Review: Nussbaum's Account of Compassion

Reviewed Work(s): Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions by Martha C.

Nussbaum
Review by: John Deigh, Martha C. Nussbaum and Martha C. Nussbaum
Source: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , Mar., 2004, Vol. 68, No. 2 (Mar.,
2004), pp. 465-472
Published by: International Phenomenological Society

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Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
Vol. LXVIII, No. 2, March 2004

Nussbaum's Account of Compassion

JOHN DEIGH

University of Texas at Austin

Martha Nussbaum, in her compelling new book in moral psychology, gives

an account of the nature of compassion.1 This account is the topic of my
contribution to this symposium. I believe it illuminates an important human
emotion that we call 4compassion.' At the same time, I believe there is a
different emotion that we also call 'compassion.' Recognizing these two
forms of compassion leads to seeing that the general theory of emotions from
which Nussbaum draws her account falls short of explaining all emotions.
While my contribution concludes with this point, I intend it as probative
rather than conclusive.2
Nussbaum's general theory is a modified version of the theory the ancient
Stoics advanced. Its principal thesis is that emotions are evaluative judgments
of a specific sort, and the main modification Nussbaum makes is to broaden
the theory's conception of judgment so that it applies to the emotions of
nonhuman animals and infants, or as I will say, beasts and babies. The
ancient Stoics denied that beasts and babies were capable of emotions, for
they conceived of the judgments they identified with emotions as affirmations
of propositions and they denied that beasts and babies had linguistic capacities
necessary for propositional thought. Consequently, if you're drawn to the
Stoic theory but believe that other animals besides humans have emotions
and that humans begin to experience emotions in infancy, you must either
modify the Stoic conception of judgment or attribute linguistic capacities to
beasts and babies. Nussbaum does the former. She accepts the view that some
emotions do not involve propositional thought.
Of course, any contemporary defender of the Stoic theory has to make
some such modification if only to avoid propounding anachronistic ideas
about beasts and babies. But Nussbaum has a further reason to make it.

Emotions, she holds, have developmental histories beginning soon after

1 Upheavals of Tfwught: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2001), pp. 297-353.
2 I raise more general questions about the comprehensiveness of Nussbaum's theory in
"Nussbaum's Defense of the Stoic Theory of Emotions," Quinnipiac Law Review 19
(2000): 293-307. See also Nussbaum's "Reply", ibid. pp. 358-362.

BOOK SYMPOSIUM 465

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birth. They have, in virtue of these histories, a narrative structure, and
theories of emotions that ignore this structure offer at best an inadequate
understanding of their subject. This deficiency, Nussbaum observes, not only
characterizes the classical Stoic theory but many current cognitivist theories
as well. Her point here is well-taken. It reminds me of William James's
remark about the merely descriptive character of most scientific writings on
emotions. Reading these works, James complained, was about as instructive
as reading "verbal descriptions of the shapes of the rocks on a New
Hampshire farm."3 One learned from them nothing of the root causes of
emotions. Nussbaum too declares that an adequate theory of emotions must
encompass their root causes. And by treating emotions as originating in
infancy and as having a narrative structure in consequence of those events of
infancy that first excite emotions and that contribute to their subsequent
development, she gives the Stoic theory the explanatory depth its classical
statement lacks. To do so, though, requires modifying the theory to make it
compatible with attributing emotions to beasts and babies.
How, then, on Nussbaum's theory, is the narrative structure of emotions
to be understood? The answer follows from the sort of evaluative judgment
with which the Stoic theory identifies emotions. These are judgments one
makes relative to one's ends and interests. That is, sometimes one judges
something as good or bad in virtue of its serving or frustrating one's ends or
interests, and an emotion is an evaluative judgment of this sort. An example
would be my thinking it good that New Year's Day fell on a Monday because
a long weekend better served my interest in relaxation. Another person might
think it bad that New Year's Day fell on a Monday because the delay in
getting back to work frustrated his interest in completing some urgent piece
of business. These judgments would then constitute conflicting emotions,
my delight and his distress at the same state of affairs. The conflict is merely
apparent, however, for it reflects a divergence in perspective rather than a
contradiction in belief. These judgments are thus different from the evaluative
judgments one makes when, for instance, one referees a competition and
consults the appropriate standards of excellence in assessing the entries, for
the latter are made from the same detached perspective. They are conceived of,
that is, as disinterested judgments, and a conflict between them would
therefore reflect a contradiction. By contrast, the judgments the Stoic theory
identifies with emotions are conceived of as interested or, to use Nussbaum's
term, eudaimonistic. As such, they are conditioned on the interest one invests
in the people and things that favorably or adversely affect one's well-being.
Accordingly, the history of one's investments and withdrawals of interest in
such people and things, going back to infancy, defines the narrative structure
of one's emotions.

