my fundamental values or religious commitments. [24] This represents a very different view of the moral landscape. Again, we must ask just how this view can be reconciled with the view embodied in liberalism. They cannot simply be joined. Moral life cannot be both heterogeneous and homogenous. And yet, there is something, as we have seen, of great value and truth in both. Before turning to the task of reconciling these divergent perspectives we should note one final respect in which from the standpoint of compassion ethics looks different from how it looks when seen from the standpoint of liberalism: Moral criticism must be seen differently. When a liberal criticizes a social practice or institution on moral grounds, s/he argues that it is violative of certain fundamental human rights. When one criticizes a social practice or institution from the standpoint of compassion, on the other hand, the grounds of such criticism are equally universalist, but are somewhat different and more straightforward: Institutions and practices are not deemed wrong because they violate some right (though, as we shall see, this might often be the case, and might often be derivative grounds for such criticism) but rather simply because they are harmful to people; because they are not expressive of individual or collective compassion, and because they do not foster it among the citizens exposed to those institutions. [25] >From the standpoint of liberal moral theory, this is an inadequate basis for moral criticism, simply because the individuals harmed or denied benefits may have no particular rights against those harms or to those benefits. But from the standpoint of compassion, that is immaterial to the immorality of such institutions. [26] 6. RIGHTS WITHIN COMPASSION Having scouted the principal differences in outlook between liberalism and compassion-based moral theory, it is now time to return to the central problem this essay aims to resolve: Given that these two approaches to moral theory--which at first glance appear so harmonious--turn out upon inspection to be very much in tension with one another, is it possible to join them in any way? That is, is the recurrent plea of His Holiness the Dalai Lama on behalf of both human rights and compassion coherent? If so, how so? Given our accounts of these two frameworks, it should be apparent that if liberalism is taken as foundational, this task is hopeless. For central to liberalism is the protection of the private, and central to that protection is the protection of individuals from obligations to undertake any particular attitudes or visions of the good life. And compassion is nothing if not a very particular moral attitude, and an embodiment of a very particular vision of the good life. Liberalism essentially makes compassion optional. But what happens if we adopt compassion as the foundation of our Garfield.txt Page:13 moral outlook, and try to reconstruct what we can of a liberal account of rights and duties upon that foundation? We shall now see that there is more hope in this direction. Moreover, we will see not only that we can construct a unified moral framework in such a way, but also that some of the outstanding problems concerning rights insoluble within the framework of liberalism admit of solution within the framework provided by compassion. In particular, the problem of the sanction of rights and duties will turn out to have a straightforward resolution. To begin from compassion is to begin by taking the good of others as one's own motive for action. [27] This happens quite naturally within the family and the circle of one's intimate friends and associates, when those relationships are healthy and intact. Hume remarks "'tis rare to meet with one, in whom all the kind affections, taken together, do not over-balance all the selfish... there are few that do not bestow the largest part of their fortunes on the pleasure of their wives, and the education of their children, reserving the smallest portion for their own proper use and entertainment." [_Treatise_ 487] But compassion, like the gravitational force to which in local social life it is so analogous, obeys something like an inverse square law and so will end up being counterproductive on a large scale: The further in relation to us a person or other sentient being is, the less natural compassion we feel for his or her suffering, and the easier it is to be indifferent or even hostile. Were this phenomenon to persist unchecked in human affairs, the sentient universe would come, as a consequence of the operation of this essentially local force, to resemble the physical universe, shaped as it is by the essentially local force of gravitation: We would find ourselves living in small, internally tightly bound, but mutually hostile bands, each one of us bound to our immediate fellows, and intensely loyal to members of our clans at the expense of the interests of others, like tiny planets floating in sterile isolation in the frigid vastness of space: But tho' this generosity must be acknowledg'd to the honour of human nature, we may at the same time remark that so noble an affection, instead of fitting men for large societies, is almost as contrary to them, as the most narrow selfishness. For while each person loves himself better than any other single person, and in his love to others bears the greatest affection to his relation and acquaintance, this must necessarily produce an opposition of passions, and a consequent opposition of actions... [ibid] This would of course be a profoundly unsatisfactory state of affairs. For one thing, it runs against even the narrow self-interest of all concerned. We deprive not only others of the benefits to be derived from interaction with us, but also ourselves