Compassion is all very well and good but if people don't do sensible things with their lives, they won't be able to do anything meaningful with that feeling. Equally, those with the means to help others may gain a reputation for compassion which allows them to become even more successful even if they are actually ruthless.
In other words, the emotion, by itself, has no special worth. On the other hand, 'public signals' regarding compassionate behavior which positively alter outcomes may promote a better 'correlated equilibria' for Society. This is a pragmatic matter though, no doubt, Religions or Ideologies of various kinds might pretend otherwise. The trouble here is that unless you have some great achievement to your credit, or are a priest of some sort by profession, your banging on about Compassion may be counter-productive. People may think you are a self-publicist and that the object of your compassion might be better off without you.
A case in point is Martha Nussbaum about whom Amia Srinivasan writes
In Political Emotions (2013), Martha Nussbaum attempts to articulate a set of political emotions appropriate to, and compatible with, the aspirations of the liberal state.
Why bother? Liberal Democracies are in the business of aggregating the preferences of voters exercising 'enlightened self-interest'. If political or religious or other emotions get the better of them, the results may be highly pathological. The Liberal State should aspire to do sensible things. It should not be articulating stupid shit. Still, it is true, any ranter or rhetoricians is welcome to appeal to emotions or ideals or articles of faith. Speaking generally, this is 'cheap talk'. We assume that, if they take office, they will do sensible things.
Compassion lies at the centre of her project.
No. Had she an ounce of compassion she would spare us her stupidity.
To bolster and protect the institutions of liberal justice – particularly those that require income redistribution, like social welfare, public education and public healthcare – the state must inculcate in its citizenry a capacity for deeper and more expansive compassion.
This is false. Firstly, there are no 'institutions of liberal justice'. There is only 'risk pooling'. Secondly, income redistribution is not the goal of any liberal democracy in the world. Voters turned their backs on the thing many decades ago. The reason there is funding for public education and healthcare is because there are positive externalities and dynamic effects associated with both. A theocracy may inculcate 'compassion' such that people give money to charity so as to earn a place in Heaven. But a Liberal State generally seeks to separate Church from State. Public schools hire people to teach Math and Chemistry. They don't hire people to teach compassion or being sweet and nice.
This, on Nussbaum’s view, it should do through the use of public artwork and political rhetoric.
This is like Amartya Sen's theory that 'second order public goods'- i.e. demanding the provision of more first order public goods'- is itself a public good. But it isn't really. The former can crowd out the latter. A totalitarian country may waste a lot of money on statues of the Goddess of Compassion while the radio streams nothing but political rhetoric. But a Liberal State should not go in for such stupidity.
I will suggest that, while the inculcation of compassion might be pragmatically useful for the ends of liberalism,
it isn't. Why not simply say 'compulsory lobotomies may be pragmatically useful for the ends of Liberty'?
compassion is often the wrong answer to the question of what we owe each other, morally speaking, in an aspiring (but failing) liberal society like the U.S.
We don't owe each other shit. That's why I get arrested any time I break into the house of Kaushik Basu to offer him compassion for the fact that he has shit for brains.
In such a society, I want to suggest, the privileged ought feel not compassion, but instead a moral emotion that registers their own complicity in the suffering of the oppressed.
Martha should feel ashamed that she is complicit in the rape of children who have been kidnapped. Why not suggest that she should feel disgust and self-hatred for having raped and beheaded trillions of imaginary babies?
This will lead me to some more general comments about what I take to be the psychic and moral limits of compassion – limits left, to my mind, unlimned by Nussbaum. I will conclude by saying something about where I take my fundamental disagreement with Nussbaum’s account of political emotions to lie: not in a conflict over which emotions are appropriate to a society that is genuinely aspiring to ideals of equality and freedom, but rather in a conflict over whether the U.S. is such a society.
It isn't. It's a place where people want to get rich or live large without having to get rich.
