Compassion: Its Philosophical Basis

No matter how diverse our philosophies, everyone seems to believe in the need for compassion. However, while some base compassion on our instincts/feelings alone, others regard these as inadequate. Rather, we need to extend the circle of our compassion beyond the limited circle defined by our feelings, our affiliations.

Therefore, it is not enough to simply feel compassion; we need to also believe and think compassion! But what beliefs will promote compassionate behavior?

Several very popular worldviews deny that humanity is responsible for any wrongdoing. If this is so, then we can’t hold people responsible and therefore resent them for their misdeeds. Instead, compassionate becomes the most appropriate response.

According to one such worldview, we are exclusively the product of nurture and nature. Humanity is basically good and would do the good if we could. Why then do we do badly? Because we are irresistibly driven by these deterministic forces to act badly! Consequently, instead of punishing the wrongdoer, society needs to treat him and eliminate those factors that drove him to do badly.

Closely allied to this worldview is the denial of freewill. If we cannot act otherwise, then we should not be held responsible if we hurt others.

Both of these worldviews also tend to be pragmatic, recognizing that dangerous people must be restrained in prison. However, it is not because they deserve this but because society needs protection.

However, this gives a contradictory message:

• Society must punish you even though you do not deserve this harsh treatment. 

Hence, these worldviews eliminate any concept of justice. Justice is thereby reduced to expedience – what works for the majority. In other words, “We are merely punishing you for our own welfare!” However, this can only breed cynicism, division, and ultimately decay. There is nothing to prevent the outcast from then thinking:

• Well, if you are going to punish me because of your welfare, then there is no reason for me to not punish you for my welfare! 

Besides, without the concept of justice, there remains no way to win hearts and minds. What can we say to those who want to fight for ISIS? “You must not go and fight with ISIS because of our benefit?” When we sacrifice justice, we sacrifice any rationale to appeal to anything higher than base instinct.

These two worldviews also un-dignify humanity. They proclaim:

• You are not a free moral agent. You are not responsible for your actions. In essence, you are no more than a sophisticated bio-chemical machine, something that can easily be discarded if it fails to perform a designated function! 

This opens wide the door to abuse. To un-dignify humanity is also to deprive humanity of compassionate behavior. We might instinctively love animals, but we also eat and cage them. If humankind is just another animal, what then is to protect them from the way we treat other animals? Even the honorable Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Homes, Jr. admitted:

• When one thinks coldly I see no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand.

However, we walk on grains of sand and use them in the production of concrete. So much for a philosophical basis for compassion!

Serial killers have also figured out that, if we are no more than animals, then the law of the animal kingdom prevails. Instead, of evolution providing a basis for compassion, Jeffrey Dahmer protested, “I would argue that understanding evolution has the opposite effect, let me explain”:

• As far as we know, we only have one life and we share this planet with billions of other life-forms that have the exact same purpose as we do. We're no better or no worse than any other individual, ESPECIALLY not other human individuals.”

It was this understanding that enabled him to kill and cannibalize others.

Moral relativism is another closely-related worldview. It too maintains that our concepts of justice, right and wrong are just human inventions, without any existence apart from our own thinking. We merely invented these concepts because they are useful.

Consequently, this worldview also degrades humanity, even our pursuit of virtue and compassion. After all, if virtue is just someone’s invention, why take it seriously – more seriously than my own inventions?

Serial killer Ted Bundy understood this:

• Then I learned that all moral judgments are ‘value judgments,’ that all value judgments are subjective [it just depends on how you think about them], and that none can be proved to be either “right” or “wrong”…I discovered that to become truly free, truly unfettered, I had to become truly uninhibited. And I quickly discovered that the greatest obstacle to my freedom, the greatest block and limitation to it, consists in the insupportable “value judgment that I was bound to respect the rights of others. I asked myself, who were these ‘others?’ Other human beings with human rights? Why is it more wrong to kill a human animal than any other animal, a pig or a sheep or a steer? Is your life more to you than a hog’s life to a hog? Why should I be willing to sacrifice my pleasure more for the one than for the other? Surely, you would not, in this age of scientific enlightenment, declare that God or nature has marked some pleasures as ‘moral’ or ‘good’ and others as ‘immoral’ or ‘bad’? In any case, let me assure you, my dear young lady, that there is absolutely no comparison between the pleasure I might take in eating ham and the pleasure I anticipate in raping and murdering you. That is the honest conclusion to which my education has led me – after the most conscientious examination of my spontaneous and uninhibited self.” (Christian Research Journal, Vol 33, No 2, 2010, 32)

Clearly, moral relativism cannot serve as a basis for compassion. When feelings fail, this philosophy offers no resistance to our selfish instincts. However, these worldviews argue that if there is objective moral law and if we do have freewill, even in the midst of powerful deterministic force, then we re-establish a basis for moral contempt and undermine compassion.