the benefits to be derived from interactions with them. Moreover, we perpetuate an unstable and dangerous hostility that keeps us all in a state of Garfield.txt Page:14 peril. But moreover, it runs against both reason and another component of human nature--our capacity for imaginative exchange of our own situation for that of others. For reason urges that drawing distinctions in the absence of genuine difference is arbitrary, and that doing so in ways detrimental to the interests of all concerned is downright stupid. [28] And that is precisely what the narrow limitation of compassion does. For this reason compassion must be deliberately given a public, social face. The construction of an edifice of rights can hence be seen, as Hume saw it, as a device for extending the reach of natural compassion and for securing the goods that compassion enables to all persons in a society. For, he saw, compassion is a natural endowment of the human being, present in each of us as the innate attitude towards those close to us--towards those for whom we care and towards those who care for us. Since we all require, as we have argued, the many goods that rights enable, including the ability to express ourselves, the security to plan and to conduct our lives, and the availability of a platform for moral criticism; and since we each benefit from a society in which all enjoy these goods, not only self- interest but regard for each other demands that we adopt a mechanism for enabling these goods. By a natural process of generalization, compassion extends to those in our larger family, and in our circle of friends, associates, and acquaintances. So while compassion is of the utmost moral significance, we need no moral theory or explicit social structure to ensure its operation in this intimate ambiance. Human nature takes care of this. But to extend it far enough to ensure necessary social goods, we need a mechanism--a human convention. Conferring rights is simply the best mechanism we have devised to this end. Hume puts the point this way: The remedy, then, is not deriv'd from nature, but from artifice; or more properly speaking, nature provides a remedy in the judgment and understanding, for what is irregular and incommodious in the affections. For when men, from their early education in society, have become sensible to the infinite advantages that result from it, and have besides acquir'd a new affection to company and convention; and when they have observ'd, that the principal disturbance in society arises from the goods, which we call external, and from their looseness and easy transitions from one person to another; they must seek for a remedy by putting these goods, as far as possible, on the same footing with the fix'd and constant advantages of the mind and body. This can be done after no other manner, than by a convention enter'd into by all the members of the society to bestow stability on the possession of these external goods, and leave everyone in the peaceable enjoyment of what he may acquire by his fortune and industry. [_Treatise_ 489] ... After this convention..., there immediately arises the ideas of justice and injustice; as also those of property, Garfield.txt Page:15 right, and obligation. The latter are altogether unintelligible without understanding the former. [_Treatise_ 490-491] Moreover, as we are all aware both as a consequence of our introspective evidence but also as a consequence of the evident ability of the media to stir the sympathy of millions for even those who are very distant physically, culturally and circumstantially from them, we are endowed with an innate ability and propensity to place ourselves in imagination in the place of others and to be moved by their suffering and interests, even when these others are far from us on every relevant dimension of distance. We teach each other to cultivate this capacity, and it forms the basis of our ability to extend the bounds of our community of interests beyond our immediate circle of friends. It gives rise to sentiments of solidarity with those we recognize as like us: in its most limited form petty nationalism or communalism (dangerous sentiments, perhaps, but better than egoism and steps on the way to something better); with greater scope, to nationalism; and finally, in those of the highest moral character, to universalism. In each case, the greater generalization is achieved by coming to see others as more like us, or like those to whom we already extend compassionate regard, and to imagine ourselves or those we already love in the circumstances of the other. [29] But having extended the sentiment of compassion, we must then ask how to turn that sentiment into tangible goods for those to whom it is directed, as well as how to ensure that those goods are available even when imagination and instinctive human goodness fail, as we know they all too often do. And that is where rights come in. By extending either a basic set of general human rights to our fellow persons, or more particular rights of citizenship to those who share our vision of civic life and who participate with us in its institutions, we grant enforceable claims to the goods of life and against oppression. These provide the tools with which each individual can protect him/herself and achieve his/her own flourishing. These tools will be available even when our compassion or those of others fails, and can even be used as rhetorical vehicles to reawaken that compassion. This has been successfully demonstrated in the Indian independence movement, the American civil rights movement, the South African anti-apartheid movement, and, though sadly with less tangible success, in the Tibetan freedom movement. In each case, a double role can be discerned for rights: