1

"And who is my neighbor?": Moral sentiments, proximity, humanity

Kallscheuer, Otto. Social Research 62.1 (Spring 1995): 99.

I DO NOT know whether it is of any particular importance that the man who "stood up,
and tempted" Jesus, asking him "Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" and thereby
provoking the famous story of the good Samaritan happened to be, as St. Luke wants us to know,
"a certain lawyer." But when we think of the role of legal definitions and legal action in stabilizing
which stranger in our neighborhood or knocking at our door is or is not entitled to our help this
detail surely fits well. This biblical episode begins with one of the usual traps set for the newest
heterodox preacher or prophet from Nazareth making his way from Galilee to Jerusalem--from the
province to the capital-and this time Jesus is challenged by a certain lawyer. In his defense, Jesus,
the clever Nazarene preacher, adopts an almost classical rhetorical device, as he usually does.(1)
Jesus answers his challenger by asking the counter-question, "What is written in the law? How
readest thou" The lawyer answers, almost automatically, at least not very surprisingly, by quoting
from the beginning of the daily prayer (Shenz Israel, Deuteronomy 6.5): "Thou shalt love the Lord
thy God with all thy heart ... " He then adds, "Thou shalt love your neighbor as thyself." This,
however, is not part of the prayer in the book Deutoronomy but a sentence taken from Leviticus,
another of the five books of Moses (19.18). And when "master" Jesus responds, "Thou hast
answered right--your answer was theologically correct--so follow the law and thou shalt live," the
man from Nazareth seems to have won the rhetorical contest. End of the first round.
The title question of this Social Research colloquium opens the second round: "And who is
my neighbor?" It might just have been the forensic skill or the dialectical spirit of our lawyer that
kept him from giving up so easily. Now he is the one questioning the answer of his opponent,
Jesus. But he does have a real point. And this time Jesus's answer is a bit longer. He tells the story
of the good Samaritan.(2)
The story of the merciful Samaritan is well known, perhaps even too well known. The holy
words sound too familiar to provoke our reflection. Rereading them now, I found the story of the
merciful Samaritan much more complex than I had remembered from my Catholic Sunday school
some decades ago. The message is much less obvious than I had thought. However, since I do not
wish to divert the discussion about real help and our moral paradoxes with too much textual

exegesis, I will sum up my deconstruction of this particular biblical text and context without
confronting them with other versions and readings. In the text of the Gospel of Luke and in its
context, namely, the quotation as the response of the tempting lawyer to the question of the
Nazarene prophet about the law, the question "Who is my neighbor" receives three very different
answers.
We find the first answer in the quotation that gave rise to the question. The lawyer answers
Jesus's question by invoking not only the basic religious commitment of every faithful Jew (daily
prayer) but also by invoking a very political rule. He quotes from a rather specific source, the
detailed rules about Purity and Holiness in the book of Leviticus, and specifically from the
nineteenth chapter of that book, where the Lord lays out the rules of membership and reciprocity
of His people. He does so only after all requirements of ritual, nutritional, and sexual purity have
been enumerated and, we might add, after the Chosen People have settled down. The Lord tells
Moses and His people to extend the attitude of brotherly love or kinship to all neighbors, that is, to
all the people of Israel. I give the full quotation: "Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine hart: thou
shalt not in any wise rebuke thy neighbor, and not suffer sin upon him. Thou shalt not avenge, nor
bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself: I am
the Lord" (Leviticus 19. 17 - 18, emphasis added). The book of Leviticus, from which this quotation
is taken, seems to presuppose that the former nomads have become a nation, a people with a
common history (shared traditions, shared rituals, shared boundaries) connected to a territory (the
Holy land). Being a neighbor is also a territorial property. Territorially defined, neighborhood is not
just a tribal unity (of nomads) but a political construction. Here the question "Who is my
neighbor?" refers to a context of redefining or redrawing the boundaries of membership. A nomadpeople has settled down, and family bonds are extended to a wider group: the nation.(3) It is
Moses, the founding father of the nation, to whom the Lord confers these new obligations of
political or national solidarity. Today, we would speak of our duties towards fellow citizens.
The second answer is obviously the one Jesus gives, telling his story of the good Samaritan.
I need not repeat it here, except perhaps to mention the fact-obvious to the original readers of the
Gospel but not to us--that the Samaritans did not belong to the Jewish people. They definitively
had no place at all in the national, cultural, and/or religious understanding of 'neighborhood'
within the political community of the chosen people. They did not belong to the national
neighborhood to which both the lawyer and Jesus (and Jesus's followers) belonged. What is more,

