Combination and Comparison

After considering the possibility of a deontological application of the notion of being in touch, this chapter argues that compassionate agents achieve intuitively correct moral comparisons by being in touch with certain complex objects. A spatiotemporal analogy is first considered, in which agents can be in touch with large-scale and historical properties of physical objects by proportionately zooming out in their mind’s eye. This framework is then applied to compassionate engagement with pains of different intensities, duration, and quantities, with the result that differences in being in touch coincide with intuitive differences in moral goodness. In a similar vein, a J. S. Mill-inspired heuristic is introduced, in which we imagine an unbiased agent reaching a preference through living through all the potential courses of experience that her actions could lead to and deciding which courses to live through again. Related issues concerning probability and spatiotemporal proximity are also discussed.