On the one hand rights are used as tools to fight against those who show a paucity of compassionate regard for the oppressed. They can be asserted in courts of law, in political processes, or in diplomatic channels in order to secure the goods that would ordinarily be available through fellowship. On the other hand, the very assertion of those rights makes a claim to humanity and hence a claim to compassionate regard. Mahatma Gandhi, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, President Nelson Mandela and of course His Holiness the Dalai Lama have, in strikingly similar ways, used the assertion of rights as part of a rhetorical demonstration of the humanity of those on whose behalf those rights are asserted. This demand to recognize humanity is at the same time a call to others to Garfield.txt Page:16 put themselves in imagination in the place of the oppressed, and so to generate compassion, and so to act on behalf of the oppressed. [30] The important feature of such appeals for present purposes is this: In no case is it either necessary or helpful to take the rights to which appeal is made as constituting moral bedrock. To merely note that someone has a right is not to establish that that person has a claim on me to act. And in general, rights claims by themselves will be impotent to establish such obligations. No particular Englishman could have been shown to have an obligation to assist any particular Indian; no American stands under any definite obligation to liberate any particular Tibetan. What generates our sense of moral duty in such cases is the fact that we come to care about those in need, and that we see them as our fellows. And we treat our fellows in a way nicely captured by the rights we are called upon to recognize. In short, others' rights generate claims on us not because of the brute fact of rights-possession, but rather because of the brute fact that those others are seen not to be other, but rather as our own. And hence they have a claim on our feeling. Rights are on this account not insignificant: As we see, they have a central moral role in gaining recognition; in giving specificity to claims for action; and even as tools against those who withhold recognition. But without a foundation in the compassion that recognition facilitates, rights become pointless. And if there is an antecedent relation of compassion, rights are unnecessary. To quote Schopenhauer: If anyone were to ask me what he gets from giving alms, my answer in all conscience would be: "This, that the lot of that poor man is made so much the lighter; otherwise absolutely nothing. Now if this is of no use and no importance to you, then your wish was really not to give alms, but to make a purchase; and in that case you are defrauded of your money. If, however, it is a matter of importance to you that that man who is oppressed by want suffers less, they you have attained you object from the fact that he suffers less... [_On The Basis of Morality_, p. 165.] Neither rights nor incentives can motivate compassionate action. But compassion can certainly provide the motivation for constructing a system of rights, and for the creation of incentives to further compassionate action. 7. BEYOND PRIVACY The foregoing discussion neither entails that we reject a central role of rights in moral and political discourse nor that we regard them as morally fundamental. In its preservation of a role for rights it recontextualizes them as a mode of expression of and as a call for, the exercise of compassion, and as moral tools to ensure the personal and collective flourishing that is possible and valuable only in the context of compassionate interpersonal relationships and Garfield.txt Page:17 in the context of a compassionate attitude towards the world. Without such a context, a meaningful human life is not possible; meaningful accomplishments would not find their necessary conditions. And even if by some miracle these conditions were satisfied, and what would otherwise be meaningful accomplishments were achieved, they would have no larger significance if absent a culture designed to enable them to benefit other beings and the world. But we thus retain rights in a very different form than that recognized by that liberal moral theory responsible for their articulation. And this is because by taking compassion as our moral foundation we erase the fundamental divide between the public and the private spheres that grounds liberal theory and a liberal construal of rights. The reason for this is that once one regards one's character, attitudes, and relations to others as topics of moral discourse, one allows morality and moral criticism to intrude into the most intimate realm of personal life; once one subjects one's view of the good to moral evaluation, there is no sphere of thought and action protected from such scrutiny by a demarcation of a zone of privacy; and finally once one allows the same moral questions to be raised about one's behavior in the household and family as about one's behavior in the marketplace or in the international political arena, the very line between the public and the private domains whose demarcation is the point of liberalism and the task of rights is erased completely. This erasure could be seen in one of two ways: Negatively, it means that we open the boundaries of our private lives to intrusion to the demands of morality. We can not say, as can the liberal, that our choice about what kind of person to be, and other such moral decisions are "nobody's business but our own." [31] On the other hand, it also means that the positive reach of morality, and its potential as a force for human development is extended from the marketplace and political arena into the family and into our