the Evangelist does not forget to remind us (Luke 9.52 - 56) that the Jews and the Samaritans--be
they defined as ethnic, national, or religious groups--actually hated each other.
Excursus: Bosnia--Samaria?
The reason why "the Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans" (John 4.9), although they
are geographical neighbors and their villages are dispersed, partially mixed, is extremely
complicated. It is difficult to decide whether the emotional 'fault-line' between both neighborhoods
had more of a religious or political origin. There is this strange mixture of proximity and apostasy
continuously evoked in all (anti-) Samaritan stories in the Bible (Dupont, 1989). The Samaritans are
no longer Jews, but we are told they once had been (their ancestors had been deported). They
believe in the same God but in an 'impure' syncretic way; and while they might not seem very
different to foreign administrators and Roman peace corps, from the Jewish viewpoint they are
"the almost the same" (Vladimir Jankelevitch).
This all looks pretty much like the Balkans today. Think only of the Bosnian Muslims. Their
ancestors had been christianized Slavs, later falling under Osman rule then converted to Islam. In
the 1970s, the notion of "Muslims" was introduced in communist Yugoslavia in order to distinguish
(very often former) Muslims from (former) Christians--orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats
(Gellner, 1983, p. 71). But after centuries of multireligious, even if not necessarily idyllic
neighborhoods and regions in the Osman Empire, and even after the recent Yugoslav decades,
today the Bosnian (ex)Muslims are (again) portrayed by orthodox Christian crusaders as "traitors
of Christianity" and as hereditary foes of Serbia. No wonder that after two years of war they begin
to feel, to dress, to behave like Muslims. On the other hand, some Bosnian Muslims themselves see
their ancestors' conversion to Islam as fidelity to a former heterodox "Bosnian" Christian church or
sect, sometimes also portrayed as identical with the antitrinitarian sect Bogumiles, a Balkan version
of the Cathari.
Which of the two answers is the right one? I really do not think that this matters very much
for our purpose. In the Bible, the proverbial hatred between Jews and Samaritans is always
presented as a very old story, and in a way it is. In fact, the tradition of this strife was continuously
and ritually reinvented. One group of the same ethnic family fell under foreign rule earlier than the
other group. So their experiences diverged; their stories began to contradict each other. The
Judeans and the Israelites were separated, and these separations led much later to a religious
schism. The Northern Kingdom of Israel had been crushed by the Assyrians in 722 BC, and much