3 The Principles of Psychology (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1950) ii, p. 448.

466 JOHN DEIGH

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 Nussbaum, drawing on the works of several child psychologists,
schematizes this history for both normal and abnormal emotional
development in early childhood. She then uses the complex schemes she
constructs to exhibit various patterns of narrative structure that emotions can
have. On the schematic history she constructs, the child experiences severe
emotional conflict characteristic of ambivalence toward its parents that is due
to their being both its providers and controllers of its behavior. The child
seeks a way out of this conflict by moderating its demands and learning to
accept postponement of their satisfaction and finally reaches a compromise
with the world, so to speak, that represents a fair balance of its needs against
those of its parents and of others, typically its siblings, who are also
dependent on its parents as providers of nourishment and safety. The child
acquires, as a result, a rudimentary sense of fairness and thus capacities for
distinctively moral emotions. These too fall within the Stoic theory. For the
child, in acquiring a sense of fairness acquires a primitive view of the world
as structured by a moral order on which its well-being depends, and
accordingly, it invests a strong interest in preserving this order. This interest
anchors the evaluative judgments with which the Stoic theory identifies these
emotions and so explains them as eudaimonistic.
Compassion, on Nussbaum's account, is one of these distinctively moral
emotions. She identifies it with the emotion Aristotle defined as pain caused
by the perception of some misfortune that another has suffered undeservedly
and that one is liable to suffer oneself.4 Eleos is the Greek word for this
emotion. It is usually translated pity, as Nussbaum notes. But for her
purposes either translation, 'pity' or 'compassion,' will do, and accordingly
she uses the two terms interchangeably. They are not exact synonyms,
however. We speak of self-pity but not of compassion for oneself. Yet this
difference, though suggestive, does not suggest different evaluative
judgments. So treating the two terms as names of the same emotion seems
reasonable given a general theory of emotions on which they are identical
with evaluative judgments. Of course, Aristotle did not define compassion as
an evaluative judgment. He defined it as pain. But this means either that he
worked within a different theory of emotions or that the pain he identified
with compassion was like heartache rather than a toothache. In either case,
Nussbaum's use of his definition to identify compassion is unproblematic.
While Aristotle may not have thought compassion was an evaluative
judgment, he did incorporate such a judgment into his definition of the
emotion, and for this reason the definition serves Nussbaum's purposes well.
The judgment his definition includes is complex. Its central idea is that x,
where x is the object of one's compassion, has suffered some misfortune. But
this idea is qualified in three ways. First, one must see x's misfortune as

4 Rhetoric 1385b 13-16 (W. Rhys Roberts, trans.).

BOOK SYMPOSIUM 467

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seriously damaging his well-being. One cannot see it as merely a minor
harm. Second, one must think x did not deserve this misfortune. One must
think it was not his fault or due to actions for which he is to blame. This
thought, moreover, corresponds to one of two possibilities. Either x did not
deserve to suffer misfortune, or though he deserved to suffer some, the
misfortune he suffered was out of proportion to what he did deserve to suffer.
Third, one must regard oneself as similarly vulnerable. That is, one must
think the same misfortune could befall one as befell x. Following Nussbaum,
let us refer to these three qualifications as the cognitive requirements of size,
nondesert, and similar possibilities. All three are necessary elements of the
complex judgment Aristotle's definition specifies as an essential component
of compassion.
This complex judgment, while plainly evaluative, is not plainly
eudaimonistic. Hence, Nussbaum cannot directly import it into her account of
compassion. It is nevertheless possible to interpret it in a way that fits the
requirements of the Stoic theory she expounds. For the judgment would be
eudaimonistic if the thought that it was a bad thing for x to have
undeservedly suffered serious misfortune were implicit in it and if this
thought were conditioned on one's interest in fairness and in preserving the
moral order one's sense of fairness implies. I mention this interpretation as a
possibility only. Aristotle did not expressly render the judgment
eudaimonistic in this way. Nor does Nussbaum. Instead, she offers an
improvement on Aristotle's account of the judgment, which supersedes the
question of how to render the judgment, on his account of it, eudaimonistic.
Specifically, while she keeps his cognitive requirements of size and
nondesert, she replaces that of similar possibilities with an explicitly
eudaimonistic requirement. Consequently, the evaluative judgment she
identifies with compassion is explicitly eudaimonistic, so the question of
how to render it as such never arises.

