The Event of Compassion. In: Considering Compassion: Global Ethics, Human Dignity, and the Compassionate God, Frits de Lange & L. Juliana Claassens (eds.), Pickwick Publications (Wipf & Stock), Eugene OR 2018, 17 - 30.
This essay is about ethics and compassion. But I do not do not want to look here at compassion f... more This essay is about ethics and compassion. But I do not do not want to look here at compassion from the perspective of ethics, but conversely, I want to question ethics from the perspective of compassion.
Instead of situating compassion somewhere within ethical theory, I rather seek to question the ethical enterprise as a whole from the perspective of compassion. More precisely, my argument is that the event of compassion deconstructs the “ethical subject” as the center of moral agency, i.e., the presupposition of most of the modern ethical theory. I suggest that in ethics, we, as moral subjects, do not know who we are. And that is exactly who we are. Instead of defining more precisely our moral identity, ethics benefits of its unsettlement.
In the first part of this essay, I will approach compassion not as an ethical concept, or a moral emotion, virtue or principle, but as a phenomenon that, if taken seriously, precludes the possibility of speaking about moral agents as closed subjects, centers of interior reflection on their outward behavior.
In the second part of this essay, I illustrate this perspective with a reading of the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan that is one of the most powerful stories ever told on the subject of compassion.
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Instead of situating compassion somewhere within ethical theory, I rather seek to question the ethical enterprise as a whole from the perspective of compassion. More precisely, my argument is that the event of compassion deconstructs the “ethical subject” as the center of moral agency, i.e., the presupposition of most of the modern ethical theory. I suggest that in ethics, we, as moral subjects, do not know who we are. And that is exactly who we are. Instead of defining more precisely our moral identity, ethics benefits of its unsettlement.
In the first part of this essay, I will approach compassion not as an ethical concept, or a moral emotion, virtue or principle, but as a phenomenon that, if taken seriously, precludes the possibility of speaking about moral agents as closed subjects, centers of interior reflection on their outward behavior.
In the second part of this essay, I illustrate this perspective with a reading of the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan that is one of the most powerful stories ever told on the subject of compassion.
This is the question that I want to think through with you from the perspective of Christian ethics. The leading vision in Christian ethics is the double love command: Love God with all that is in you, and love your neighbor as yourself. It my impression that when the commandment: Love your neighbor as you love yourself, is understood as: Love your ageing neighbor, as you love your ageing self, Christian ethics can deliver an important contribution to the societal debate on ageing.
The question at the heart of this book is whether the Christian legacy provides us with sources of moral imagination needed to guide us into the global era. Can the Christian practice of faith contribute to a more compassionate world? If so, how? And is it true that compassion is what we need, or do we need something else (justice, for example)? In Considering Compassion, colleagues from different theological disciplines at Stellenbosch, South Africa, and Groningen, Netherlands, take up these challenging questions from a variety of interdisciplinary angles.