of its original population had been forced into captivity. At the same time, a 'population exchange'
under the Assyrian king brought "men from Babylon, and from Cutah, and from Ava, and from
Hamath, and from Sepharvaim, and place[d] them in the cities of Samaria instead of the children
of Israel, and they possessed Samaria and dwelt in the cities thereof" (II Kings 17.24).
There seems to be no common account of the rest of the story: The Samaritans called
themselves the Children of Israel (Bene-Yisrael) and the true Observers (of the older, original books
of the Holy Scripture, the Pentateuch alone); they are portrayed by the Jews--and somehow also by
the first Christian Jews(4)--as syncretic and impure infiltrations of pagan polytheism. In the time of
Jesus already we have a rather "thick" but incoherent account of the alleged reasons or origins of
the Judaeo-Samaritan antagonism (or Erbfeindschaft), but it is almost impossible to establish
whether the political or the religious strife came first. Even under the Roman rule there were
struggles and psychological warfare between the two communities: Samarian incursions in the
Jewish Temple, attacks on Pilgrims headed to Jerusalem, Galilean raids in Samaritan villages.
Whereas the priest and the Levite in the story that Jesus tells fail to recognize the half-dead
victim on the road as victim even if they had belonged to the same neighborhood/nation, the
Samaritan (that is, the ethnic foe and religious enemy) establishes a relationship with the man
fallen among thieves and left half dead. Thus, 'neighborhood' means many concrete, practical
things, all of them mentioned in the text of Luke (10.33 - 37): seeing the victim, feeling compassion,
going to him, first aid, taking care of him, providing cure and treatment and comfort (Dupont,
1989). We might suppose that the victim should have been happy anyway, even without this "first
class" treatment by the Samaritan. His life at least would have been saved by the Samaritan, even
without sleeping in the same category of hotel as his rescuer. But what the good Samaritan did was
not just rescue the half-dead victim; he treated him as one of his own kind, as a fellow citizen with
not just physical survival needs but with his own dignity. "Love thy neighbor like yourself" in this
version means more than rescue. It requires an emotional "investment" of personal identification
that should accompany the enlargement of our moral horizon to "all mankind" (so the biblical story
tells us).
One of the specific modern aspects of the Holocaust seems to have been the preliminary
social suppression of any familiarity and proximity of the future victims: "the social production of
(moral) distance" (Baumann, 1989, p. 192). Moral responsibility always presupposes some kind of
social proximity. What Jesus's Samaritan story tells us is that in order to be a neighbor, you have to

make yourself involved, to become actively and voluntarily 'familiar' with the victims of social
cruelty or, for that matter, of natural catastrophes. The problem is, however, that this kind of highly
personal identification is always selective. It has to be; otherwise it would be just a duty-either a
political or a moral duty. Oskar Schindler took high risks, and probably he was aware of the moral
fact that all the prosecuted Jews 'deserved' the same help, but he took these risks "only" for "his
Jews," those in his company, in his moral family (Jackson, 1991, p. 161-63). So the second version of
'neighborhood' requires more than our common understanding of moral duty, but Jesus's
command is formulated in an universal manner. And it is obviously this paradox of
"supererogatory universalism" (we might even speak of "holiness") that is stressed by the fact that
in Jesus's (or Luke's) account the man who actually makes himself the loving neighbor of the needy
is himself the member of a detested and hated neighborhood.
The third version of solidarity or 'moral neighborhood' is not mentioned directly in Luke's
account either by Jesus or by the lawyer. But I think it is present in the dialogue; I can almost hear
it in the air. The command with which the lawyer had answered Jesus's question ("Love thy
neighbor as thyself," quoted from Leviticus 19), and which I have understood as a kind of classical
Old Testament version of national solidarity ("Love thy compatriot like you love thy family") is
specified and corrected in the same chapter of Leviticus. Not even twenty verses later (but the
actual order of Leviticus 19 does not seem to be very logical) we read: "But the stranger that
dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for
ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord ... " (Luke 19. 34). This is a moral command
too, but it does not concern only the individual. It is given to the whole collectivity of the Jewish
nation. The text evokes immediately the famous chorus of Amos 9.7: "Have I not brought Israel out
of the land of Egypt / And the Philistines from Caphtor, / And the Syrians from Kir?"(5) It is
because of their own experience of liberation from bondage that the people of Israel (should)
understand what it means to be a stranger, a victim, an outcast, and, therefore, the political
community should be a morally 'open' neighborhood. The national community should recognize
duties towards strangers; immigrants should be treated as (if they were) neighbors: "Love thy
neighbor as thyself."
I think--but I cannot prove it--that this moral melody of self-understanding of the national
community is still pretty much in the air when Jesus's disputatio with the lawyer comes to the
point; and so the preacher/prophet Jesus, by telling the (much more compelling) story of the
merciful Samaritan, is also responding to a moral tune the lawyer has already touched. Jesus is