most intimate deliberations. But the erasure of this fundamental principled divide must not be seen as the rejection of the value of privacy //tout court//. For privacy is indeed a good, and, as we saw above, a good essential to many kinds of flourishing. Much of what we do in life requires the kinds of protection comprised by the general right to privacy--including freedom of speech, association, religious practice, and so forth. The security that allows us to order our lives, to develop our talents and to express our views is a good deserving of protection, and its protection is a matter of primary concern to morality as it is articulated in public policy. But the very fact that privacy so understood, and the cluster of rights it comprises are such goods entails that they are goods that compassion leads us to grant to one another, and that a compassionate society grants to its citizens. The failure to do so would constitute a kind of cruelty. The privacy so granted, however, is of a different kind from the privacy understood by the liberal: It is a set of freedoms to pursue ends, to express views and to develop talents. But it is not a freedom from moral constraint. Those ends, views and talents are themselves understood Garfield.txt Page:18 as bound by our inter-relations, and the freedom that is one aspect of privacy so understood is hence constrained by our moral bonds to one another. On this view, our mutual responsibility is fundamental, not our personal rights. Personal rights emerge only as goods we extend to one another as a consequence of our concern. [32] 8. CONCLUSION: RIGHTS AS FOUNDATIONS VS. RIGHTS AS DERIVATIVE We can now sum this investigation up straightforwardly: Human rights in the West have, for the past three centuries, been most frequently articulated within a liberal moral framework. While there is a real conflict between such a framework and an outlook that grounds morality in compassion, there is nonetheless no real conflict between seeing compassion as the fundamental moral phenomenon and recognizing and utilizing rights in moral criticism and in moral and political discourse. The apparent conflict is resolved by grounding rights not in the liberal theory of the public/private dichotomy, but rather in compassion itself. On such a view the purpose and sanction of rights derive exactly from their role in extending natural compassion when it might not naturally be extended, in eliciting compassion where it is tardy, and in articulating compassion skillfully. Rights are hence important at a number of levels, despite being morally derivative. Moreover, despite the erasure this entails of the principled boundary between the public and the private, a morality based on compassion allows us to recognize and to protect the fundamental values that are embodied in a right to privacy. The very rights that liberals properly advance and protect so vigorously are reconstructed and protected with equal vigor on a new basis when they are grounded not in individual autonomy but rather in collective mutual responsibility. Taking rights and individual autonomy as foundational to morality does indeed give us a great deal ethically and politically, and nobody who looks at the general trend--albeit occasionally halting and marked by setbacks--towards greater freedom, democracy, and their ancillary human goods in the world can help but be grateful to liberal moral theory for its significant role in facilitating this progress. At the same time, however, we must recognize that this approach to morality comes at a price. That price is the essential individualism of liberal theory. And while that individualism is a useful liberative tool against tyranny, it can also be an obstacle to the development of mutual responsibility and to the extension of compassion to others that moral life also demands. By instead starting from a perspective that takes our mutual responsibilities and our moral sentiments as foundational, we can avoid paying the price of this individualism, and can reconstruct, albeit on new foundations, many of the same rights the liberal defends. We thus get a more far-reaching moral sensibility. To be sure, we lose something the liberal values: the protection of our right not to care about others, and to pursue our own vision of the Garfield.txt Page:19 good life in isolation. But in a world characterized by the omnipresence of suffering that is a right well lost. Finally, we can now understand how it is possible, despite the vast difference in theoretical outlook between liberal and Buddhist moral theory, for a moral advocate such as His Holiness the Dalai Lama simultaneously to advocate the cultivation of compassion as the most basic moral task and advocate for the recognition of human rights. For properly conceived, the latter is but the social face of the former. I offer this essay to His Holiness the Dalai Lama with reverence and with boundless gratitude for his continuous manifestation of pure compassion for all sentient beings. REFERENCES Allen, A. 1988 _Uneasy Access_.New York: Rowan and Littlefield. Aaryadeva "Four Hundred Stanzas" Trans. K. Lang in Aaryadeva's _Catu.h"sataka_. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag. Baier, A. 1992 _A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume's Treatise_. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Baier, A. 1994 _Moral Prejudices_. