Compassion for Others

Jason Cruz
Aug 27, 2017 · 13 min read

In response to various cruel remarks made and shared this weekend asserting that Texans deserve the wrath of Hurricane Harvey, a storm causing apocalyptic flooding right now, for voting for Donald Trump last fall, I am posting an essay on empathy, feminist ethics of care, and our obligations to each other which I wrote for Dr. Melinda Hall while her student at Stetson University. Sections have been bolded for emphasis.

To be writing on empathy and ethical obligations to others in the fall of 2016 seems like both a trivial and vital task. So many times this year, our lack of empathy has failed us. It failed to stop the rise of xenophobic right-wing politics across Europe and the United States. It failed to stop the ravages of warfare across the Middle East. It failed to meaningfully increase human dignity in so many parts of the world. And yet, it remains our last best chance for salvation.

Big hearted empathy for others will fuel progress moving forward. Empathy grounds us in our shared humanity and binds us to our responsibility to care for one another. We have an ethical obligation to aid, respect, cherish, and work alongside each other, regardless if we be friend or stranger. What is needed now is for us to care for each other and act upon that feeling.

Our ability to care for others stands as an innately human trait. We often act upon this caring in our quotidian experiences, especially when faced directly with a plea for caring action. Impressively embedded into our responses to such situations, even when we feel nothing can be done, is some form of the statement “I want to help you” in reference to the person requesting our benefit. In her book Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education Nel Noddings, now an emeritus professor at Stanford University, argues “in situations where we act on behalf of the other because we want to do so, we are acting in accord with natural caring” (79). Without that natural caring much of what is generally considered ethical action would never get off the ground. It is our empathic response to others and the foundation for our charitable works, our daily acts of kindness, and our love for people beyond ourselves. Natural caring for others comes without internal provocation or a need to be intimate with the object of our desire to help. There is no urging ourselves to care, it simply happens. A clear example of this is the mother whose “caretaking efforts in behalf of her child are not usually considered ethical but natural. Even maternal animals take care of their offspring, and we do not credit them with ethical behavior” (79). Nodding notes that there is no “demand for the initial impulse that arises as a feeling, an inner voice saying ‘I must do something,’ in response to the need of the cared-for” (81). Our innate feeling is to help those around us. We might not always act on these feelings, but they are there, pushing us towards action, reminding us our obligation to each other.

When our immediate desires oppose our natural caring instinct, we must activate ourselves by tapping into memories of caring and being cared for. Our intrinsic desire to do the right thing and lend a helping hand is reinforced in these moments by recollections of our own times of need. Noddings articulates how this process works within ourselves, explaining “I have a picture of those moments in which I was cared for and in which I cared, and I may reach toward this memory and guide my conduct by it” (80). Those memories of our own vulnerability and the aid we received do not make us more compassionate or enhance our natural caring. They emphasize the necessary ethical, caring actions by highlighting situations when we ourselves benefited from the kindness of others. This makes it far more difficult to ignore the person in need before us as we see ourselves in the other and take action to help them, to preserve their humanity just as we would like our own to be preserved. I am not religious myself but it strikes me that the phrase “there but for the grace of God go I” reflects a deep cultural legacy of this understanding, at least in the Judeo-Christian world.

That shared humanity forms the basis for our obligation towards each other because it is truly an obligation towards ourselves. Humans are fundamentally social beings. Not only because of our ever-more connected world and the fact that we have spread across the overwhelming majority of the Earth’s hospitable land mass. We rely upon each other to maintain the basics of interior life. Noddings refers back to our earliest moments of contingent life, when we were fed and defended by our mothering person’s literal bodies. That dependency does not evaporate over time but morphs from a wholly physical need for survival to a social one, recognizing ourselves in interactions with other people and building our worlds outwards through them. Being with people is more than just a thing to do. It is a major component of establishing ourselves and defining what we care about, what our life will include, how we will develop internally. We constitute ourselves by way of relation to other people, be they family, friend, or stranger. We need them to see ourselves and our commonalities while also delineating our interior beings from those around us.

Alone we feel the absence of others, yearn for connection, imagine ourselves in company. The pain of being stuck in isolation is so severe that it is used as a punishment for crimes and is increasingly being decried as a form of torture. Jack Henry Abbott, an American prisoner who spent years in solitary confinement, understood the inherent connectivity humans require and wrote that “the body communicates with its environment. Place something in an environment in which possibilities of communicating are next to nil — that ‘something’ is annihilated to that degree” (Abbott). After describing the incredibly sparse conditions of his cell, which featured a lightbulb and a hole in the floor and nothing else, Abbot had this to say about what being trapped under such an absence of contact: “you become superfluous […] Solitary confinement in prison can alter the ontological make-up of a stone” (Abbott). When we ignore or are forcefully separated from our bond with others, we begin to lose our own boundaries. We cannot define ourselves in contrast with that which we do not experience. Existing apart from others runs against our integral systems.

