Compassionate Moral Realism

Colin Marshall offers a ground-up defense of objective morality, in which the central role is played by compassion. Compassion is taken to be our capacity to perceive other creatures’ pains, pleasures, and desires. Non-compassionate people are therefore perceptually lacking, regardless of how much factual knowledge they might have. Marshall argues that people with this form of compassion thereby fit a familiar paradigm of moral goodness. Part of this argument is the identification of an epistemic good which Marshall dubs being in touch . To be in touch with some property of a thing requires experiencing it in a way that reveals that property - that is, experiencing it as it is in itself. Only compassion, Marshall argues, lets us be in touch with others’ motivational mental properties. Compassionate Moral Realism offers a new answer to the question Why be moral? , which has been a central philosophical concern since Plato.