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Baier, A. 1994a "Hume: A Women's Moral Theorist?" in Baier 1994. Baier, A. 1994b "Morals and Cruelty: Reflections on Hume and Kant." In Baier 1994. Baier, A. 1994c "Sustaining Trust." In Baier 1994 Baier, A. 1994d "Trust and Anti-Trust." In Baier 1994. Baier, A. 1994e "Trust and Its Value." In Baier 1994. Baier, A. 1994f "Unsafe Loves." In Baier 1994. Baier, A, 1994g "What Do Women Want From Moral Philosophy?" In Baier 1994. Baier, A. 1994h "The Need for More Than Justice." In Baier 1994. Benhabib, Seyla 1987 "The Generalized and the Concrete Other: Implications of the Kohlberg-Gilligan Debate," in Kittay and Meyers, eds., _Women and Moral Theory_ New York: Rowan and Littlefield. Card, C. 1992 "Caring and Evil." _Hypatia_ 5(1):1-8. Care, N. 1969 "Contractualism and Moral Criticism", _The Review of Metaphysics_ 23:83-101. Garfield.txt Page:20 Care, N. 1987 _On Sharing Fate_. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Feinberg, J. 1990 _Rights, Justice and the Bounds of Liberty_. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Flanagan, O. and Jackson. 1987 "Justice, Care and Gender: The Kohlberg-Gilligan Debate Revisited" _Ethics_ 97:622-645. Garner, R. 1994 _Beyond Morality_. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Gibbard, 1990 _Wise Feelings: Apt Choices_. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Gilligan, C. 1982 _In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Moral Development_ Cambridge: Harvard University Press. HH the Dalai Lama 1984 _Kindness, Clarity and Insight_. Ithaca: Snow Lion Press. ---- 1992 _The Global Community and the Need for Universal Responsibility_. Boston: Wisdom Publications. Henkin, L. 1974 "Privacy and Autonomy", _Columbia Law Review_ 74:1410-1433. Hobbes, T. 1909 _Leviathan_. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hohfeld, W. 1946 _Fundamental Legal Conceptions_. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hopkins, J. 1980 _Compassion in Tibetan Buddhism_. Ithaca: Snow Lion Press. Hume, D. 1978 _A Treatise of Human Nature_. L.A. Selby-Bigge, ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Innes, J. 1992 _Privacy, Intimacy and Isolation_. New York: Oxford University Press. Janiak, A. 1994 _Assessing a Contemporary Challenge to Ethical Liberalism_. Amherst: Hampshire College Division III Thesis. Kant, I. 1979 _The Conflict of the Faculties_. Trans. M.J. Gregor. New York: Abacus. Kant, I. 1959 "What Is Enlightenment?" In _The Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals_ and "What is Enlightenment?" Trans. L.W. Beck. New York: Library of Liberal Arts. Kohlberg, L. 1981 _Essays in Moral Development I: Moral Stages and the Idea of Justice_. San Francisco: Harper and Row. Garfield.txt Page:21 Kohlberg, L. 1984 _Essays in Moral Development II: The Nature and Validity of Moral Stages_. San Francisco: Harper and Row. Locke, J. 1988 _Two Treatises on Government_. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacKinnon, C. 1984 "Roe v. Wade: A Study in Male Ideology" in Garfield and Hennessey, eds. _Abortion: Moral and Legal Perspectives_. Noddings, Nel. 1984 _Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education_. Berkeley: University of California Press. O'Neill O. 1989 _Constructions of Reason_. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rawls, J. 1971 _A Theory of Justice_. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Rousseau. J. 1947 _The Social Contract_ Trans. Frankel. New York: Abner. Shantideva 1979 _Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life_ Trans. S. Batchelor. Dharamsala: Library of Tibetan Works and Archives. Schoeman, F. ed. 1984 _Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy: An Anthology_. New York: Cambridge University Press. Schopenhauer, A. 1892 "Essay on Ethics." in _Essays of Schopenhauer_. Trans. T.B. Saunders. New York: A. Burt. Schopenhauer, A. 1965 _On the Basis of Morality_. Trans. E.F.J. Payne. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Thomson, J. 1986 _Rights, Restitution and Risk_. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Tronto, J. 1993 _Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care_. New York: Routledge. Wayman, A. 1991 _The Ethics of Tibet_. Albany: State University of New York Press. Williams, B. 1973 "A Critique of Utilitarianism." In J.J.C. Smart and B. Williams, _Utilitarianism For and Against_. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. NOTES [1]. See esp. H.H. the Dalai Lama (1984, 1992). [2]. See especially Baier (1994, 1992), Tronto (1993), Noddings (1984) and Garner (1994). Garfield.txt Page:22 [3]. See, e.g. Care (1987) or Kohlberg (1981, 1984) as well as Flanagan and Jackson (1987). [4]. See Hohfeld (1947), Thomson (1986). [5]. The right to vote might be urged as a counterexample here. This appears to be a positive right and one that is fundamental in the requisite sense. Matters get complicated here. But here is a quick sketch of a reply: One might argue tbat the right to vote is not a universal right: It is a right that one has in virtue of living in a democracy It is not obvious that democracy is the only morally acceptable way for persons to organize their lives, though it may indeed be the best. On the other hand, one might argue that to the degree the right to vote is fundamental, it is also negative: It is the right not to have one's vote interfered with. [6]. See e.g., Janiak (1994) for a good discussion of the liberal response to relativism on this score, and Rawls (1971) or Care (1987) for a powerful defense of the universal claims of liberalism. [7]. See Rawls (1971), Gibbard (1990) Thomson (1986), Feinberg (1980). [8]. This is not to say that--whether within a classic liberal theory or in some other moral framework--there are no rights children may assert against their parents, or vice versa. Assuredly there are. Rather the point is that to try to accommodate all of what is morally significant about family life, or friendship, within the framework of rights will inevitably result in a sterile picture of this domain. For too much of what