However, the Reverend Martin Luther King argued that there is another solution. In a sermon entitled “the American Dream,” he stated:

• You see, the founding fathers were really influenced by the Bible. The whole concept of the… “Image of God,” is the idea that all men have something within them that God injected… every man has a capacity to have fellowship with God. And this gives him a uniqueness, it gives him worth, it gives him dignity. And we must never forget this as a nation: There are no gradations in the image of God. Every man from a treble white to a bass black is significant on God’s keyboard, precisely because every man is made in the image of God… This is why we must fight segregation with all of our nonviolent might.

For King, the image of God meant compassion for all. But doesn’t it also mean that some are moral outlaws who deserve punishment and not compassion?

When I was a probation officer, supervising offenders, I would always attempt to treat them with respect, although also with firmness. I knew that I had been forgiven a tremendous debt and was therefore required to treat others with the compassion with which God had treated me.

As any parent knows, compassion also requires correction, even punishment. To raise a child without correction is not compassion. Meanwhile, to reveal to the child your freewill-denying worldview is to teach your child wrongly. It is to say:

• Because you don’t have freewill and could not have done otherwise, I should not punish you. You do not deserve it. However, I must punish you to correct your impulses, which are neither right nor wrong but merely useful or un-useful. But of course, these assessments must change as society changes.

Instead, we need to know that there are considerations and values that are more important than our feelings. Consequently, maturity requires that we restrain the immoral expression of these feelings.

When I wrong my wife, I must take full responsibility and humble myself by confessing my wrong. A morally relativistic confession would not work. I could not say:

• I am truly sorry that I hurt you. However, I did not really commit a wrong, because there isn’t any objective right and wrong. However, you feel bad. Therefore, I am apologizing, even though I haven’t really done another wrong. 

Such an apology is as useful as the freewill-denying apology:

• I am really sorry that I hurt you, but I don’t have freewill and could not have done otherwise. Therefore, you have no right to be upset with me.

Compassion requires taking full responsibility for our actions. Instead, worldviews of mitigation or complete denial are only superficially compassionate. They may look compassionate, but they are unable to achieve the reconciliation required in meaningful relationships. If my wife loves me, her compassion will ask me to take full responsibility.

As we Think, so too Do we Live: The Case of Atheism

The way we think determines how we feel and respond to the world. A woman was convinced that the man at her door was a thief until she found out that he was the postman delivering a long-awaited package. When her thinking about him changed, so too did her feelings and her behaviors, and she happily greeted him.

This principle also pertains to our philosophical worldview thinking. If we believe that humans are just another animal, it is inevitable that this will color how we feel and treat the members of our species. Regarding the connection between our ideas and our behavior, evolutionist Karl Giberson, in Saving Darwin: How to be a Christian and Believe in Evolution, wrote:

• [Evolutionist] Ernst Haeckel nudged the racism of the Third Reich along its malignant road by suggesting that the various human races were like stages in the embryonic development of the fetus…”You must draw [a line] between the most highly developed civilized people on the one hand and the crudest primitive people on the other and unite the latter with animals.” (76)

• How shocking it is today to acknowledge that virtually every educated person in the Western culture at the time …shared Haeckel’s ideas. Countless atrocities around the globe were rationalized by the belief that superior races were improving the planet by exterminating defective elements…there can be little doubt that such viewpoints muted voices that would otherwise have been raised in protest.

Meanwhile, many are singing the laurels of secularism, claiming that its denial of all transcendent moral truth has created a better world. I try to remind them of the unmitigated horrors of the secular-atheistic-communistic experiments. Characteristically, they respond:

• Secular atheism is merely the denial of any sky-daddy. It therefore has no impact on morality.