Nussbaum is a cognitivist about the emotions, meaning that she believes that emotions are characterised (at least in part) by their propositional content.
More particularly, if a person does not have an appropriate emotion, there is a cognitive failure. This ignores the fact that emotions evolved as 'Darwinian algorithms of the mind' so as to speed up decision making. However, they are plastic and easily suppressed. The guy who goes to medical school may initially feels horror and disgust at having to cut open cadavers but he soon learns to suppress these reflexes.
Compassion in her view is a feeling of pain at the suffering of another person or another creature that necessarily involves (at least in humans) three thoughts: first, that the suffering is serious;
We may feel compassion for those doing boring or pointless jobs- e.g. Nussbaum or Srinivasan- even if they themselves experience no greats suffering
second, that the suffering is not entirely the victim’s fault;
Nonsense! We feel compassion for the drug addict or alcoholic even if their suffering is entirely their own fault
and third, what Nussbaum calls the eudaimonistic thought, the thought that the suffering person is among one’s most important goals and projects, and thus that their suffering matters to oneself.
Again, this simply isn't so. We may feel compassion but we may also refuse to part with a penny.
Nussbaum also thinks that compassion often, though not necessarily, involves the thought that the suffering person is relevantly similar to oneself, and thus that one is susceptible to the same sort of suffering.
Which is why the husband feels nothing when his wife is screaming with pain while giving birth.
Where compassion is appropriate but absent, it is because one of these thoughts is missing.
No. It is because the emotion would be useless.
Thus one can fail to be compassionate when compassion would be apt because one fails to recognise the seriousness of the suffering, or falsely believes that the suffering is entirely the subject’s fault, or fails to see that the subject lies within one’s circle of concern.
A surgeon may relieve the suffering and prolong the life of a serial killer he despises. A Doctor's bed side manner may overflow with compassion even towards someone he has no reason to like. I suppose, in his line of work, having the emotion makes him better at his job.
In this connection Nussbaum discusses the work of sociologist Candace Clark, who suggests that the lack of compassion that Americans feel toward the poor is correlated with the belief that the poor are responsible for their poverty.
Nothing wrong with that hypothesis. The problem with sociological research tends to be bad methodology.
But most importantly for Nussbaum, human compassion faces a severe limitation that does not seem to be shared by animals, and to which we must be particularly alert: that is, our tendency to see certain others as disgusting, ugly reminders of our animal nature.
It may be that disgust has its roots in pathogen avoidance. Some animals exhibit something similar.
It is the tendency toward disgust that produces social stigma and exclusion,
like consigning lepers to the lazaretto? Surely, that is pathogen avoidance. It may be that the Indian doctrine of 'untouchability' was originally created by indigenous people who needed to keep pastoralists at a distance because the latter carried a higher pathogen load because of the animals they tended.
doctrines of contamination and, at worst, acts of radical evil – subordination, humiliation and enslavement.
Not if the motive is clearly to secure money and wealth.
Disgust, Nussbaum thinks, has its roots in the particularly human phenomenon of narcissism, the infantile drive to overcome helplessness through the subordination of others.
Men don't think baby is trying to 'subordinate' them. As for narcissism, it is not concerned with others and thus has no need for disgust.
Thus compassion by itself can be no guide to justice;
for the same reason that cuddliness can be no guide to Quantum Mechanics.
it requires the stabilising and focussing structures of reason and principle, and most of all safeguards against our tendencies toward narcissism and disgust.
Rubbish! Lots of religious folk gas on about compassion while being extreme narcissists who find find it disgusting that some dudes put their pee pees in their wives' chee chee place.
Ancient Athens wasn't a wonderful place if you were a slave. Yet Nussbaum thinks Greek tragedy inculcated compassion. What she forgets is that after Aeschylus had put the fear of God in the audience, a bawdy satyr play was staged.