reminding him of elements of their common identity as members of the people once rescued from
bondage, of a people that therefore recognizes basic moral duties towards strangers. Even today,
answering the question "Who is our neighbor" requires coming to a just balance between the three
versions of (moral) neighborhood or solidarity we have found in the biblical story of the good
Samaritan: national solidarity; personal (supererogatory) identification with (certain and/or all)
victims of violence; and inclusive community, that is, the degree of openness for strangers in the
self-understanding of our political community. Jews and Samaritans under Roman rule--as it
seems--did not achieve or cultivate a very stable equilibrium between the three versions of
solidarity. But, as my following and not very systematic remarks will show, I do not see any golden
rule for reaching such a moral equilibrium in our present day situation.
The CNN-Factor: Paradoxes of Attention
Hegel once compared the daily newspaper with the morning prayer--obviously the prayer
of an enlightened German Protestant. What happens if people do not pray? Hegel read in his
newspapers the Big Story of Western Freedom as Universal History (or Weltgeschichte, grand recit,
meta-narrative), of Revolution, Republic and Constitution, of Napoleon and the Civil Law, of the
New (postrevolutionary) World Order--and he indicated perhaps not exactly the "end" but
something like the overall direction of History in Europe. Peoples without a history-ethnic entities
without states--obviously did not belong to the interesting news; they belonged to prehistory,
Vorgeschichte (Hegel, 1970, p.82).
History, the real news, was about Reason becoming a secular force ("die Geschichte da
aufzunehmen, wo die Vernunftigkeit in die weltliche Existenz zu treten beginnt" [Hegel, 1970, p.
81l), whereas all the other news was not meaningful at all. Even Francis Fukuyama, who surely is
no "water-proof" Hegelian, followed this line of reasoning. When critics were pointing at situations
of dictatorship, ethnic conflict, or religious fundamentalism in the Third World, contradicting his
big History optimism, Fukuyama's answer was that big History does not care about Bourkina
Fasou. Indeed, what about the daily news? Does it not produce a new sense of history (for
example, a "new world order" after the break down of communism) or a new occasion for the big
choice between good and evil (for example, "the West against the rest")?
There is indeed some temptation to paint a picture of the complicated post cold war world
in this way: some liberal intellectuals portray the "Bosnian nation" as a multicultural paradise that
even this (rather secular) Islamic population in Southeastern Europe probably never represented.

And there might very well arise a delusion of liberal news consumers at the very moment when a
(hopefully) somewhat freer and less besieged Bosnia might turn out (after some years of bombing
by Christian Serbs) more "Islamist" than pluralist. Meanwhile we continue to observe the tendency
of Western intellectuals to use bad news about the Bosnian to produce a good example of the old
J'aecuse attitude and for a surplus-profit of prime-time and cultural capital.
What defines actuality? Michel Foucault has defined the core of Enlightenment with this
Kantian question.(6) Are we really interested in informing ourselves about stories of suffering,
without any "historical" sense How much do we know about world hunger? Is the mere act of
being (or keeping) informed--for example, being aware of the fact that in 1987 approximately 40
million people died from poverty and famines, and that many of these deaths might have been
prevented by combined political and economic, public and private action(7)--a question of taste (of
preference) or of moral obligation (of duty), of understanding, or of sentiment For David Hume it
is only "after every circumstance, every relation is known, [that] the understanding has no further
room to operate, nor any object on which it could employ itself. The approbation or blame which
then ensues cannot be the work of the judgment, but of the heart; and it is not a speculative
proposition or affirmation, but an active feeling or sentiment" (Hume, 1965, p.128, emphasis
added). But for the average citizen of a present day Western country, 'sentiment' usually intervenes
before knowledge or information. Is it not "active feeling or sentiment" too that determines
whether (and on what topic) we choose to keep informed I suppose it is very often a question of
shifting preferences. We might feel the duty, but we prefer not to feel it too concretely. Of course,
we more or less keep informed. But when the pictures of refugee camps or mutilated children
appear, we prefer to look elsewhere (to read other books or other pages in our newspaper, to
switch the channel on the television).
Are we obliged to keep informed, to inform ourselves about the state of the world, the
continents of need and danger and despair, of hunger and warfare? Obliged by whom? By
anything else than by our sentiments? We probably feel at times that we should keep ourselves
much more informed on these matters. Much more, in any case, than those of us who are not
demographic, economic, or agricultural experts actually do.(8) It is true that this information might
matter not only for our personal customs (for example, which products we boycott or buy as
private consumers) but also for our public interests and for our electoral behavior (for example,
what foreign policy do we want our governments to pursue?). Besides, was it not a classical
argument against universal suffrage that only the responsible should vote? Should it not be an

