The Moral Implications of Compassion

Compassion could be defined as an adverse reaction one gets when witnessing the suffering of another (at any level of social development that they can understand or empathize with). It could also be defined as the tendency to prevent -or at least to want to- that suffering from occurring. Compassionate people do not want others to experience the painful descent down 'Maslow's Slope'.

Maslow's slope can be defined as what are sliding down as we experience our needs being unfulfilled or taken away. This to me, is the best possible way to explain suffering from a moral/ethical perspective. Whether we are feeling pain, hunger or loneliness, suffering always entails some NEED being unfulfilled. Most obviously, we suffer when our physiological needs are not being met. Over half of the world's population faces thirst, food insecurity and other more immediate survival concerns such as if they will find a warm place to sleep at night. We also suffer when we don't feel safe due to the fear and anxiety that sets in, which unfortunately is a useful combination of feelings when we are in a situation where we may be in danger. One can argue that safety needs are also tied to one's financial security. So many people, even in more developed parts of the world, will experience suffering due to their safety needs being unfulfilled. Next up is love and belonging, we feel great sadness when we don't feel loved or that we belong in our now safe environment. Even if no one in our community is a physical threat to us, it still really hurts if we don't feel a human connection to them. In the cultures of our most developed societies, self-esteem is the highest order need that most people can experience. Defining self esteem is tough, but it is often linked to having confidence in oneself. I prefer to look at self-esteem from a more collective perspective and define it as a feeling one gets when they feel as if they have VALUE within their social environment (on a macro or micro scale). These feelings are ego food, they are rationalized proof that we are doing something right and are 'winning'. Conversely, we slide down Maslow's Slope every time the ego gets hit, anytime we feel undervalued or less valued than someone else. In other words, when we 'lose'. While self-esteem provides us with a very privileged set of needs, it subjects those who experience them to endless slips down Maslow's slope. Self-esteem slips happen multiple times a day due to the inescapable comings and goings of our social interactions in which we are always competing for value. Even if we are fed, clothed, safe and loved, we cannot escape suffering. As long as Maslow's slope exists, there will always be times where our needs cannot be fulfilled.

While we ought to aim for a global environment where forms of suffering that lead to pain, death, disease and poverty are as minimized as possible, other types of suffering at higher levels of society are often necessary to experience or are not the responsibility of the more privileged to alleviate. As we progress, the suffering we face must be treated as opportunities for self improvement. An advanced society flourishes when its individuals optimize themselves in a dutiful way that in turn also strengthens the collective. This cannot be done without the constant suffering we experience from self-esteem hits. To reach self-actualization, the flat top of Maslow's slope where one no longer needs to worry about slipping, the ego must learn to take a beating until it is no longer a barrier to our development as individuals.

To define suffering as something to prevent absolutely in order to maintain some moral imperative is to completely discount the necessity of certain types of suffering that can be experienced at all stages of development on Maslow's hierarchy. Even at lowest levels, it is the suffering experienced by one who is starving that gives them the motivation to find food. They want to end their suffering and thus they take it upon themselves (unless they're suicidal or incapacitated) as an individual to rid themselves of the sufferable experience. With suffering, the opportunity to triumph emerges. Triumphing over suffering and evil is an essential moral imperative as well. The reason for this is that more complex needs can only arise once less complex ones have been comfortably met by the collective. Only after we are comfortably fed and sheltered can we even think about safety as a need to fulfill. Suffering provides the oxygen needed to ignite the fire under our asses that motivate us to meet our current needs as well as to chase new ones. This inevitably always leads to societal progress, the ultimate moral imperative.

This is the flaw of focusing too narrowly on reducing suffering as a moral imperative. It takes away too much from the importance of one's moral duty to reduce their own suffering for the betterment of humanity. It also boils societal progress down to running away from something, like suffering, instead of running towards something. It makes much more sense for moral progress to be goal oriented and constructive as opposed to an exercise in avoidance. This is not to say that reducing suffering is not an important component of moving towards a better future, it obviously is. However real moral progress is much more complicated than reducing suffering, it needs a goal. It takes a plethora of constructive dogmas that compete with each other fairly under the governance of honesty and epistemic humility. These two virtues break dogma out of its incontrovertible prison and allow them to be subject to meaningful updates. The best example of this is the addition of the new testament to the Hebraic tradition that form the Judeo-Christian values fundamental to the Enlightenment and modern western culture. I apologize for the sudden tangent on the importance of dogma.

Back to compassion...... the whole point of my Maslow's slope rant was to address that while compassion is a virtue, it can be misused and become a vice. This happens when compassion is exercised as a means to reduce the types of suffering that one ought to experience for their personal growth and development or as a means to disregard one's autonomy as it pertains to reducing their own suffering (for example not letting your baby cry for even a few seconds at bedtime, robbing them from a learning experience in self soothing). And perhaps the other point was to poke holes in Sam Harris' narrow view of moral/ethical currency.

:P