Compassion and Benevolence in Democratic Deliberation

• In Event: 34.078 - Expanding Traditions of Civic Education and Social Cohesion: International Perspectives

Abstract

This paper examines the role of compassion and benevolence in social education. Like the first paper in the session, it draws from a conceptual framework that sees the purpose of social education in terms of preparing students to deliberate public issues as part of democratic civic participation (Parker, 2003). Such deliberation requires benevolence: Neither justice nor harmony can be pursued if people attend only to their own self-interest, and to be part of a public means precisely to transcend self (and even family and friends) in order to make decisions that benefit a greater good. In the Western curricular tradition of social education, this often has been equated with suppressing emotional attachments, so that everyone may be treated equally and dispassionately. This paper draws on Confucian philosophy, as well as Western philosophical theories of moral sentimentalism, in order to advance an alternative educational approach that begins with emotional feelings of compassion.

In this view, benevolence results not from suppressing our primary emotional attachments but from extending them to those we know less well or not at all. For the Chinese philosopher Mencius (4th century BCE), as for other Confucians, benevolence (仁 rén) is a core ethical value, grounded in a feeling of compassion for kin, other humans, and non-human animals (Van Norden, 2017). Although all people have innately compassionate responses, these initially exist only as what Mencius referred to as “sprouts” (duan 端), which must be nurtured and cultivated in order to achieve maturity (Van Norden, 2009; Wong, 1991). This involves extending compassion from the situations, contexts, and objects in which it occurs most naturally to those that seem further removed. Such extension is an educational task that requires providing students with the knowledge they need in order to orient their instinctive but undeveloped feelings of compassion toward others, so that they can engage in deliberations based in an attitude of benevolence. If a benevolent person is “pained by the suffering of others and takes joy in their happiness” (Van Norden, 2009), then the curriculum must help students understand people’s concrete circumstances: the realities that lead them to take joy or feel suffering, and how those can be affected by public policy decisions. This paper thus contributes to curriculum theory in social education by pointing to the role that compassion can play, not in improving interpersonal relations among students, but in guiding the selection of content knowledge necessary for democratic deliberations.

Authors

• Keith C. Barton, Indiana University

• Li-Ching Ho, University of Wisconsin - Madison