Tragic spectatorship, she tells us, focuses on common human vulnerability – especially bodily vulnerability – and thus reminds even those in privileged positions of their susceptibility to universal human plights.
Very true. Sophocles wrote a play about a great King who was dying of dysentery. It was called Oedipus gets the shits.
Tragic spectatorship thus encourages compassion while also universalising it beyond the particular.
No. Tragedy inculcated eusebia, more particularly a type of piety directed at particular local shrines or cultic centers.
Meanwhile, tragedy’s twin, comedy, with its emphasis on the joys and foibles of the human body, is a model for how we can dispel disgust, compassion’s great enemy.
Aristophanes' 'Oedipus eating his own shit' was a laugh riot. It enabled the Greeks to overcome their disgust at coprophagy.
I want to suggest that morally speaking, there is something problematic about the idea that compassion is the appropriate response to the kind of widespread and systematic injustice that characterises what Nussbaum calls ‘aspiring’ liberal societies like the one we find in the United States. To see why, simply ask how someone like myself – someone who enjoys tremendous, unearned privilege because of my birth into the socioeconomic elite – should feel when I see a fellow citizen, say a poor black person, suffering because of institutionalised racism, state-sponsored ghettoisation, or poverty wrought by state-sanctified economic exploitation?
Amia was an Indian citizen at birth. Later, she relinquished her Indian passport so as to become an American citizen. There may be poverty in America but it is worse in India. Also, she does not have a dick and isn't Vivek Ramaswamy level smart. It is no great privilege to have to teach shite to cretins.
I should feel pain at her suffering, no doubt; and also recognise that she is not to blame for her suffering, that her suffering is serious, and that this suffering falls squarely within my own circle of concern.
Coz American Blacks matter. Indian darkies don't.
Thus, according to Nussbaum, I should feel compassion for her. But surely there is something missing here. For should I not also feel that distinctive sting of recognition and self-indictment that is the proper response to my complicity in the political structures that have caused and perpetuate this woman’s suffering, that have bought my privilege at the expense of her oppression?
No. You are flattering yourself. Your mummy and daddy made some smart decisions and sacrifices so you could have a chance to study something worthwhile. But you didn't study a STEM subject. Pretending it is a great privilege to teach cretins only makes you complicit in an Academic Ponzi scheme. You can't oppress anybody because you simply have no importance of any kind.
If I do not feel this sting of complicity, then I have failed to respond, I want to suggest, as morality or justice demands.
This is like me blaming myself for not having cured Cancer and proved the Reimann hypothesis because I was too busy giving multiple orgasms to stars of stage and screen. No! Not Rock Hudson! I only had sex with female stars.
...whether we are talking about how white Americans should feel toward black Americans,
they want to be as cool as them. Also, they want to have a bigger dick.
or how descendents of British colonists should feel toward the immigrant children of those they colonised,
they should tell them to fuck off back to their own country the way Mahatma Gandhi told the Viceroy to fuck the fuck off. Amia is too stupid to understand that White Americans grabbed land from the natives. White Brits were the fucking natives. Still, at least they have got rid of Rishi Sunak.
how men should feel about women suffering under patriarchal oppression,
which is why you shouldn't marry your g.f. Why buy the cow if that would cause it to be oppressed?
or how the rich should feel toward the poor and emiserated.
Rich peeps feel that the poor might be willing to work for a wage which yields the shareholders a decent profit.
In each case, to feel only compassion is to fail to have a fully moral response to the observed injustice.
Which one? The fact that it is unjust that British Asians are darker than White Britons? No. It is that a lot of ex-colonies turned to shit once the Brits slyly fucked off. But that was the fault of the Japs and the Yanks and Herr Hitler.
Compassion is too distancing, representing the suffering as not having anything to do with our own actions or position.
Very true. If you see Oedipus Rex shitting himself to death you should feel not just compassion for him but also tremendous guilt for so cruelly sodomizing him with your ginormous invisible dick that his entrails are now streaming out of his anus.
