Justice

Why talk about global justice on the anniversary of 9/11?

Well, why not? It is a day when people, immersed in busy lives, may actually stop to think in ways that they usually don’t. So why not talk about a vitally important topic that usually occupies too little of most people’s time? Indeed, shortly after September 11, 2001, I wrote that it might be that disaster itself that would force people’s imaginations outward, getting Americans, often so insular, to learn more about the developing world and its problems, since now those other parts of the world had impinged on our own safety.

But here are two discouraging facts about the moral imagination: It is typically narrow, focused on people and things that affect one’s own daily life. And it is easily engaged by sensational singular events, rather than by long-term mundane patterns. Adam Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, drew attention to both defects when he talked about how an earthquake in China would initially arouse great compassion in a “man of humanity” in Europe—until daily life returned with its predictable self-focused events and that same man found himself caring more about a pain in his own finger than about the deaths of a million people he had never met.

By now we know that Smith was right. Studies of our primate heritage (especially by Frans de Waal of Emory University) have shown that the capacity for compassion is one that we share with a number of species. Meanwhile, studies of human infants (particularly by Paul Bloom of Yale University) have demonstrated that from a very early age we are adept “mind readers,” able to see the world from someone else’s viewpoint. But, like apes, we humans typically deploy our compassion narrowly, with favoritism to ourselves and our circle of relations. And a disaster befalling some particular person whom we vividly imagine often has more force in guiding behavior than a general principle about who is worthy of help and when.

In his terrific recent book Altruism in Humans, C. Daniel Batson summarizes years of experiments showing that the vivid imagining of another person’s suffering is strongly correlated with helping behavior—but that compassionate response often takes a morally ambiguous form. When subjects agree to a general principle of fairness, for example in the allocation of scarce medical resources, and then hear a vivid tale of one person’s woe, they are usually willing to jump that person to the front of the queue, despite their awareness that they are violating their own principle. Batson concludes that compassion is necessary for morality, but woefully incomplete: We need principles and entrenched habits. Bloom comes to a similar conclusion: Morality has roots in “human nature” but is an achievement of culture that must go beyond our native equipment.

We saw the good and bad in compassion on 9/11: the strong surge of interest and concern for the people, of many races and backgrounds, who died; the new curiosity about nations far away from us. But we also saw the distressing shortfall of the compassionate imagination: As soon as things returned to “normal,” most people went back to their old habits and their daily lives, continuing to put themselves and their friends first in the old familiar ways. Moreover, the intense compassion that was generated by the disaster never got translated into a keen interest in the mundane and boring problems that actually kill so many more people in the world than terrorism, or even war: hunger, malnutrition, chronic diseases, lack of sanitation and clean water, sex-selective abortion, and infanticide. We didn’t even learn to care passionately about the right to education for all the world’s children, a theme much emphasized after 9/11 apropos of the women of Afghanistan.

What, then, should we learn from these unsurprising and all-too-human failures? First, we need not just emotional responses, but then, tempering and correcting them, principles and habits. Second, we’d better turn those principles into laws and institutions that treat all people with equal concern and regard: at the national level, but also through global agreements and global work on human development and human rights. Third, we all need to get involved in efforts to engage with the boring, unsexy daily problems, building global concern into the fabric of our lives. Bill Gates, for example, has shown very good judgment in focusing his philanthropy on vaccines.

Those of us who don’t have his means, and that is more or less all of us, can still contribute a great deal—through money, through work—to the global effort to eradicate what I called the “daily” killers and maimers of human potential. Let’s not focus on disaster. Let’s pursue full justice for all.

Martha C. Nussbaum is a professor in the philosophy department, law school, and divinity school at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton University Press, 2010).