integral part of our civic responsibility to care about-at least to have some knowledge of--the state
of human suffering? Should, therefore, only the "informationally virtuous" have the right to decide
about government, taxes, and budgets, especially the portion of it dedicated to economic help for
the starving part of mankind on this globe?(9)
I think we can suppose that the anarchy of the international political system, which
certainly has not disappeared nor diminished since (and because of) the recent victory of the West
in the Cold War, will continue to exist at least for the next five decades. And the combined results
of population growth, economic competition, and--not least!--ecological degradation in the next
decades could cause various types of ecological and/or economic scarcity which in turn might be
reasons for various types of violent conflicts (Homer-Dixon, 1991). So we probably do not even
need Samuel Huntington's "civilisational clashes" or other more elaborate sociological or cultural
theories in order to predict a continuously growing "overproduction" of war and prosecution, of
economic, ecological, political, religious victims, and, consequently, refugees on our globe in the
near future. And, what is more, we are in principle aware of this. We know about it. We could
know about it, or perhaps we ought to know about it. Is it not a day-to-day moral offense, a virtual
violation of human rights and human dignity that "we" (privileged Western liberals) in most parts
of our conscious lives do not even care to know about this starving of "the other half" of
humankind? It is obvious why we prefer not to be aware all the time. This would make it morally if
not impossible, then surely much harder to continue our normal (and rather comfortable) lives as
citizens of the rich (and rather safe) part of the world--like looking outside a "stretch limousine
onto the potholed streets of New York where homeless beggars live."(10)
Judith Shklar once noted that the difference between misfortune and injustice is in itself a
question of justice. What counts as injustice depends on socially constructed--not transhistorical-differences of sensibility, understanding, and valuation. Establishing this differences, drawing and
redrawing the demarcation lines between misfortune and injustice, is itself a struggle about the
definition of common sense, taking place on an always already "value-loaded" battlefield of
sensibility and understanding. Shklar wrote about the California earthquake, "From the victims
point of view ... what began as a natural disaster was in its full effects a public injustice. Given their
expectations of current technology and belief in political equality, these citizens would and should
vent their outrage upon the established authorities .... To take the victims' view seriously, does not
mean that they are always right when they perceive injustice" (Shklar, 1990, p.3).

This struggle--with and/or within our conscience--seems to presuppose at least that we

know about natural and social catastrophes. But did "we" know about Rwanda when the genocide
began? Or did we chose not to inform ourselves? And was "our" knowledge about the famine in
Ethiopia in the eighties (the kind of information that also gave rise to Band Aid and other charity
campaigns heavily 'backed' by the media) correspond to the actual state of affairs and needs down
there in the Sahel-zone?(11) Between ourselves and the people struggling for survival there is
another and none less brutal (Darwinian) battlefield, where information and actuality (and first of
all pictures) are fighting for their survival in the evening news and the morning papers. And this
struggle

for

informational

survival

of

this

or

that

event

as

"news,"

that

is,

as

word/picture/emotion package called "event" and memorialized as relevant, is continuously

