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Empathy, Respect, and Humanitarian Intervention

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

Nancy Sherman
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Extract

This essay explores several moral attitudes that undergird a commitment to humanitarian intervention. Humanitarian intervention is usually understood to mean assistance or relief, often in the form of a rescue response by the international community to such emergencies as natural disasters, systematic human rights violations, or genocides that take place within the borders of sovereign states. But the term can equally mean aid before the fact, or prevention, as well as longer-term commitments to international justice that go beyond emergency relief. Whether the aid is relief or prevention, short- or long-term, and however it relates to broader questions of international justice, the same question applies: How do we come to feel the ethical imperative to ally ourselves with those outside our borders? If, as Kant puts it, “ought implies can,” then what makes the “oughts” of intervention psychologically feasible? Of course in international affairs the issue is, more typically, whether certain proposed interventions are politically feasible, Do they promote our national interest? Are they cost effective? Even more practically, will food relief get where it is intended to go? Do the rules of military engagement allow us to protect the victims we are trying to help?

Type
Articles
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 12 , March 1998 , pp. 103 - 119
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 1998

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References

1 So Robert Johansen argues that in Rwanda, prevention programs—having to do with economic development, education against bigotry, adjudication of war crimes, and the like—might have averted the genocide of 1994. See “Limits and Opportunities in Humanitarian Intervention,” in The Ethics and Politics of Humanitarian Intervention, edited by Hoffmann, Stanley (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame Press, 1996), p. 55Google Scholar. For a criticism of humanitarian intervention as rescue, see Pasic, Amir and Weiss, Thomas, “The Politics of Rescue: Yugoslavia's Wars and the Humanitarian Impulse,” Ethics and International Affairs 11 (1997), pp.105–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 See Sherman, Nancy, Making a Necessity of Virtue: Aristotle and Kant on Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 See Smith, Adam, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759; Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Classics, 1976)Google Scholar.

4 Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, 1242a, p. 21ff., my trans.

5 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1155a, pp. 16–21, my trans.

6 Laertius, Diogenes, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 2 vols., trans. Hicks, R. D. (Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1972), 6.63Google Scholar. Epictetus, , Discourses, 2 vols., trans. Oldfather, W. A. (Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1925), 2.10.3, 1.9.2Google Scholar.

7 Aurelius, Marcus, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, trans. Farquharson, A. S. L. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 4.4Google Scholar; 4.29; 4.4.

8 For example, Epictetus, Discourses, 2.8.12; 1.9.23; 2.10.3–4; 1.9.6; 2.10.3–4. Note that Epictetus himself was an ex-slave.

9 Hierocles (Stobaeus, Eclogae Physicae et Ethicae, 4.671, 7.673, p. 11), reproduced in Long, and Sedley, , The Hellenistic Philosophers, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)Google Scholar, fragment 57G.

10 The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, 8.61.

11 The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, 8.34. See also 11.8 and 9.23.

12 Ibid., 12.26.

13 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 7.85.

14 Cicero, , On Duties, edited by Griffin, M. T. and Atkins, E. M. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1.99Google Scholar. For a further early reference to the respect aroused by our divine capacity of reason, see Seneca, , Epistulae Morales, 3 vols., trans. Gummere, Richard (Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1917–22), p. 51Google Scholar.

15 Sherman, Making a Necessity of Virtue, ch. 8. We have a natural tendency to feel ourselves into what we perceive or imagine. As we read about the forest, we may, as it were, become the explorer; we feel for ourselves the gloom, the silence, the humidity, the oppression, the sense of lurking danger; everything is strange, but it is to us that strange experience has come…. This tendency to feel oneself into a situation is called EMPATHY—on the analogy of sympathy, which is feeling together with another; and empathic ideas are psychologically interesting because they are the converse of perceptions; their core is imaginal, and their context is made of sensations, the kinesthetic and organic sensations that carry the empathic meaning. Like the feeling of strangeness, they are characteristic of imagination. In memory, their place is taken by the imitative experiences which repeat over again certain phases of the original situations.18

16 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, pp. 140–42, 146, 167.