The requirement of similar possibilities, Nussbaum argues, is

unnecessary. It makes Aristotle's definition too restrictive. In particular, there
are cases of compassion felt by superior beings for the misfortunes of inferior
ones that the definition fails to reach. Thus, when we take pity on a small
animal that has suffered some disabling injury-a bird, for example, with a
broken wing, we need not think that we too are vulnerable to disabling
injuries in order to feel compassion for the injured animal. It is enough to see
that its injury is serious and undeserved. Nussbaum makes this point by
noting that divine compassion for humanity is a common theme in several
religious traditions, even though divine beings are not vulnerable to the same
misfortunes as we mortals. Here too it seems that it is enough for the gods to
see that sometimes our misfortunes are serious and bring greater harm than

468 JOHN DEIGH

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we deserve.5 Of course, if the gods didn't think our well-being was important,
if we appeared to them to be too strange and puny to be worth the bother,
then they wouldn't feel compassion for our misfortune even when they
recognized that it was serious and greater than we deserved. For this reason,
Nussbaum observes, we cannot simply drop Aristotle's requirement of
similar possibilities. Rather we must replace it with an explicitly
eudaimonistic one, a requirement that one see the well-being of the object of
one's compassion as important and take it as one's end. This requirement
then becomes, on her account, the third necessary element in the complex
judgment that constitutes compassion. Judging that one is similarly
vulnerable to the misfortunes that have befallen another is, Nussbaum
suggests, a valuable way of coming to realize the importance of another's
well-being and to take it as one's end, but it is this realization and not the
judgment of similar possibilities that is strictly necessary to compassion.
It will be useful to separate Nussbaum 's criticism of Aristotle's definition
from her revision of it. The criticism is unassailable. The revision, however,
is open to question. Specifically, one might ask whether her introducing an
explicitly eudaimonistic element into her account of compassion is too quick
a fix for the difficulty she finds in Aristotle's definition. Consider a case of
compassion for the suffering of total strangers that is transformative of its
subject's ends. A child of affluence, for example, who grew up knowing only
suburban prosperity and without ever encountering urban slums or rural
squalor might, when confronted for the first time with such human misery
and after the initial shock of seeing whole families living in cardboard boxes
near rivers of sewage, experience a powerful wave of compassion through
which the desire to help the victims of poverty replaces her prior indifference
to their plight.6 In this example, we would readily attribute the change in
disposition to the experience of powerful emotion. Our heroine, we would
suppose, comes, as a result of her experiencing compassion, to see the well-
being of those whose wretched existence confronts her as mattering a great
deal and thereby to take it as her end. Her compassion, then, could not consist
partly of the judgment that these people's well-being matters, for what is a
consequence of something cannot also be one of its constituents.
Consequently, Nussbaum 's account appears to have trouble accommodating
compassion that is transformative of the subject's ends.

5 A good example is found in The Iliad, where several gods are described as filled with
compassion for the dead Hektor at the moment when Achilles is about to defile him.
Apollo, in particular, is said to have "had pity on [Hektor], though he was only a dead
man." Bk. 24, lines 17-23 (Richard Lattimore, trans.). Lattimore uses both 'pity' and
'compassion' in his translation.
6 The example comes from one Stephen Darwall gives in his Impartial Reason (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 39-41.

BOOK SYMPOSIUM 469

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 The trouble is due to the explicitly eudaimonistic element Nussbaum
introduces into her account and not to its having a eudaimonistic element.
This point should be clear from my earlier observation of the possibility of
interpreting as eudaimonistic the complex judgment that Aristotle's definition
of compassion specifies as essential to the emotion. That possibility derives
from the second element in the judgment, the element of nondesert, and since
Nussbaum 's account includes this element, she does not need to introduce the
third element to render the judgment she seeks eudaimonistic. She could,
instead, limit her account to the first two elements, those of size and
nondesert, and still be faithful to her modified Stoic theory. Such an account,
moreover, applies unproblematically to cases of compassion that is
transformative of its subject's ends, since once one supposes that the
subject's ends include preserving fairness in the world, one can explain the
transformation as resulting from the subject's judgment that the objects of
the emotion suffer misfortune unfairly. Thus, in my example, our heroine,
having fairness as one of her ends and judging that the indigents for whom
she has compassion do not deserve their wretched existence, comes to take
their well-being as an end by seeing that relieving their suffering is necessary
to removing the unfairness of their condition. Her compassion, then, explains
her coming to have this new end as a consequence of the perception of
unfairness that her emotion entails, the prior attachment to fairness it
presupposes, and her realization of what is necessary to rectify the unfairness
she perceives. Looking back to Nussbaum's understanding of compassion as
a moral emotion, one whose narrative structure reflects emotional
development that yields a rudimentary sense of fairness, we can see how such
an account would be well-suited to her program.
Whichever version of the account one considers, it is, I believe, a correct
representation of a significant moral emotion in human life. It captures
sorrow for serious, undeserved misfortunes that have befallen another, and the
names compassion and pity appropriately apply to such sorrow. At the same
time, there is another significant emotion in human life to which these
names also apply. What distinguishes this emotion from the one Aristotle
defined is that it is a form of fellow-feeling to which judgments of nondesert
are unnecessary. This emotion is the one Adam Smith has in mind when he
writes, at the beginning of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, "How selfish
so ever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his
nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness
necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of
seeing it. Of this kind is compassion or pity, the emotion which we feel for
the misery of others, when we either see it or are made to conceive it in a