taking place in the news market for our attention (Franck, 1994). This market constitutes a
"subsystem" with its own differentiated, "relatively autonomous" laws of accumulation that have
nothing to do with the relevance of the news for the people concerned. The international
"informational value" of this or that item of news does not depend on the local "use value" of
concern, pain, or worry. So political criticism of television-manufactured reality is needed, but it
must first be professionally packaged before it can arrive in the public sphere if it is to be
informationally effective or produce counterinformation. Just deconstructing informational
objectivity does not produce or translate into real concern ("Sorge").
To be sure, even our traditional Kulturkritik, the pseudo-intellectual, moralistic, anti-or
"high-cultural" media-bashing is quite understandable. We indeed should criticize the highly
questionable over dramatizing of events (for example, the fact that every second mass murder is
called a holocaust). We must deplore the inflationary methods of horrifying collective tragedies
(thereby banalizing them), and we cannot tolerate the less and less frequent observance of
standards of decency and shame in titles, texts, and images. But this, our usual kind of criticism,
very often misses the point, as, obviously, does the opposite postmodern and also quite fashionable
devaluation of reality (Virilio, 1991). Think about fundraising for refugee camps or the struggle for
public opinion in order to attain a political shift toward the United States intervention in Haiti.
How should campaigners behave in order to capture our limited attention?
The informational market is a zero-sum game: each event or cause or picture that "makes it" to the
headlines eo ipso inevitably "kills" countless other possible news worthy items, countless
possibilities for viewers and readers to be touched by compassion for this or that cause in our
worldwide neighborhood. Somebody I do not see cannot be my 'neighbor' in the biblical sense, in

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one of the meanings of the episode in the Gospel of Luke referred to above. The man, fallen among
thieves and now dying on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, was seen by a certain priest ("and
when he saw him, he passed by on the other side") and likewise by the Levite (who also "passed on
the other side") and finally by a certain Samaritan. They all at least saw him.
The Helpless Philosopher: Moral Objectivity and Sentimentality
In moral philosophy, the situation is probably even more aporetic, at least from a
rationalistic point of view, that is, if we think that moral philosophy could really determine that
(and why) we should help in Somalia and we should not help in Rwanda (and by what means we
should help, for example, by "humanitarian" intervention but not by military action).(12) Given the
overproduction of need, hunger, prosecution, and warfare in this world, given the possibility of
knowing about it in a much more immediate way (that is, given the virtual overproduction of news
about that growing need in relation to a limited market of attention), who, by any objective
standard, could decide why boat people from Vietnam should have been welcomed in the United
States and boat people from Haiti or Cuba should not be welcomed?
I do not believe that any of the current leading moral theories (inside the academic
community) can really help us decide whom we should rescue, which group of people out of the
growing number of women and men in danger or hunger or persecution should be helped first
(and survival is a question of time?) or should be helped at all, even when help would mean "to
disarm the aggressor."(13) We are privileged liberal citizens living in the rich parts and in the
rather safe neighborhoods of our globe. (Do we deserve this, our well-being and relative security,
more than citizens of former Yugoslavia, for example?) Are "we" morally obliged to rescue people
in hunger, danger, and who are being persecuted? The answer is, obviously, "Yes, we are." But it is
not very clear what this answer means.
A deontological universalistic moral point of view (say, the Kantian Categorical Imperative
or its contemporary equivalents) cannot tell us whom we should rescue (and whom first), and
how-by means of private charity, by sustaining governments that sustain international help
programs, by armed solidarity with victims. Utilitarianism perhaps could be more precise. But we
would not accept the verdict, even if there were a totally objective (whatever that may mean) ideal
observer. He might be too objective to be human. His reasons might be too "detached" from our
concerns to arouse our moral sentiments and emotions (Nagel, 1991). For example, we obviously
would not be prepared to accept the conclusion of such an Ideal Supreme Calculator (let us