17 Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by Selby-Bigge, L. A. (1739; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 317–427Google Scholar.

18 Titchener, Edward, Beginner's Psychology (New York: Macmillan, 1915), p. 198Google Scholar, as quoted by Wispé, L., “History of the Concept of Empathy,” in Empathy and Its Development, edited by Eisenberg, N. and Strayer, J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 22Google Scholar.

19 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 48.

20 “Empathy and Imagination,”Midwest Studies 22 (”Philosophy of the Emotions,” 1998).

2l This research is summarized well by Harris, Paul, Children and Emotion (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1989)Google Scholar.

22 For a summary of the literature on motor (and auditory) mimicry, see J. Bavelas et al., “Motor Mimicry as Primitive Empathy,” in Empathy and Its Development, edited by N. Eisenberg and J. Strayer, pp. 317–48.

23 See especially the work of Stern, Daniel, The Interpersonal World of the Infant (New York: Basic Books, 1985)Google Scholar.

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26 See Alvin Goldman's discussion of Harris, Paul in “Empathy, Mind, and Morals,” in Mental Simulation, edited by Davies, M. and Stone, T. (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995)Google Scholar.

27 This formulation is Alvin Goldman's. Ibid, p. 194.

28 On Chim's photography, see Bondi, Inge, The Photography of David Seymour (Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

29 Sherman, Making a Necessity of Virtue, chs. 2, 4.

30 Coke, J., Batson, D., and McDavis, K., “Empathic Mediation of Helping: A Two Stage Model,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36 (1978), pp. 752–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Batson, , The Altruism Question (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1991)Google Scholar. For further research, see Eisenberg, N., McCreath, H., and Ahn, R., “Vicarious Emotional Responsiveness and Prosocial Behavior: Their Interrelations in Young Children,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 14 (1988), pp. 298–311CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 See Harris, Children and Emotion, for a summary of the 1986 experiment of Meerum Terwogt, Schene, and Harris.

32 See, for example, Squire, Larry, Memory and Brain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)Google Scholar, and Schacter, David, Searching for Memory (New York: Basic Books, 1996)Google Scholar. Squire has shown that there are different centers of memory, one that is the locus of unconscious, implicit knowledge and another that has to do with explicit, declarative memory. Also, it is now believed that early learning of affect and paradigms of attachment are laid down in implicit memory centers in the brain: see Amini, F., Lewis, T., Lannon, R., et al. , “Affect, Attachment, Memory: Contributions toward Psychobiologic Integration,” Psychiatry 59 (1996), pp. 213–36Google ScholarPubMed. Also, Schore, Allan, Affect Regulations and the Origins of Self (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1994)Google Scholar.

33 See Wispé, L., The Psychology of Sympathy (New York: Plenum Press, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 See, for example, Hume's important remarks on the judicious spectator in A Treatise of Human Nature, pp. 581–82.

35 See Coke, Batson, and McDavis, “Empathetic Meditation of Helping.”

36 It is noteworthy that in recent writings John Rawls has used the term “peoples” rather than “political states” as the basis of a conception of international justice, in order to construct a realistic Utopia that is not tied to traditional conceptions of state sovereignty and national self-interest. Rawls, , “The Law of Peoples,” in On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993, edited by Shute, Stephen and Hurley, Susan (New York: Basic Books, 1993)Google Scholar.

37 Niebuhr, Reinhold, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1932), p. xiGoogle Scholar.

38 Ibid., p. 48.

39 Walzer, Michael, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977)Google Scholar.

40 Here I am indebted to Rawls's discussion in “The Law of Peoples.”

41 Feshbach, N. D., “Studies of Empathic Behavior in Children,” in Progress in Experimental Personality Research 9, edited by Maher, B. A. (New York: Academic Press, 1975), pp. 1–47Google Scholar.

42 Rawls makes similar remarks in “The Law of Peoples,” acknowledging his own debt to the opening lines of Rousseau's Social Contract: “My purpose is to consider if in political society, there can be any legitimate and sure principle of government, taking men as they are and laws as they might be.”