But compassion should not be restricted to people and animals. I feel compassion for the moon but also great guilt for having punched craters in its face with my ginormous dick.
Consider Nussbaum’s discussion of tragic spectatorship. Tragedy, she says, usually teaches us to feel pain when someone falls victim to sheer bad luck or a natural human affliction like illness or death.
Especially if they shit themselves to death.
But much of the suffering that is experienced in ‘aspiring’ liberal societies like the U.S. is neither a function of bad luck nor the product of natural human affliction.
It was caused by me. I should have invented a cure for death and disease as well as found a source of limitless free energy and a type of self-replicating 3D printer such that everybody could have anything their heart desired. Sadly, I was too busy having sex with beautiful women.
One can say of course that it’s bad luck to be born black in the U.S.,
more especially if you become a two term POTUS
but once born black, it is hardly a matter of bad luck that one is systematically excluded from healthcare, education, voting and jobs, or that one is likely to face harassment from the police and be treated unfairly by the judicial system. Nor are these kinds of suffering just instances of general human affliction; they are forms of political suffering, produced by particular political arrangements that do not afflict all citizens equally
Plenty of South Indians in America are as dark as fuck. Why are they not complaining? I suppose, they find America a paradise compared to India. Indeed, they would have been prepared to move to any capitalist country ruled over by nice White Christians.
Oedipus once did something silly. He pronounced judgment in a case where he himself was the culprit. There followed various disasters culminating with Antigone's cruel dilemma. Hegel, sadly, didn't get that the purpose of Greek tragedy was to inculcate eusebia- i.e. piety. The thing was religious in nature. The duty to pay for a tragedy to be put on was itself liturgical in nature.
Relevant here is Hegel’s understanding of tragedy. As Nussbaum notes, Hegel saw tragedy as having a distinctively political purpose, showing us how current political arrangements produce the suffering we see represented on the stage.
This was clearly not the case. Creon was a King just as Oedipus had been a King. Athens was a democracy.
Thus, Sophocles’ Antigone shows us how the demand for absolute loyalty to the state conflicts with natural familial duty, and thus produces unnecessary suffering.
Antigone was the daughter of a King who disobeyed the current King. The King was the State.
Nussbaum agrees that tragedy can have this particularly political function, revealing to us the ways in which current arrangements produce suffering, and prompting us to think about ways of avoiding such tragedy in the future.
Don't kill Daddy and fuck Mummy. Simples.
But even on this Hegelian vision of tragedy, there is no central place made for self-indictment,
because nobody made Oedipus kill Daddy or fuck Mummy. No doubt, Amia will say 'we are all complicit in Patriarchy which causes daddies to put pee pee in Mummy's chee chee place.' But the truth is, even under Matriarchy, pee pees have entered chee chee places.
no room for the emotional recognition that we are the ones who have caused and sustain injustice. Thus while compassion might be theoretically compatible with, as I’m calling it, the sting of complicity or self-indictment, I worry nonetheless that compassion is a misleading paradigm for how we should respond to political suffering.
America's war on terror inflicted plenty of 'political suffering'. How did Amia respond to it? I suppose she blamed herself for kidnapping and killing Osama. I tried to do so, but the folks at the pub didn't believe I was an SAS officer on secondment to the Navy Seals.
Compassion, at least as we usually think of it, is too distanced and too unself-implicating to be the emotion appropriate to our current political realities.
The correct response is to pretend that we leant Capitalism the money to go into business. Sadly, Capitalism is refusing to take our calls. Also, we caused pee pees to be put into chee chee places. That's just wrong.
In response to my criticism of Nussbaum’s focus on compassion, one may well worry that there is something problematic with my talk of self-indictment and complicity.
There is. We think you and Martha are Drama Queens. Still, at least Martha pretends to care greatly about India's poor.