11

suppose it could be proven on utilitarian grounds) that might deprive every citizen in this country
(or worse, each of our children) of ten years of his/her lifetime, thereby reducing unnecessary
premature death (death from starvation) in the Third World by fifty percent. We might be willing
to accept, even to require this sacrifice as a personal decision; we might consider sacrificing one's
life as the only truly "moral" decision (Emanuel Levinas), but we would not be in favor of
enforcement by the state.
Some years ago, before the recent German reunification, Ernst Tugendhat gave a paper at
the Romerberg discussions in Frankfurt entitled "On the Helplessness of Philosophers Facing the
Moral Dilemmas of Today" (Tugendhat, 1992b, pp. 371-82). I have the strong feeling that this thesis
is correct; and, besides, his own work which tries to compensate for this lack of moral objectivity,
that is, the non-availability of a common and universal and irrefutably obliging moral order that
could "prove," "enforce," or "validate" our own universalistic moral intuitions, cannot but
strengthen this impression (Tugendhat, 1993). While Tugendhat is still looking for some kind of
"objective" basis for a universalistic moral outlook, he in recent years has focused more on the role
of moral sentiment in ethical reasoning, thereby criticizing not only the traditional metaphysical
understanding of moral objectivity but also the rationalist (Kantian or communicative) mainstream
in German philosophy. A "plausible" form of moral objectivity, so Tugendhat maintains today, can
only be based on our self-understanding and on our conception of the common life, on the way we
want to be recognized and valued as persons, as social beings, as members of humanity in general.
But, with this argument, Tugendhat has also, perhaps involuntarily, shown the very contingency
and particularity of universalistic morality itself (Tugendhat, 1993, p. 97). For a rationalist
understanding of morality, the moral obligation is based on the identity of (and solidarity between)
free, conscious, rational beings (Kantian "ends in themselves"), thereby allegedly founded on
something more "solid" ("a priori" or "transcendental") than just human emotions. But as soon as
you understand moral obligation in itself as a matter of moral sentiment, of sympathy and
compassion, then moral objectivity becomes a much more problematic concept.(14) Now moral
objectivity can only mean (and require) that we (should) try to incorporate (some) impartiality in
our moral reasoning, insofar as we do not want our particularistic inclinations to prevail against
the needs of people in danger. But moral objectivity does not refer to some 'objective' substance or
essence located somewhere "inside" every human being as an independent source of morality (for
example, Reason). So moral obligation does not (and could not possibly) liberate us from our
feelings and fears--not at the least from our self-deceptions.

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As I tried to show above, our moral sentiments (or at the least our awareness of situations of
cruelty and catastrophe that could move our moral sentimentality) are also most likely to be
influenced by the modern doxa par excellence: the media and the market of attention. I do not
believe there is an independent source of morality other than attention, emotion, and will
articulated in our self-understanding. But even if there were additional sources of moral objectivity
(the traditional candidates being Reason and/or Religion), when it comes to political ethics, to
collective commitments and public deliberation, in liberal democracies, pluralist societies, and
multireligious cultures, political morality cannot require anything more compelling than the
feelings and willing, the emotions and intentions of their citizens. Even our "deepest" convictions-those that we want never to be modified, not even by any majority opinion or vote--must be felt as
our convictions; even our "second order" preferences (preferences about the type of preferences we
can accept as "ours") are our preferences.
Objective Redson and Special Reasons: The Political Memory
These doubts about the existence of independent or objective sources for universal moral
obligations may be epistemical doubts, but they do concern existential questions. This "quest for
certainty" has moral, not just epistemological reasons. After the catastrophes and totalitarianism
and in the midst of the massacres and genocides of this century, the moral philosopher is--as is
everybody else--looking for something more stable than the vicissitudes of human sentiment. (In
Europe, in times of crisis, people usually look out for the state. In the United States, they probably
will be longing for old-time religion.) But liberal democracy is doxophilia (Tamas, 1994), because
and insofar as it respects the "shifting involvements" of popular opinion and public deliberation as
the bases for public decision.(15) If you do not like doxa (opinions, persuasion, deliberation) as is
the case for most philosophers since Plato, you can only despair about the state of morals in
Western democracies.
If democracy demands education and experience, it is only a matter of tradition and opinion, of
habit and mood. Opinions and moods can shift, and so also can the attitude of nations towards
rescue. Immigration laws and practices still depend on whether and how much nation-states open
their borders (and for whom) or risk their citizens' comfort, wealth, and, in the case of military
interventions, even lives. It is a matter of tradition and mood that accounts for whether nations
want to risk even lives for the sake of humanitarian assistance (somewhere else) and the extent to
which they retain their (past and present) responsibility for the fate of other nations as part of their

