Compassion and Being in Touch

This chapter argues that only compassion can provide the epistemic good of putting an agent in touch with a suffering creature’s pain. The argument proceeds by showing that only compassion satisfies the conditions for being in touch, according to which a subject must experience the suffering creature in a way that reveals the property of pain. To show that compassion can be part of phenomenologically basic experience, the views of René Descartes, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Max Scheler are discussed. Neither propositional knowledge nor accurate imagination, it is argued, are sufficient for an agent to be in touch. This chapter also proposes capturing the motivational structure of pain and compassion in imperatival terms (drawing on recent work in the philosophy of mind), and argues that there is no barrier to states with imperatival content providing epistemic, world-matching goods.