I have suggested that compassion is insufficiently self-implicating (or better, inaccurately self-implicating) to be the apt response to paradigm cases of political suffering. And yet one might worry that the person who responds to political suffering by obsessing over his own complicity or guilt is not much better than the person who feels mere compassion for suffering that results from a system created and sustained for his benefit.
They are both shit. On the other hand, if they do something which helps the poor and suffering, we don't greatly care what their motivation is.
Most of us are acquainted with the person who loves to obsess over the state of his own conscience, who draw a narcissistic pleasure from confronting and confessing the extent of his wrongdoing. I concede that this response is little better than the ‘mere compassion’ response to political suffering. Indeed perhaps it is worse. But I think it is fair to say that most of us are also acquainted with a recognition of complicity that is not narcissistic, that begins in horror at one’s own involvement in another’s suffering, and that is followed swiftly by the desire to make reparation and find a better way forward.
Are Amia and Martha suggesting America pay reparations to Afghanistan and Iraq and displaced Syrians and so forth? No. They are virtue signallers who lack virtue.
It is this sort of attitude that I am proposing as the apt response to political suffering. None of that is to say that Nussbaum’s pragmatic proposal is wrong. Indeed, I think that as a matter of human psychology, simple compassion – compassion without the sting of self-indictment – is probably a better motivation for getting privileged people to do things like pay their taxes and support welfare programmes.
Sadly, the rich prefer to get a tax write off by supporting a bogus charity. They then gas on like they are Mother fucking Theresa.
People on the whole do not like being told that they are complicit or guilt. Far better then, pragmatically speaking, to tap into people’s desires to save others from misfortune, to be (and be seen to be) beneficent. The kind of self-indictment that I think is the morally apt response to political suffering might be too psychologically debilitating to do the work that Nussbaum envisions. If so, then there is perhaps a kind of tragic conflict here: between those emotions that justice demands, and those emotions that are most practically useful for the project of liberalism
Justice demands actions not emotions. Liberalism is about enlightened self-interest. It can do 'mechanism design' to improve outcomes. This may involve 'public signals' which may have an imperative or emotive element. Nothing wrong with getting rid of repugnancy markets on the basis that they are disgusting.
... there are serious limits to our ability to project ourselves into another person’s psyche,
so what? Mechanism design is done on the basis of econometric evidence.
especially across divides of political and social power, and a corresponding limit to the usefulness of such an empathetic procedure when it comes to the implementation of general political values like equality and freedom.
Which mean different things at different times even to the same person.
This is related to a point that Thomas Nagel makes in his “Personal Rights and Public Space” (1995). Often we cannot, Nagel argues, empathise our way into understanding why people have the right to engage in nonharmful activities they find pleasurable but that holds no similar charm for us – for example, sadomasochistic sex.
We can do so well enough. I was probably unconsciously homophobic till I watched 'Will and Grace'.
Many of us cannot see why such activity is sexually gratifying, and why a legal prohibition against such activity cuts to the core of certain people’s sexual identities – at least in the empathetic, first-personal sense of ‘see’.
That doesn't seem to be a genuine problem. The fact is we do ban certain sexual activities- e.g. with miners like Arthur Scargill.
Instead we must simply, Nagel argues, take it for granted that other people’s sexual preferences matter to them in the same way that our sexual preferences matter to us,
but sex doesn't matter at all to some people. Still, they might agree that the thing should be allowed because babies are the result of pee pees entering chee chee places.
and defend their rights to non-harmfully satisfy those preferences in accordance with our general commitment to the protection of liberty.
Or not. When sodomy was legalized some complained that the thrill of it had gone.
Similarly (and this is a point familiar from decades of feminist and anti-racist theory) there are significant psychic limits to men’s ability to empathise with the feelings of degradation and threat that women experience when they are catcalled or objectified, or to white people’s ability to empathise with the horror of being the object of racist hate speech, or to rich people’s ability to empathise with the feelings of worthlessness and desperation bred by economic precarity.
