COMPASSION AND INSTITUTIONS

How can the public culture of a liberal democracy cultivate appropriate compassion, and how far should it rely on this admittedly fallible and imperfect motive? In this chapter I shall leave aside the many roles that compassion may play in personal and community relationships of many kinds and focus on its connection to the political structure of a state that is both democratic and liberal. This means that I shall also leave aside the specific content compassion may have in connection with the different conceptions of value and ultimate meaning that citizens of such a nation may hold – religious conceptions, secular conceptions of many kinds. I shall focus only on its role in connection with a constitutional and legal structure that can be expected to be endorsed by citizens holding a wide range of different religious and secular views.

In terms of contemporary philosophical categories, then, I shall be examining compassion in connection with a form of political liberalism, a political conception that attempts to win an overlapping consensus among citizens of many different kinds, respecting the spaces within which they each elaborate and pursue their different reasonable conceptions of the good. Why should such a conception deal with emotions at all, it might be asked? The answer is, plainly, that any political conception needs to concern itself with citizens' motivations, both in order to ensure that the conception is feasible in the first place – does not impose impossible strains on human psychology – and also in order to ensure that it has a decent chance of being stable over time.