In a world obsessed with fairness and impartiality, is it really wrong to favor those closest to us? Traditional moral theories like utilitarianism demand that we count everyone equally, from strangers on the other side of the globe to our next-door neighbors. But for moral sentimentalists, this is a radical mistake. Morality isn’t about abstract and detached reasoning, moral sentimentalists argue —it is about empathy and care. In this article, Michael Slote draws on David Hume, Carol Gilligan, and other moral philosophers to argue that prioritizing neighbors isn’t just natural —it’s a moral obligation.

The idea that the moral individual should judge situations impartially and act accordingly, and the more specific idea that everyone should count equally in such a reckoning, are probably familiar to most of you. In moral and political philosophy, this idea goes under the name of consequentialism, and in its most familiar and historically influential form, it is known as utilitarianism. Utilitarianism has seemed very powerful to many thinkers, and why not? Isn’t morality supposed to substitute impartiality for the self-interested and biased attitudes and actions that characterize so much of human life?

Actually, many different forms of utilitarianism have been advocated in moral and political philosophy, but I shall highlight the most familiar kind, which tells us that in every situation where we are called on to act, we ought to consider everyone equally and do what, in those terms, does the greatest good for the greatest number. However, the utilitarians who tell us this recognize how strongly their moral ideal works against ordinary people’s habits and feelings. We all have greater concern for members of our own family than for strangers, and greater concern for our neighbors than for people we have never met who are on the other side of the world. If we act in accordance with those preferences, we will often end up not doing what, impartially speaking, has the best results. Our actions will, to a considerable extent, favor our near and dear or our neighbors in a way that is inconsistent with an impartial equal concern for all human beings. (I will leave the issue of our treatment of animals to one side.)

SUGGESTED VIEWING Morality and prejudice With Tommy J. Curry, Michael Huemer, Melis Erdur, Barry C. Smith

Does that mean that most or all of us frequently act on immoral tendencies? The utilitarian theorist of morality will tell us that it does, but there are some moral philosophies that disagree. Such philosophies say that a certain degree of partiality toward near and dear and toward neighbors is not only morally acceptable but morally better than acting according to the dictates of utilitarianism. In other words, impartialistic theories of what is morally obligatory have often been opposed by partialistic conceptions of the obligations of morality.

___

A common thread between Hume and these followers is that empathy is an important element of being a moral person.

___

But who are these partialists? Well, perhaps the most famous among them is the 18^th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume, whose most important book, A Treatise of Human Nature, argues, among other things, that virtue consists in giving preference to near and dear. There are many moral philosophers today who follow Hume in this respect, and a common thread between Hume and these followers is that empathy is an important element of being a moral person. Because of this emphasis on empathy, these recent philosophers place virtues/feelings like compassion, benevolence, and (most broadly) caringness at the center of the moral life. They can all, in some sense, be called moral sentimentalists because empathy works by conveying the emotions/feelings of one person to another, and sentimentalists think that empathy and sentiment in a suitably broad sense are central to who we are or ought to be.

But then, as Hume pointed out, we tend to feel empathy more strongly toward those we know than toward people we don’t know. If empathy is central to our understanding of what it is to be moral, then, the moral sentimentalist concludes, the utilitarian impartialist must be mistaken to deny partiality any sort of moral weight. Now there are, in fact, some utilitarians who place a value on feeling, but it is always feeling scrubbed of any partiality toward those one knows or loves best. More generally, though, utilitarians tend to be ethical rationalists, and rationalists hold that partialistic feelings have no rightful place in moral action. Rather, they say, morality must be based in reason or rationality, and since they think there is nothing partialistic or emotional in pure rationality, they disagree with the sentimentalists about the nature and requirements of morality.

SUGGESTED VIEWING Moral facts and moral fantasy With Ruth Chang, Simon Blackburn, Joanna Kavenna

Now, it is possible to be an ethical rationalist without espousing utilitarianism. The great 18^th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant was an ethical rationalist, as were the 20^th-century British intuitionists W. D. Ross and H. A. Prichard, but none of these moral philosophers was a utilitarian, and none of them ever argued that we shouldn’t favor our neighbors. So, for present purposes, it makes sense to put those other rationalists to one side and to focus, more narrowly, on rationalistic utilitarianism vs. empathy-based sentimentalism. Doing so will allow us to put the issue of the present short essay into sharper focus. We want to know whether there is any moral justification for favoring our neighbors over distant others. The sentimentalist thinks there is, and the utilitarian denies this.

