would seem a better starting point, enabling as it can devices like Smith’s impartial
spectator.
A spectrum of affective responses leading from pity to empathy seems
highly plausible as the basis of our humanitarian impulses. In one of his lesser
known articles, Charles Taylor provides us with an interesting account of sympathy,
understood in a broad sense that encompasses the relevant range of this
spectrum.^23 For Taylor, we really are dealing with a primitive, immediate and
unthinking impulse here, and he draws on an account of a Rescuer during the
Holocaust to illustrate this. He argues that sympathy, being moved by the suffering
of others, is powerfully constitutive of what it is to be human, and the possibility of
sympathetic responses is explanatorily basic in how we come to understand our
humanity.
This is not to say, however, that this provides us with a reliable, foundational
building block. The capacity to experience the humanitarian impulse is in turn
enabled or hindered by other factors. Sherman argues that though empathy may be
something that most of us develop in childhood and beyond to some extent, it
needs to be cultivated if it is to help us respond to threats to human dignity with
which we cannot easily identify.^24
Scenes of the helpless and so obviously innocent, of starving and orphaned
children, may transcend parochial borders; we may understand the dramatic
script without much explicit rehearsal. The simulation, or act of empathetic
imagination, may be fairly automatic, fairly procedural. We may experience
a sense of “there but for fortune,” a response that underscores our shared
humanity.
In other cases, threats to human dignity may be harder to simulate.
We may have to find mediating steps that bridge an alien world and our own
so that identificatory mechanisms can be established. So, some have argued,
the threat of rape many women live in fear of, or the prospect of female
genital mutilation, may require a sensitivity to women’s vulnerabilities that
many men may not easily come by without education and consciousness-
raising.^2523
24 Charles Taylor, "Sympathy", Journal of Ethics 3, no. 1 (1999).
25 See also Hunt, Inventing Human Rights , 39.
Sherman, "Empathy, Respect, and Humanitarian Intervention": 113.