We do tend to lose patience with nutters unless they are hot and seem like they might fuck you if you just keep nodding your head.
Two heroes of Nussbaum’s book are Gandhi and Martin Luther King,
who combined religious with political influence.
both political leaders who encouraged love and compassion even as they revolted against injustice.
But Gandhi's people were the vast majority in his country. King's people were an oppressed minority. Gandhi delayed Indian independence- which may have been a good thing. King probably enabled Civil Rights to come sooner rather than later.
Nussbaum thinks that theirs is a morally admirable way of doing politics, and hopes that their model can be emulated by others facing similar battles.
In which country do a handful of foreigners rule over hundreds of millions?
But even if we grant that this is so – and many black and feminist writers have argued for the importance of more ‘negative’ emotions such as anger in the fight for justice -- I think we should be troubled by the idea of the state encouraging victims of political injustice to follow the models of Gandhi or King.
The state should do sensible things with tax-payer money. It shouldn't be 'encouraging' civil disobedience of any type.
The liberal state of course can ask that all its citizens, privileged or oppressed, respect its foundational principles, and obey the laws of the land.
No. The liberal state can enforce the laws of the land. It is not concerned with whether citizens, for religious or ideological reasons, 'respect' its principles.
But can the liberal state also ask of its marginalised and disenfranchised citizens that they love those very principles that are selectively applied to all but them, and feel compassion towards those who, under the cloak of those principles, oppress them?
No. But individuals are welcome to talk any type of shite.
Indeed, isn’t there something coercive (and thus illiberal) about so doing?
No. However, it may be ultra vires.
Nussbaum wants to insist that state-sponsored inculcation of emotion is only coercive when those who don’t feel the intended emotions are punished.
Fair enough. I suppose, 'public signals' may inculcate emotions- e.g. the notion that a particular type of transaction is repugnant- and this may promote better correlated equilibria. Signaling is not coercive in itself. However, screening may be ultra vires. That is a justiciable matter.
The political culture should invite people to feel compassion, she says, not force people to do so. This is why, she argues, the protection of dissent and disagreement is so important for a liberal state.
It isn't important at all. Dissent involves an immunity associated with an action- e.g. speech. It is not protected in itself.
But we might worry that legal protections of dissent and disagreement aren’t enough, when even Barack Obama is commonly accused of being a rage-fuelled black man, and when critics of an immoral war are branded enemies of the state.
This might lead to a back-lash. Thus, there is a countervailing impulse.
We should be suspicious, I think, of any top-down programme that encourages those who have greatest reason to be angry to transform that anger into compassionate love.
There is no such 'top-down program'. Also it isn't true that the Government is secretly telling women to let men put their pee pees in their chee chee place.
I want to stress that this worry is compatible with the thought that there is something deeply morally admirable about Gandhi or Martin Luther King.
Sadly, when Gandhi's party came to power in several Indian states in 1937, its putting into practice Gandhian ideas caused a Muslim backlash which led to the partition of the country and the deaths of hundreds of thousands.
For there is a vital difference between someone from within an oppressed community encouraging compassion, and compassion sponsored by the state.
Dr. King wasn't sponsored by the State. True, Congress ruled India did follow a Gandhian path, but soon came to rue having done so.
The latter tips dangerously toward authoritarianism, and should be met with cynicism and suspicion by those whom the state has most interest in controlling.
No. It should be met with whatever hypocrisy is politically convenient. Being a paranoid nutter isn't the smart option.
Martha was a US citizen by birth. Amia chose to become American. She could at any time have reverted to Indian nationality. Why did she not do so?
When we look to a nation like the U.S., I think Nussbaum and I see different things.
Amia saw a country whose citizenship she wanted to acquire.
She sees a country with the correct foundational principles and pretty good institutions.
Which her ancestors helped create.