The rationalist utilitarian realizes that their moral recommendations in many ways go against common-sense preferences and our ordinary moral judgments. We tend to favor our family or neighbors over distant others, and ordinary non-philosophers typically think it is morally acceptable to do so. In fact, they or we think that such preference is itself morally preferable. Most of us would morally criticize someone who was more concerned with a stranger’s mother’s welfare than with the welfare of their own mother, though the utilitarian tells us to think otherwise. The utilitarian often or even typically invokes rationality to defend their view of this kind of issue. Reason, they think, tells us that we ought to be concerned with everyone equally; it is only the biases of non-rational feeling and emotion that interfere with morality as grounded in reason.

But here the sentimentalist can make an answer. Who says that reason tells us to treat everyone in the world equally? How does it do that? Who says that reason tells us to rely only on reason when we act toward others? How do we know that? These are questions the ethical rationalist and, in particular, the rationalistic utilitarian might find difficult to answer.

However, at this point, the utilitarians have a very significant rejoinder available to them. Rationalistic utilitarianism may have implications that contravene our ordinary, common-sense moral intuitions, but if the philosopher is looking for an acceptable overall theory of morality, impartialistic utilitarianism offers us a possible candidate, and utilitarians have said that the partialistic sentimentalist has no comparable theory of morality to offer us. If we as moral philosophers want a theory of morality, then rationalism may be the only game in town, and the utilitarian can then go on to argue further that their theory of morality is superior to what is on offer from ethical rationalists like Kant, Ross, and Prichard.

___

The sentimentalist care ethicist can be said to offer us a partialistic moral theory based in the general moral injunction: never act in a way that shows you to be lacking in empathy.

___

But sentimentalism has developed considerably since Hume’s day. Hume may have offered us a scattered and somewhat incoherent sentimentalist theory of morality, but the so-called care ethics that originated with and has developed out of Carol Gilligan’s 1982 book In a Different Voice offers us a sentimentalist theory of morality that stands diametrically opposed to utilitarianism. The rationalist utilitarian offers us a moral theory whose basic moral injunction is to always do what most favors humanity overall. This tells us it is wrong to give automatic preference to our neighbors when we can do just as much good for distant strangers by giving, say, to Oxfam. However, the sentimentalist care ethicist can be said to offer us a partialistic moral theory based in the general moral injunction: never act in a way that shows you to be lacking in empathy, i.e., in empathic concern for others. Utilitarians and care ethicists are thus at this point on an equal footing when it comes to the claim to be offering a theory of morality. Is there any philosophical reason, then, to prefer one of those theories over the other?

Well, here is a reason that depends on highlighting a fact about utilitarianism that we have so far left unmentioned. In cases where we have to choose between our own mother and someone else’s mother, utilitarianism tells us to automatically extend our help where it will do the most impartially judged good, and, of course, we have seen that a sentimentalist care ethics based in empathy will disagree with this judgment. But impartiality also means that one has a moral obligation to help oneself when one can do more good for oneself than one can do for others. By contrast, common-sense thinking about morality tells us that it might be unwise to help others when one can do more overall good for oneself, but that such self-sacrifice is far from being morally wrong. Our ordinary concepts of moral obligation and moral wrongness make it seem weird to suppose that we have a moral obligation to refuse to sacrifice our own greater good for the good of others. Yet that is just what utilitarian theory entails.

___

Someone who has empathy will (other things being equal) have more concern for their neighbors than for the distant others.

___

By contrast, partialism based in empathy doesn’t have this result because empathy focuses on the other, not on one’s ongoing self. To help others when you could do more for yourself thus doesn’t show one as in any way lacking in (other-directed) empathy, so, according to the sentimentalist, such self-sacrifice isn’t morally wrong. And that is what anyone speaking ordinary English would also say. I think this is a strong argument against utilitarianism and in favor of care-ethical sentimentalism.

To return now to the moral issue that gave rise to the present discussion, the sentimentalist wants to say that it is morally both permissible and desirable that one give preference to neighbors over people one will never know who live on the other side of the world. Most particularly, the sentimentalist will claim that someone who has empathy will (other things being equal) have more concern for their neighbors than for the distant others, and from this they will say it follows that anyone who tends to act on behalf of the distant others rather than on behalf of their neighbors shows a lack of empathy that marks their actions as morally wrong and/or undesirable.