amounts, e.g., to good parenting involved acts and attitudes which are neither supererogatory nor the objects of plausibly enforceable claims. [9]. See Tronto (1993), Noddings (1987) and Janiak (1994) for more detailed exposition of this point. It is, however, important not to over-emphasize this point: Liberal moral theorists do not claim that moral considerations other than rights have no place in moral discourse. Rather they accord primacy to rights and to rights claims, and accord only a subsidiary role to other considerations. I thank Prof. Ernest Alleva for emphasizing this point in conversation. [10]. This is especially clear in "What is Enlightenment," where Kant says "Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another.... //Sapere aude! // 'Have courage to use your own reason!' That is the motto of enlightenment." in "On History":3. Thanks to Andrew Janiak for drawing my attention to this passage. [11]. Privacy theory is very complex, and is very much contested terrain. This is not the place to survey that literature of the debates it comprises. See Innes (1992), Allen (1988), Schoeman (1984) and Feinberg (1980) for excellent perspectives on privacy in liberal moral and legal theory. Garfield.txt Page:23 [12]. //Griswold vs. Connecticut // ( 381 U.S. 479, 1965), //Roe vs. Wade// (410 U.S 113, 1973). [13]. //Union Pacific Railway vs. Botsford // 141 U.S. 250 (1981). [14]. See MacKinnon (1984). [15]. See O'Neill (1989) for an excellent discussion of the connection between liberalism and privacy, as well as MacKinnon (1984). Care (1987) attempts to construct a moral theory blending rights and compassion by retaining the basic liberal framework but abrogating the right to privacy in circumstances where there is great distress in the world. Janiak (1994) argues persuasively that this attempt is incoherent. Liberalism without privacy is oxymoronic. There is another important strain of privacy theory that deserves note. Innes (1992) has articulated this with the greatest clarity. She notes that privacy can be understood as protecting a sphere of particularly intimate aspects of individual expression and life: ...[P]rivacy... amounts to the state of the agent having control over decisions concerning matters that draw their meaning and value from the agent's love, liking, or care... Therefore, privacy claims are claims to possess autonomy with respect to our expression of love, liking, and care. [91] While I agree with Innes that these are central components in a zone of privacy whether it is a zone demarcated by liberal moral theory or accorded, as I will suggest below, through a compassion-based ethic, I think that her characterization is a bit too narrow. Much of what is "intimate" in the morally relevant sense goes beyond matters of "love, liking and care," and, for instance, includes religious, artistic, or political thought. [16]. Prof. Ernest Alleva has persuaded me to be fairer to liberalism on this score. I am aware that these few remarks do not do justice to the full range of liberal replies to the implicit critique of liberalism this paper represents. But to discuss those matters fully would take us far afield. [17]. O'Neill (1989) puts the point this way: Since the discourse of rights requires that obligations are owed to all others or to specified others, unallocated right action, which is owed to unspecified others, drops out of sight. It may be right to help those in need, or to treat others with courtesy--but if these traditional obligations lack counterpart rights they will not be recognized by theories that treat rights as basic. [286]... suppose we think there are both rights not to be tortured and rights to food. In the absence of enforcement, A tortures B, we are quite clear who has violated B's right; Garfield.txt Page:24 but if A does not provide B with food, nor even with an aliquot morsel of food, we are not sure whether A has violated B's rights. There nothing shows that it is against A that B's claim to food should be lodged or enforced. [296] Thomson in "A Defense of Abortion" argues strenuously for such an understanding of rights, and defends such a framework throughout (1986). See also Benhabib (1987). [18]. As I note above, this does overstate the case slightly. But the important point remains intact once necessary qualifications are noted: Concerns about character are, for the liberal, derivative of concerns about rights; any intrusion into the private is to be justified by public concerns. [19]. See Baier (1994, 8a, b,c,d,e,f) Noddings (1987) and Tronto (1993). Kohlberg (1984), responding to this criticism writes that "The spheres of kinship, love, friendship, and sex, all eliciting considerations of care, are usually understood to be the spheres of personal decision-making, as are, for instance, the problems of marriage and divorce." [230] But this just re-states the problem. For the liberal, to say that these are "personal" matters is to exclude them from the domain of moral discourse and criticism. For the moral theorist who takes compassion as foundational, it is to put them at the very center of that domain. The challenge for the liberal is to explain the seriousness of these issues; for the theorist of compassion, to show how the rights the liberal correctly articulates can be recovered without reconstructing this zone of privacy. Baier writes in "The Need for More Than Justice" (Baier 1994h): For the moral tradition which developed the concept of rights, autonomy, and justice is the same tradition that provided "justifications" of the oppression of those whom the primary rights-holders depended on to do the sort of work they themselves preferred not to do... As long as women could be got to assume responsibility for the care of home