What is needed from her perspective is a renewed commitment to those principles, and in particular a renewed commitment to social welfare programmes that ensure that no one is too badly off, and that everyone has equal opportunities for living a worthwhile human life.
This involves following smart economic policies and controlling immigration. It doesn't involve gassin on about Compassion. Still, Martha is a WASP American and thus has a greater degree of oikeiosis. It may be that she knew from experience that a lot of her family laughed their heads off if they saw a poor black man starving to death by the side of the road.
Insofar as the U.S. fails to meet its commitments to these ideals, it is because its citizenry does not do enough to provide opportunities for betterment or a safety net in the case of misfortune.
One reason the US could afford to neglect its own people was because it could bring in well educated foreigners. Angus Deaton now thinks he was wrong to support the 1965 Immigrations Bill which permitted people like the Srinivasans or Ramaswamys to enter and settle in the US.
Thus Nussbaum writes at the beginning of her book that her inquiry “presupposes that basically good institutions exist, or can be shortly realized, albeit in a form that will require ongoing work to improve and perfect” (2013, 23).
Institutions can change by doing 'Mechanism Design' better. Sadly, signaling and screening can become pathological or adversely selective. That's what happened to Nussbaum & Srinivasan's profession.
She says that the ideal society she describes is “not only possible, but in many respects actual, and that something close to the whole of it has existed in some places and times” (ibid, 24). Whereas when I look to the U.S., I see a country that systematically enacts violence against its worst off, and that has actively caused their suffering through state-sponsored policies of discrimination, exploitation and disenfranchisement, often while paying lip service to noble ideals of equality and freedom.
If that were really true, Amia would reject US citizenship. The problem with darkies like me complaining about Whitey is that we spent good money to move to where Whitey runs things.
On my view, the U.S. fails to achieve its liberal ideals not through mere inaction, but through an ongoing legacy of active, statesponsored oppression.
Which made it so rich, Srinivasans and Ramaswamys paid top dollar to move there.
Frankly, I cannot but see this when I think, for example, of the plight of black Americans,
South Indians are often darker. Kamala gets her fair skin from her Dad's side of the family.
who after being emancipated from slavery, were subjected to exclusionary Jim Crow laws, legally sanctioned predatory mortgage practices and land-grabs, and systematic ghettoisation sponsored by the Federal Housing Administration.
This is extractive introjection- the confiscation of the pain of another for the purpose of self-aggrandizement.
The black ghettos constructed by governmental legislation, and the purposeful exclusion of blacks from the benefits of Roosevelt’s New Deal, now reenforce a cycle of poverty, crime and racism. A black person is ten times more likely than a white person to spend time in prison for drug-related offenses, despite the fact that white people are five more times likely to use drugs.
African Americans prefer to see such people incarcerated. To be frank, longevity and educational and health outcomes can improve for an incarcerated Black, but not a White, cohort.
From my perspective then,
America is great coz it fucks over African Americans but not educated Indian or African immigrants
a proper emotional reckoning with the injustice that pervades ‘aspiring’ liberal societies like the U.S. will necessarily involve much more than compassion, and indeed much more than love.
Give up your American passport if you hate the place so much.
But if I am right about where my disagreement with Nussbaum really lies, then it turns out, in a sense, that we do not really disagree at all.
Because both of you are just virtue signaling. The difference is Nussbaum is American by oikeiosis, not opportunism.
I agree with Nussbaum that a spirit of political love and compassion is appropriate to a society with the correct ideals and nearly perfect institutions of justice. But I do not recognise any societies I know by this description.
But she knows enough about India to not want to settle there.
For the liberal societies I do know, a proper emotional reckoning with our fellow citizens must involve a confrontation with our own bloody hands.
Srinivasan's ancestors were enjoying Pax Britannica in Madras while Martha's ancestors fought in the Revolutionary and the Civil Wars. Also, fisting yourself while on the rag involves confrontation with your own bloody hand. But this changes nothing and thus may be considered part of Political Philosophy.
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