My reflection on compassion (for ethics, and social psychology)

Compassion is the emotion one experiences when feeling concern for another’s suffering and desiring to enhance that individual’s welfare. It is different from empathy, which refers to the mirroring or understanding of another’s response; from pity, which refers to feelings of concern for someone weaker than the self (but doesn’t involve an active response for reversing the situation); from altruism, which is an action that benefits someone else; and from agape, which refers to the love of humanity.


Compassion often involves an empathic response and altruistic behavior. However, compassion is defined as the emotional response when perceiving suffering and involves an authentic desire to help (Psychology, n.d.; Seppala, 2013), and can be delineated through five elements: 1) recognizing suffering. 2) Understanding the universality of suffering in human experience. 3) Feeling empathy for the person suffering and connecting with the distress (emotional resonance). 4) Tolerating uncomfortable feelings aroused in response to the suffering person (like distress, anger, fear) so remaining open to and accepting of the person suffering. 5) Acting to alleviate suffering (Strauss et al, 2016).


Finally (Preckel, Kanske & Singer, 2018), compassion can thus be viewed as an emotion-regulation strategy that buffers negative affection though the active generation of positive effect relying on reward-related and affiliation-related brain circuitries, unleashed by empathy (sharing affective states with another person) as the preamble for feeling concern for another (compassion). Apart from that, though economists have long argued the contrary, is generally accepted that both animals and humans have a compassionate instinct. In other words, compassion is a natural and automatic response that has ensured our survival, that of course, can be developed by habit; with surprising benefits for physical and psychological health that overcome any possible costs in altruistic behavior (Seppala, 2013; Lonczak, 2020).


As opposed to indifference, compassion arises and grows from love to everyone else and to us (being impossible to achieve the one without the other), and recognizes equality and interdependence between all human and living beings, as well as the inanimated things (García, 2013). Compassion, the most social of emotions, has been acknowledged as a moral virtue (habit operativus bonus, in terms of Saint Thomas Aquinas) infused on our souls (a moral value that by constant practice allows us to endure in ourselves the Catholic theological virtues of faith, hope and charity: faith makes us know the God to whom we are going, hope makes us look forward to joining Him, and charity makes us love Him; Brown, 1945; Hardon, n.d.; García-Valdez, 2014, Raffino, 2020). Even Darwin argued that sympathy, or compassion, is the central moral emotion, that will have been increased through natural selection (Ekman, 2010; Kukk, 2017; Psychology, n.d.).


Batson (1998) proposes that altruistic behavior can be motivated by self-serving motives (like the desire to reduce personal distress in response to another’s suffering or the goal of receiving social rewards for being helpful); and bay an other-oriented state called empathic concern, which closely resembles the definition of compassion, in terms of unselfish concern for the welfare of others (Radey & Figley, 2007; Psychology, n.d.). Getting back to Darwin, it’s not accurate to speak about the “survival of the fittest” (the phrase was coined by Herbert Spencer, not by Darwin). It is better to say “survival of the kindest”, because compassion is the reason for both the human race’s survival and its ability to continue to thrive as a species (Kukk, 2017).


When trying to dedicate one day to act compassionately, you will feel that simply hanging out with compassionate people, led to some state of elevation that, like a drop of water in the sea, inspire somehow a chain reaction. When involving in that experience, I personally felt that compassion can inspire my life and the change lives of others. Not in vain, Jesus insisted on the importance of “loving your neighbor as yourself”. Apart from that, I felt wonderful. Besides, I noticed that in general terms, I acted more or less like every day (I mean, I perceived myself as a compassionate person), and I didn’t notice any out of the ordinary response from others. Compassion is indeed a natural, healthy, and happy state of mind for all of us, and of course, the answer to the cost-benefit question is clear: the benefits of behaving compassionately clearly outweigh the eventual costs.


Camilo García Sarmiento


Sources:


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(n.d.) Compasión. Retrieved from: https://designificados.com/compasion/

Brown, F. (1945) Saint Thomas Aquinas on habit. Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Retrieved from: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/76233406.pdf

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