470 JOHN DEIGH

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very lively manner."7 Elaborating a few paragraphs later, Smith notes that
the names 'compassion' and 'pity' are names of a specific form of fellow-
feeling. Where 'sympathy', Smith remarks, denotes our fellow-feeling with
any emotion, 'pity' and 'compassion' specifically denote our fellow-feeling
with the sorrow of others.8 Smith's general idea is that many emotions are
easily communicated from one person to another. We readily detect or
imagine what others are feeling by their circumstances, countenance, and the
like, and then sympathetically respond by experiencing the same feeling.
Another's smile brings a smile to our own face. Sores on his arms or legs
and the anguish we easily imagine they've caused excite a like anguish in
ourselves. And so forth. Accordingly, our compassion for another's
misfortune is distress and unhappiness we feel in response to that person's
evident distress and unhappiness or to circumstances that induce us to
imagine his suffering the same.9
This form of compassion, unlike the one that is the object of Nussbaum's
study, is not a moral emotion. No distinctively moral judgment, specifically,
no judgment of nondesert, is essential to it. This does not mean that a person
who experiences this emotion is insensitive to matters of desert. For his
judging that others have deservedly suffered misfortune could make a
difference to whether or not he felt the emotion even if the compassion he felt
for them did not entail his judging that their misfortune was undeserved. It
would make such a difference, for instance, if his making the judgment
prevented him from feeling compassion he would otherwise feel, if it blocked
his sharing their distress or impeded his imagining the distress they should be
feeling given their circumstances. In this case, his feeling compassion
implies the absence of a judgment of desert rather than the presence of a
judgment of nondesert. It thus differs from the emotion that Nussbaum means
to capture.
This conceptual difference, moreover, reflects a difference in the narrative
structures of the two emotions. For convenience' sake, let us call the form of
compassion that is the object of Nussbaum's study 'moral compassion' and
this second form 'nonmoral compassion.' Accordingly, just as nonmoral
compassion does not entail a moral judgment, so its development does not
encompass the emotional conflict whose resolution produces the rudimentary
sense of fairness that moral compassion implies. Rather its development, to
borrow an idea of Max Scheler's, encompasses the emergence of fellow-

7 A Theory of Moral Sentiments, D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1976), p. 9.
8 Ibid., p. 10.
9 It must therefore be a different emotion from compassion that one could feel for a dead
person on account of his being defiled. See fn. 6 above.

BOOK SYMPOSIUM 471

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feeling from experiences of vicarious feeling.10 The former emerges from the
latter as the child acquires a sense of itself as distinct from others and
concurrently learns to attribute the emotions it feels vicariously to the people
in whom they originate. The child thus comes to share emotions with others
where previously it was capable only of experiencing the same emotions as
others experience coincidentally. And in coming to share another's distress,
the child comes to experience nonmoral compassion. The narrative structure
of this emotion corresponds, then, to an aspect of the child's developmental
history that is different from the aspect to which the narrative structure of
moral compassion corresponds.
In addition, it is an aspect of the child's developmental history that does
not, so it seems, include the acquisition of new ends. In particular, the child
does not, so it seems, in coming to experience nonmoral compassion, come
to see another's well-being as important and to take it as its end. Instead, it
comes to attribute the distress it feels vicariously to another and to respond
appropriately by attempting to relieve that person's distress. Hence, how one
can understand nonmoral compassion as constituted by a eudaimonistic
judgment is inobvious. The emotion appears to fall outside the scope of the
Stoic theory. Even a modified version, like Nussbaum's, that attributes
eudaimonistic judgments to beasts and babies, seems to fall short of
explaining it.

The Nature of Sympathy, P. Heath, trans. (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1954), pp. 12-
14. See also Martin L. Hoffman, Empathy and Moral Development (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 63-92.

472 JOHN DEIGH

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