I say all of this to explain the depth of our obligation to care for others, regardless of our personal familiarity with them. Our caring derives from the recognition of ourselves in others. Our ethical obligations and decisions derive from this recognition. It is the source of morality. Acting upon our natural caring shows “we are engrossed in the other. We have received him and feel his pain or happiness, but we are not compelled by this impulse … If we have a strong desire to be moral, we will not reject it, and this strong desire to the moral is derived, reflectively, from the more fundamental and natural desire to be and to remain related” (Noddings 83). The urge to remain related does not end just because the person we see is unfamiliar to us. There is no one truly alien to us for even in the most distant stranger we recognize the fibers of ourselves and the connective tissue which binds us. Simply being humans means that we are “already and perpetually in potential relation” with other people (86). By turning away from the potentially cared-for, we close ourselves off to relation with another. We sever the bonds that tie us together. We turn against our natural yearning to further relation with others.

Even when we dislike the other, when they are not friend or stranger but someone whom we disdain, we feel this natural desire to care and are thus obligated to aid. Since people are all interrelated, our ethical community includes all people. When we or any other member of this community disrespects the ideals we uphold, all members suffer the damage to our relations. Our obligation to care for others is, in part, about preserving our own relations and ethical ideals. Caring begets caring, since we use our memories of care to push ourselves to help people when necessary. We attempt to act in such a way as to “increase … the likelihood of genuine caring” with regards to both the cared-for and ourselves as ones-caring (83). As we expand our ethical activities to include caring for more people, it will actualize relations between ourselves and a growing number of individuals. Our ethical obligations to others then directly stem from our need for relation with others. Destroying such relations at the moment they may be established through caring runs counter to our very humanity. For this reason, when I see someone in need of care “I am obliged, then, to accept the initial ‘I must’ when it occurs and even to fetch it out of recalcitrant slumber when it fails to awake spontaneously” and ensure that I engage this other by caring for them when they require it (84).


I want to return to the notion that our obligations to care for others do not halt or falter if the person in need of care is unfamiliar to us. This is true not only because of the potential for relation which each person represents for us, but also for each person qua person. In her book Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency Eva Kittay argues for a vision of care ethics which takes into account both that we are always already fundamentally related people and that each individual deserves to be cared for based on connection-based equality. Kittay proposes this connection-based equality from the grounds that “we are all some mother’s child” (66). What might seem like a simple saying becomes for Kittay the basis for our ethical obligations to one another regardless of immediate relation. Connection-based equality leads us to understand “what is due us by virtue of our connection to those with whom we have had and are likely to have relations of care and dependency” because we recognize every person on earth, barring miracles of science, was born to a woman, is some mother’s child (66). Being some mother’s child is necessary for life and stands as the common position from which we all begin. This gift of life alone makes us each deserving of care from other mothers’ children, regardless of whether or not they know us personally. Each of us required “the interest of some mothering person(s) who has provided a degree of preservative love” and when we take care and treat each other as mothers’ children “we honor the efforts of that mothering person and symbolically of all mothering persons” (69).

Kittay analyzes responses Naomi Gerstel collected during a study on caregivers including a black woman who said she is taking care of her mother because “she expects me to help her … she took care of her mother. So I have to help her” alongside another black woman who simply remarked that “what goes round comes round” (Gerstel qtd. in Kittay 67, 68). These responses exemplify the connection-based equality model, which has us uphold our ethical obligations to others not in the hopes of exchange or to better ourselves but with the understanding that people deserve care on their own. In the case of the first woman she decides to live up to her mother’s expectation “since her mother gave care to her mother, her mother is now owed care. And as the care her mother’s mother received was meted out by the daughter, so that daughter now deserves care from her own daughter” (Kittay 67). The second woman’s statement signifies the bonds community members have which form a “sense of reciprocity between those who give and those who receive that raises the expectation that when one is in the position to give care one will, and when that person is in need another who is suitably situated to give care will respond” (68). That communal bond does not stop at the edge of our neighborhoods or the political boundaries between one state and the next, nor is it absent in the face of one we do not know. We are obligated to give each member of the human community, all mothers’ children, respect and care.

Imagine a world where we felt no need to care for people who did not know intimately. The basic functions of a civilization would be impossible because they rest upon the notion that its people are interconnected and willing to make sacrifices on behalf of one another. Consider the United States basic system of taxation, for example. Taxes paid by people in the US go towards programs and resources which, to varying degrees, benefit them and the international community. Taxes pay for the infrastructure Americans use each day to navigate their lives. Taxes pay for rudimentary social services such as public education, fire departments, and health insurance for the poor. Federal taxes make federal programs, which affect the lives of individuals in all fifty states, possible. No American will meet and experience the self-affirming joy of direct relation with each and every individual living within the US. Yet we recognize our connectivity and pay to raise the standard of living for all rather than living as though we were entirely foreign to one another. Kittay points out that even the criminals who we exile from their immediate communities remain the focus of our care. We provide them with the basic necessities of physical life as well as allowing “even the most vicious to have visitation rights. This indicates the societal recognition that nothing can take from an individual his or her worthiness for a certain amount of care and connection” (Kittay 69).


