Irresistible Compassion: An Aspect of Eighteenth-Century Sympathy and Humanitarianism

Abstract

In a well-known letter written late in life, Thomas Jefferson reiterated some of the essential elements in his ethical philosophy. At one point he asserted, Nature hath implanted in our breasts a love of others, a sense of duty to them, a instinct, in short, which prompts us irresistibly to feel and to succor their distresses. . At least four distinct natural ethico-psychological qualities are reflected in these few words, though Jefferson unwittingly conflated them all into a single innate moral instinct and worried little about the separate historical life of the parts. Of the variety of interesting and typical eighteenth-century assumptions in the passage, it is the last one that is the subject of this paper: the belief that men irresistibly have for the sufferings of others and are equally irresistibly moved to alleviate that suffering. My purpose is to trace back to its modern origins the assumptions about that not only Thomas Jefferson but numerous other figures in the eighteenth century treated as self-evident fact. The belief in what we shall call irresistible compassion expresses great confidence in the human personality, a confidence that goes considerably beyond trust in the free exercise of reason as a guide or political safeguard. Here we are presented with an automatic mechanism for social good, not simply an intellectual option. To a twentieth-century mind, doubts about the reality and the reliability of this mechanism arise quickly; history and analysis both undercut it. We know more about the perversions of nature. But in the eighteenth century, among some groups, as Jefferson is a witness, the trust in certain qualities of human emotion was unbounded, as impressive certainly as the more often noted trust in rational faculties. Irresistible has another name commonly used in the eighteenth-century, sympathy; it was also called humanity. When the ideal was truly practiced, or when the alleged mechanism really worked, we have one of the essentials of humanitarianism. Modern humanitarianism may be defined as the widespread inclination to protest against obvious and pointless physical suffering.2

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