However, this denial has had broad philosophical implications, especially in the area of morality and the one hundred million exterminated under atheism. In fact, there isn’t even one example of a communist state which didn’t have an appalling human rights record. Why? Perhaps these communistic states where merely acting out their philosophical baggage. Here are some examples of philosophies that are almost inseparable from atheism and their moral failures:

Atheists are almost invariably evolutionists, and they require a creationism substitute  - the one that evolution provides. Rather than positing a sharp distinction between the human and animal world, the evolutionist sees a continuum which denies any meaningful man-animal distinction. Historically, blurring this distinction has had a profound effect on our treatment of humanity. Those who have been considered more evolved have received better treatment. Those considered less evolved have been treated more like the rest of the animal kingdom. Besides, if we are all animals, there no longer exists a rationale to oppose treating us as animals.

Atheists are invariably secular humanists. Consequently, there is nothing higher than human cognition, and so there is no higher transcendent truth to which to defer. Morality, therefore, is strictly a matter of human creation. As such, it changes and is relative to our culture. Because of this, it is hard to take our moral determinations very seriously. After all, they will simply change tomorrow. Why not get ahead of the changing fashions and create our own personal morality according to our own desires! This was exactly the tact of serial killer Ted Bundy:

• Then I learned that all moral judgments are “value judgments,” that all value judgments are subjective, and that none can be proved to be either ‘right’ or ‘wrong’…I discovered that to become truly free, truly unfettered, I had to become truly uninhibited. And I quickly discovered that the greatest obstacle to my freedom, the greatest block and limitation to it, consists in the insupportable value judgment that I was bound to respect the rights of others. I asked myself, who were these ‘others?’ Other human beings with human rights? Why is it more wrong to kill a human animal than any other animal, a pig or a sheep or a steer? Is your life more to you than a hog’s life to a hog? Why should I be willing to sacrifice my pleasure more for the one than for the other? Surely, you would not, in this age of scientific enlightenment, declare that God or nature has marked some pleasures as ‘moral’ or ‘good’ and others as ‘immoral’ or ‘bad’? In any case, let me assure you, my dear young lady, that there is absolutely no comparison between the pleasure I might take in eating ham and the pleasure I anticipate in raping and murdering you. That is the honest conclusion to which my education has led me – after the most conscientious examination of my spontaneous and uninhibited self. (Christian Research Journal, Vol 33, No 2, 2010, 32)

Although, the Maos, Stalins, and Pol Pots didn’t justify their moral innovations in terms of their personal pleasures, the absence of any higher moral truth similarly gave them the freedom to morally innovate.

Without any transcendent and absolute moral law, moral relativism becomes the default. Since moral law doesn’t exist, we create our own pragmatic set of morals. Consequently, the supposed ends will always justify the means – the most horrible human atrocities. Lenin had been asked, “What is the good and the bad under atheistic communism?” His answer reflected the thinking of other communists:

• Whatever promotes the Revolution is what is good; whatever interferes with it, that is what is bad.

Such pragmatic, non-moral-law thinking can be used to justify any moral atrocity and was routinely used in this way.

Atheists are materialists and deny the existence of anything outside of matter and energy. Consequently, humans are no more than complex bio-chemical machines. What then do we do with machines that don’t behave in ways we regard as useful? We either change them or destroy them, perhaps for their parts. Humans then become expendable in favor of the “higher good.”

In addition to this problem, materialists can find no basis for freewill if everything occurs according to physical laws. Consequently, our thinking and choosing is merely the product of prior bio-chemical reactions. This means that we are not morally accountable. One atheist friend confessed to me that he found this understanding very liberating, freeing him from feelings of guilt. However, we have been equipped with such feelings because they are socially necessary. Once dulled, we are free to act in immoral ways.

Atheists are also naturalists. This means that we are the product of chance and natural processes rather than of purpose and design. Consequently, the naturalist is not accountable to a Creator. He owes no allegiance to anyone, just to his own welfare.

Of course, the naturalist will protest:

• I feel grateful for my family and for my fellow human beings. I therefore feel that I am accountable to them. I don’t need God to be moral.

While many atheists might be sincere about their feelings, feelings and intuitions are not enough as the communist experiments have proven. We also have very negative feelings and even our wholesome feelings are subject to change. In light of this, we also require a mental rationale – a transcendent moral-law rationale – to decide among our competing feelings.

