The challenge here is similar to that acknowledged in Martha Nussbaum’s
influential plea for a cosmopolitan education to make the lives of distant strangers
less pallid in comparison to the colourful consolations of patriotism.^26 How to
cultivate a capacity for empathy that can potentially link us to any human and their
suffering? For Kwame Anthony Appiah, the answer lies in building out from an
identity that is already shared, such as the Christian identity that links American
Christians to Christians in Southern Sudan, or writers worldwide through PEN
International: “engagement with strangers is always going to be engagement with
particular strangers; and the warmth that comes from shared identity will often be
available”.^27 This is not dissimilar to Rorty’s sense that we empathise and
sympathise with people “like us”. What is not so clear, as I argued in the previous
chapter, is that our sense of shared identity is necessarily particularistic, in the
sense that many rescuers of Jews in the Second World War felt that the relevant
shared identity was humanity (though perhaps a particular conception of
humanity). If there is to some extent a dynamic of expanding our borders of
empathy according to a pattern of concentric circles, we must acknowledge that for
some, albeit perhaps a small minority of so-called “moral exemplars”, the particular
identity at stake might be one of, if not universal resonance, at least universal
scope.
Andrew Linklater complicates the question further, asking “whether the
extension of human solidarity depends not only on emotional identification and
compassion but also on feelings of guilt or shame when harm is caused or when
little is done to alleviate misery. The conjecture is that shame and guilt along with
compassion must become ‘cosmopolitan emotions’”.^28 Judith Lichtenberg draws on
recent work in experimental psychology to suggest that shame (more so than guilt),
can be particularly effective in motivating people to act out of a concern that their
26
Martha C. Nussbaum, "Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism", in For Love of Country? , ed.
Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002). 27
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W.
W. Norton & Company, 2006), 98. 28
Linklater, "Distant Suffering and Cosmopolitan Obligations": 27.