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Adam Smith and the political rhetoric of compassion

By Genevieve Lloyd - posted Friday, 5 July 2013


Among many confusing aspects of current debate on Australia's asylum seeker policies is the readiness with which the appeal to compassion is appropriated by all sides. In the name of compassion supporters of asylum seekers condemn the harshness of policies directed to deterrence. Yet it is also in the name of compassion that those policies are defended. It is in the name of compassion that we are urged to accept "off-shore processing"; it is also in the name of compassion that we are urged to reject it. In the name of compassion we are urged to set aside concern with how asylum seekers arrived here, focusing instead on their manifest present needs. Yet it is also in the name of compassion that we are urged to turn them away -- out of a sense of fairness towards those other absent refugees said to be "waiting patiently" elsewhere.

With all sides claiming the high moral ground on compassion, we may well wonder whether appeals to it are playing any constructive role in the debate. How is it that our desire to be present to the needs and pain of others can be so readily subsumed into competing narratives about what is happening, and about what must be done in response? The divisions here are not really about the significance of compassion as a human value. They centre rather on the rhetorical role it has taken on in policy debate.

There is of course much more at stake in all this than can be resolved through conceptual analysis. Yet some pathways through the argumentative impasse may open through reflection on what is involved in compassion. Strange though it may seem, Adam Smith -- not commonly regarded as a champion of fellow-feeling -- had a great deal to say that is relevant, in his treatment of sympathy in the first chapter of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith offers there an illuminating analysis of how sympathy for the distress of others involves interactions of emotion, imagination, and intellect.

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Smith sees sympathy as the key to moral judgement; but he argues that, if sympathy is to be morally significant, it must be accompanied by imagination. It is the cultivation of imagination that makes it possible for us to enter deeply into the situation of another human being: "Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers...It is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations". Imagination, he says, allows us to place ourselves in another's situation -- entering "as it were into his body" and becoming "in some measure the same person with him".

"Feeling for another" can sound like an empty platitude. However, Smith makes it clear that this sympathy is not a matter of feeling what another feels. Its moral force does not arise from transitory reverberation with the feelings of others -- like a spider's web waving in the breeze. What is demanded is a deeper way of being present to others -- a thoughtful imaginative presence to their situation over time.

It is an important distinction. Elaborating it, Smith observes that this imaginative presence may sometimes involve feeling on another's behalf an emotion of which that other seems incapable: "We blush for the impudence and rudeness of another, though he himself appears to have no sense of the impropriety of his own behaviour; because we cannot help feeling with what confusion we ourselves should be covered, had we behaved in so absurd a manner." In another example he observes that our sympathy for a new-born baby can extend to what we expect him or her to endure in their future -- an expectation which is beyond their own present capacities. Here again, we feel on behalf of others what they may not -- in this case cannot -- feel for themselves. We can have sympathy even for the dead, who feel nothing; though Smith, echoing Epicurus and Lucretius, suggests that here our sympathy may be misplaced.

How does this bear on appeals to compassion in current arguments about the deterrence of "irregular maritime voyages"? Those arguments often seem to reduce to the competing claims on our compassion of two groups. On the one hand, we have asylum seekers who have actually made the dangerous journey to seek protection -- present here before us. On the other hand, there is an absent group -- of indeterminate membership: those waiting for their chance at resettlement. What is asked of us by the rhetoric used to justify current government policies is that we withhold compassion from one group in order to show compassion towards the other. The implicit suggestion is that our tough treatment of the actually present group is "balanced" -- and hence justified -- by the call on our compassion exerted by the absent others.

Can those two groups be coherently compared in relation to the claims they make on our compassion? Those in the "patiently waiting elsewhere" group might at any time become part of an "actually present" group. That, after all, is supposed to be the justification for the harsh treatment of those who have already arrived. Yet they themselves have often already spent long years waiting -- whether "patiently" or not -- for evaluation of their claims for protection or resettlement. They might, moreover, have family in the absent elsewhere group.

We can make sense of this coalescing of the supposedly distinct groups in terms of Adam Smith's analysis of sympathy. To be imaginatively present to asylum seekers involves more than merely feeling for their present suffering; it demands our being imaginatively present to their whole "situation". It involves a broader engagement than the disturbance we feel at their presence in our dangerous waters. To "enter their situation" we must also attend to what led them to make those dangerous journeys -- to what has been happening in their country of origin; to what has happened to them since in other countries through which they have passed without being able to gain protection; to what might have happened to them if they had not boarded the boats; to what might happen to them -- and to their absent families -- in the future, if they are refused help now.

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The expansion of attention which is demanded by a fuller understanding of compassion might help us re-think the terms of the debate. It might help us focus on the whole situation of asylum seekers, rather than on our problem with their presence at our borders. It might help us think of the idea of a "regional approach" as centering on the needs of asylum seekers more broadly -- on the mass movements of people, which are happening beyond our borders; and on what compassionate response we might make to that global situation as citizens of the world.

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About the Author

Genevieve Lloyd is a retired Professor of Philosophy. She has published on history of philosophy, feminist philosophy, and the relations between philosophy and literature. Her latest book Enlightenment Shadows will be published by Oxford University Press in July.

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