Atheism has big pockets, and these contain its many philosophical children, all of which undermine morality in any objective sense. However, most atheists distance themselves from communism in favor of some form of socialism, pointing approvingly to the successful secular Northern European nations.

There are a number of problems with these examples. Besides the fact that their fruits are beginning to sour, they certainly don’t reflect anything like the full-blown secularism of the communist nations where secularism has been militantly enforced, where pastors and priests had either been exterminated or sent away for “re-education.” Therefore, Northern Europe retains many vestiges of their Christian culture – the culture that had once made the West great.

The Growth of Violence and what we can do about it

We have become a violence-prone society. One indication of this is the escalation of what NY Times columnist David Brooks calls “spectacular rampage murders”:

• According to Brooks, from 1913 to about 1970, there were no more than two of these types of murders per decade worldwide. After that, the number shot up to nine in the 1980s, eleven in the nineties, and 26 in the past decade. Since July 2012, when Brooks wrote this analysis, there have been half a dozen more. (Regis Nicoll, Salvo, Issue 27, 22)

What can account for this epidemic? Psychotropic medications seem to be one culprit (Their growth certainly hasn’t done anything to stem the violence!):

• Harvard University’s Dr. Joseph Glenmullen warns that antidepressants could explain the rash of school shootings and mass suicides over the last decade. People taking them “feel like jumping out of their skin. The irritability and impulsivity can make people suicidal or homicidal.”

• A study of 950 acts of violence committed by people taking antidepressants found 362 murders, 13 school shootings, 5 bomb threats or bombings, 24 acts of arson, 21 robberies, 3 pilots who crashed their planes and more than 350 suicides and suicide attempts.

• Medical studies show that patients with no history of violence, develop “violent urges to assault” while under the effects of psychiatric drugs. 

Perhaps there is even a simpler, more direct explanation. If psychotropics can reduce guilt, anxiety, fear and shame, they also can serve to remove inhibitions necessary to curb anti-social behavior.

Western society is quick to refer disturbed individuals for psychiatric care. However, there is good reason for hesitation. Dr. Michael, a professor of clinical psychiatry, claims that only a small percentage of serial killers are insane:

• After personally examining over 200 mass murderers, Dr. Stone found that “only 25 were ruled clinically insane.” The rest he found were “social misfits or angry loners” whose rage was triggered by “some event.” (Salvo, 23-24)

If mental illness is not the cause of escalating incidence of violence, what is? There are many indications that what we believe will profoundly affect the way we act, even the way we kill. Oddly,high self-esteem also seems to loosen our natural inhibitions to violently act-out:

• "Violent people are violent because their self-esteem and self-confidence are unrealistically high. Many violent criminals describe themselves as powerful, special and elite people who deserve special treatment" says Ulla Lovenkrands, Danish psychologist who spent 20 years studying criminal psychology."

• "Street gang members have high opinions of themselves and demand respect from others. Bullies from school playgrounds consider themselves more special than others. Low self-esteem and self-confidence are found amongst victims of violence, not amongst violent people."

In Western culture, self-esteem has been released from any consideration of moral conduct and truth and has been encouraged to soar.  Along with this, has been the growth of a dangerous belief of self-entitlement – “I am entitled to my pleasures, and you have no right to interfere with my pursuit of them.” Instead of learning to take responsibility for our behavior, we have been taught that there is no objective standard of moral truth to restrain us. Rather, morality depends exclusively on what we deem it to be. Consequently, there remains no adequate reason to not fulfill ourselves, even if it is at the expense of others.

We have decided that objective biblical values are archaic, repressive, and guilt-producing. They have hindered our self-esteem and prevented us from experiencing the freedom to follow our own inclinations. However, once we follow these inclinations, we then require drugs to quiet our conscience.

A recent study had concluded that those cultures that still retained a belief in eternal punishment tended to behave less criminally. Nicoll concludes:

• Unless the nihilistic [morally relativistic] worldview is abandoned for one that recognizes such a Transcendence [God], we can expect a rise in the number of walking dead and their devastating crimes. We must teach students and young people to reject what some of the supposedly brightest minds today are selling them – that the universe is meaningless and without purpose or supervision. Such nihilism only deadens the soul, which, after all, was created for communion with the living God. (25)

Keep you eyes opened!