and children and to train their children to continue the sexist system, the liberal morality could continue to be the official morality, by turning its eyes away from the contribution made by those it excluded. [25] [20]. Principal figures in this tradition are Rousseau (1947), Locke (1988), and Hobbes (1909). For excellent discussions of the structure of social contract theory, see Care (1967) and Rawls (1971). [21]. See Baier (1994), Tronto (1993) and Noddings (1987). But see also HH the Dalai Lama (1992). [22]. Baier emphasizes this with great force in (1994d, f and g). In "Trust and Anti-Trust" she writes: A complete moral philosophy would tell us how and why Garfield.txt Page:25 we should act and feel toward others in relationships of shifting and varying power asymmetry and shifting and varying intimacy... [T]hese relationships... such as parent and child... make up much of our lives, and they, as much as our relations to equals, determine the state of moral health or corruption in which we are content to live. [300-301] [23]. Janiak (1994) makes this point with particular force and clarity. [24]. In "The Need For More Than Justice" (Baier 1994h) Baier emphasizes this: One cannot regard any version of morality that does not ensure that caring for children gets well done as an adequate "minimal morality," anymore than we could so regard one that left any concern for more distant future generations as an optional extra. A moral theory... cannot regard concern for new and future persons as an optional charity left for those with a taste for it. [29] [25]. Another way to put this is point is that from the standpoint of compassion-based moral theories, what it is to be human is to participate in compassion. Tsong Khapa puts the point this way: Indeed, the joy and glory of humans, as well as the skill of humans, are the principle of carrying the burden of others' aim, because staying only in one's own aim is shared with the animals. For that reason, the character of the great ones is limited to the benefit and happiness of others. (LRCM in Wayman 1991:26) [26]. Prof. Ernest Alleva points out (personal communication) that there are two other important differences between liberal moral theory and moral theory grounded in compassion worthy of note: First of all (and this consideration is very important for Schopenhauer in his criticism of rights-based moral theory) rights theories typically do not extend moral consideration to non-human animals, or, to the extent that they do, justify such consideration in highly artificial or problematic ways. Given the necessary conditions rights theories typically require for moral standing, it is very difficult to grant animals any genuine moral standing. Morality grounded in compassion allows us to account much more directly not only for our actual moral sentiments with regard to infrahuman animals, but also to explain why these sentiments are correct, and why all creatures have some moral standing and claim to our moral recognition. Secondly rights-based moral theories, with their strong emphasis on individual autonomy, typically render highly problematic any "paternalistic" (I prefer "parentalistic") interference in the affairs of others--that is, the restriction of the autonomy of others for Garfield.txt Page:26 their own good. Debates regarding parentalism are extremely complex, and are certainly beyond the scope of this essay. But I would argue that the straightforward prohibition against such action that emerges from rights-based theories does less justice to the complexity of such situations than the more textured considerations that compassion brings into play: It is often wrong to intervene in such circumstances, but more often because of a lack of sufficient skill on the part of the intervenor to bring about genuinely favorable outcomes. Where such skill is in place, however, and where appropriate knowledge is brought to bear, with appropriate motivations, parentalistic intervention is often laudable. [27]. Schopenhauer puts this point eloquently: "As soon as this compassion is aroused, the weal and woe of another are nearest to my heart in exactly the same way... as my own. Hence the difference between him and me is now no longer absolute." [_On The Basis of Morality_:144] [28]. See Schopenhauer in _On the basis of Morality_ on the illusory character of the difference between individuals: This conception that underlies egoism is, empirically considered, strictly justified. According to experience, the difference between my own person and another's appears to be absolute. The difference in space and time that separates me from him, separates me also from his weal and woe. [205] Accordingly, if plurality and separateness belong only to the phenomenon, and if it is one and the same essence that manifests itself in all living things, than that conception that abolishes the difference between ego and non-ego is not erroneous,. but, on the contrary, the opposite conception must be.... Accordingly, it would be the metaphysical basis of ethics and consists in one individual's again recognizing in another his own self, his own true inner nature. Thus practical wisdom, doing right and doing good, would in the end harmonize with the profoundest teaching... [209] "Individuation is real."... Each individual is a being radically different from all others... This ... lies at the root of all egoism..." "Individualism is a mere phenomenon or appearance... My true inner being exists in every living thing as directly as it makes itself known in my self-consciousness only to me."