Were he alive to read this, Friedrich Nietzsche may criticize the existence of an ethical obligation to others as a form of slave morality which denies someone her own essence as a powerful, responsible being. Nietzsche would look at the references I have made to our reliance on others and our ability to summon memories of our most vulnerable moments to push ourselves towards caring as a sign we have been pulled away from our potential freedoms into a realm of weakness. In his Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche argues that slave moralities begin with tricks of memory which delude people into focusing on their pain. Early in the second essay he writes “‘if something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory’ — this is a main clause of the oldest (unhappily also the most enduring) psychology on earth” with regards to these techniques (Nietzsche 61). One might argue that memories of our natural infant dependency stand as the most painful of all, and indeed many people attempt to separate themselves from those memories, as discussed by Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva.

Elsewhere Nietzsche describes an “ever-increasing spiritualization and ‘deification’ of cruelty” he sees filtering throughout culture (66). It is easy to imagine him pointing towards my argument here as an example of just that since people would necessarily be sacrificing their time and resources to prioritize caring for others. Kittay herself describes the risk of caring in the 20th century, providing as one example “the elder-care worker who tends to a frail elderly man” and therefore “may be vulnerable to sexual abuse, economic exploitation, and poor treatment” (65). Other cases where we care for strangers, whose moral character we know nothing about, can quickly become dangerous, prevent us from pursuing our own wants and needs, or simply lead us into a false consciousness about what those wants and needs are until we have completely centered another person in our own lives.

These objections capture an incomplete picture of our ethical obligations to care for one another. Our obligations extend from and to each of us. As I must care for each mother’s child, people must care for me on the same basis. When someone puts caring for another person ahead of herself, others are obligated to support and care for her. If I expose myself to the vulnerabilities of caring for someone I do not know I expect not only the relational value which I will receive from my direct contact with her. I also expect to be cared for should the need arise. As I will have done for others, they shall do for me. When a caregiver begins to falter “the circle of dependency obligations must expand to include the vulnerability of the dependency worker, which is itself a consequence of her deferred interests as well as needs pertaining to her affective bond to her charge and her care for her charge’s well-being” (Kittay 65). Connection-based equality elevates all involved. It enables them to experience relations they otherwise would not have engaged in. It calls us to care for the most vulnerable and needy in our ranks. It calls for others to care for us in our own times of need, bringing us all into greater contact with each other and our common humanity. The dignity of being some mother’s child shines through as we work towards a more perfect union together with helping hands offered freely to all.

Centering our identities as the children of mothers also reminds us of the natural contingency which marks human life. While Nietzsche would have us believe we can play freely alone, he ignores basic facts of what it means to be a person in the world. His followers would do well to realize that our dependence in infancy is often matched by our dependence near death. Old age, sickness, and injury force us back into the caring arms of others. Memories of our dependence on parental figures as children push us to care for others by showing us as we once were and will be. Recall the woman who cared for her mother because she had cared for her own mother near the end of that woman’s life. Surely she saw in her caring a preview of her future, and continued to care with the expectation, that she would be cared for in turn. In this way our ethical obligations to others act also as methods of securing ourselves. By creating communities of connection-based equality, by aiding the strangers in your midst, you are inculcating an ethic of care which will see you treated with fairness and dignity when you need it most. Relations forged through care fulfill and sustain our lives when we are in our primes. Connection-based equality ensures our time as dependents will be handled with the same respect we gave to others.

Our ethical obligations, built from our natural urge to care and enacted in community-based equality, must extend, unwavering, to our friends and strangers alike. Nothing could be more vital now than living up to our ethical obligations to treat other people with equal care and respect while further expanding our empathic circles. A lack of empathy for the most vulnerable in our world has pushed us into yet another perilous position. The cruelest amongst us are gaining power across the globe. Knowing that we are obliged to turn outwards and forge links of care and respect with all of the mothers’ children we can, as our shared humanity calls us to do, fills me with the optimism that we will rise to the challenge of being be our own last best hope.


Works Cited

Abbott, Jack Henry. “Solitary Confinement.” The New York Review of Books 17 July 1980: n.pag. Web. 27 Nov. 2016.

Kittay, Eva Feder. Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. New York: Routledge, 1999. Print.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals — Ecce Homo. Trans. RJ Hollingdale and Walter Kaufmann. Ed. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1989. Print.

Noddings, Nel. Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Print.

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Jason Cruz

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I love writing and will use this space to talk about whatever burning topic strikes me. Politics, nerd-stuff, music, my personal life, etc etc. Opinions my own.

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