... It is this that bursts through as compassion on which all genuine... virtue therefore depends." [210] and "Saantideva in //Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life//: But if I do find happiness in his happiness Then surely I should feel the same way towards all. VI: Garfield.txt Page:27 96 ab There is no doubt that those with the nature of compassion Regard those beings as the same as themselves. VI: 126 ab [29]. This insight is due in the West originally to Hume. But in recent moral theory, Baier (1994), Noddings (1987) and Tronto (1993) have developed and defended it with great force. But in Tibetan Buddhist philosophy it is quite old, represented in the literature on visualizing each sentient being as one's mother, and on the exchange of self for others. Here the use of moral imagination is urged as a primary vehicle for extending natural sympathy into universal compassion. Tsong Khapa writes: ...[T]he cultivation of sentient beings as kinsfolk is for generating gratitude. Now, the ultimate kin is the mother. Therefore, the three, mother-contemplative repetition, mindfulness of kindness, and show of return gratitude... generate compassion. [LRCM in Wayman, 1991, p. 43] See also Kensur Lekden in Hopkins, 1980:37-38 for detailed instructions on visualizing others as one's mother, and for cultivating and transferring appreciation the mother's boundless kindness. He sums this discussion up thus: Why should one make all neutral persons and enemies equal to one's mother? If she had fallen into a ravine or a river, or into a chasm made by an earthquake, and if her own child whom she had helped from the time of his entry into her womb would not help her, who would? [45] [30]. Baier (1994h) notes: It is however also true that the moral theories that made the concept of a person's rights central were not just the instruments for excluding some persons but also the instruments used by those who demanded that more and more persons be included in the favored group. Abolitionists, reformers, women, used the language of rights to assert their claims to inclusion in the group of full members of a community. [26] [31]. Note that this does not create duties to e.g., give to particular beggars, or correlative rights on the part of, e.g., some or all beggars to alms from some or all persons. Rather it establishes a moral ideal that includes generosity and a compassionate regard for others as components, which ideal is relevant to anyone whether or not/she acknowledges its relevance, just as intelligence is part of an intellectual ideal even for those who don't care how smart they are. This is important, because the liberal might fear the following consequence from the elimination of Garfield.txt Page:28 the fundamental status of privacy: It could turn out that we are so overwhelmed, in virtue of the universal demands of compassion, by a sea of new duties--such as those to give to each beggar who could thereby benefit--that it becomes impossible to lead a rational , coherent life. This is akin to the difficulty that Williams (1973) shows to afflict utilitarianism. Integrity becomes impossible under such circumstances, as does the attainment of any goal requiring singleness of purpose. But this problem does not beset the current account, because the foundational status of compassion requires only the development and expression of a virtue of set of virtues, and because compassion itself requires that we respect an--albeit more circumscribed--zone of privacy. I thank Ms. Laurie Smith for calling my attention to this problem. [32]. This view contrasts somewhat with Innes' account. We agree that privacy is important because it protects autonomy in a sphere particularly central to self-expression and self-development. But beyond the disagreement noted above regarding the content of that sphere, we disagree regarding the basis of that protection. Here Innes is closer to classical liberalism than am I. She writes: Privacy protects our autonomy with respect to our expressions of love, care and liking. There are two possible explanations of the positive value we accord to this sphere of individual autonomy. The first of these is a consequentialist "relationship-creation" explanation. According to this explanation, privacy promotes the creation and growth of positively valued human relationships dependent on the agent's love, liking and care. [95] But she rejects this explanation (which I clearly endorse, suitably modified), writing: Relationship-promotion explanations of privacy's value also fail to accord with out intuitions about privacy's consequence-independent value. If its value flows from the relationships it produces, it is clear privacy will be positively valued only in the world where it does promote close relationships.... However, this inverts our intuitions about privacy's value... [P]rivacy is valued //just because// it can halt the intrusions of the external world. [101] (emphasis in original.) These "intuitions," I would argue (though space prohibits developing this point here) are classical liberal intuitions, not shared by adherents to other moral frameworks, and invoking them here begs the question against compassion-based moral theory. Compassion theorists, I would argue, secure the goods the liberal cares about, but secures them for the right reason--that they promote individual and collective happiness. So when Innes continues, Garfield.txt Page:29 Privacy's positive value stems from a principle of respect for persons as autonomous beings with the capacity for love, care, and liking, beings with an invaluable capacity for freely chosen close relationships; this principle dictates the positive value we accord to the agent's control over intimate decisions about her own actions and her decisions about intimate access to herself. [112], I would argue that the emphasis on autonomy as foundational inverts the correct order of moral explanation.