13

collective identity. The different attitudes of, for example, today's French, American, and German
public opinion and public rhetoric directed toward the very idea of engaging troops in peacekeeping operations (not to speak of peace-making) is a good example of how deeply particular
national histories count, especially in universal humanitarian issues.
But I do not think that the above professed epistemological skepticism concerning the very
existence of independent "sources of moral objectivity" will necessarily also lead us to moral
and/or political apathy in the face of need and starvation, aggression and cruelty. In order to make
this point very clear I will turn to an obvious example: is there any objective reason why my own
country, Germany, which up to this day and in contradiction to what is the reality, is still refusing
to be considered as a country of immigration, should change its mind (and change the legal norms
and procedures by which someone becomes a German citizen) I do not think so. But I do think that
there are plenty of special reasons why it ought to change. For example, it is unfair to deprive
many immigrants, especially of Turkish origin (we might better call them "Turkish-German"
residents), of their citizenship, as they are fellow citizens without citizen rights, people who have
paid their German taxes for twenty years or more. It is counterproductive for any open economy to
restrict immigration. Many, but unfortunately not yet too many, German fellow citizens feel
ashamed of the lack of moral standing of a Republic which seems not to honor its promises of
being an "open society" at the very moment when foreigners--political, economic, and ecological
refugees--are taking these promises seriously. And, obviously, my country does have (which means
Germans should feel) a special responsibility if we are to acknowledge the burdens of our recent
past. Because of Germany's terrible role in European history in the first half of this century and
because of our (at least morally) unmerited well-being in the latter half, today's Germans are (that
is, ought to feel) in a special way obliged to provide their share of humanitarian help and civic
hospitality.
Germans should feel these kinds of obligations towards foreigners in general, and Germany
does have special obligations towards the peoples (and states) that have been the victims of
German aggression and German crimes in this century. Obviously this is especially true of the Jews
and the state of Israel (whose existence is at least partially a consequence of the Holocaust)(16) but
also the Sinti and the Roma gypsies. I believe that this responsibility should include as well the
readiness to participate in military and/or humanitarian interventions, obviously within
cooperative structures and under inter-or multinational rule. As you know, this is a matter of
argument and public debate in post-unification Germany. But, this being said, most American or

14

French criticism of "German pacifism" usually misses the point. After two World Wars caused by
Germany, it is a positive achievement (not the least due to American reeducation, very often
inspired by rescued German emigrants and United States immigrants) that the new post-Cold War
situation and the new geopolitical responsibilities of the new, greater Germany do spontaneously
provoke "anti-interventionist" feelings and fears in (as I believe) the majority of German citizens
both in the new Eastern German Lander as well as in the Western part of the Federal Republic.
On the other hand, it is a much more serious and sad sign how quickly the "basic human
right" ("Grundrecht") to asylum for foreign refugees introduced by the founding fathers of the
Bonn Republic in the Federal Provisional Constitution ("Grundgesetz") has been abolished in the
reunited Germany, with a (not so tacit) consensus of the overall totality of the political class, a
process that began long before 1989.(17) Even if it might be conceded that this "Asylum Paragraph"
had become a bottleneck for economic and other non-political or religious refugees, this overload
of asylum demands very well might have been prevented through a consistent reform of
immigration legislation. But because Germany does not consider itself an immigration country
("kein Einwanderungsland"), this did not occur. I could give many more and more detailed reasons
or motivations for humanitarian solidarity. But would they be, or should they become, more
"objective"? Not in the sense, at least, that they would be more detached from the very specific
history (and, therefore, as it seems to me, from the special responsibility) of this country, this
people, and our awareness of German history, the moral sensibility of our memory, and so on.
In the end, any public moral argument arrives at this point: what is the real public German
self-understanding and commitment which derives from our history as a state and collective
identification as a nation? Given what we are (as a result of our history and its consequences for
others), what kind of responsibility do we as a collective body accept? What kind of special
responsibility do we as citizens of a democratic state assume for ourselves and our neighbors? In
other words, who are our neighbors? All these questions belong to the family of the third
understanding of neighborhood I found in the biblical story of the merciful Samaritan. Obviously,
there are also prudential reasons for and against the restricting of immigration. They concern the
domestic limits of tolerance in popular mood (limits that should be overcome but cannot be totally
neglected), the labor market and the welfare state, the generational contract (which actually might
be saved by fresh, demographically active immigrant populations), and European stability (to be
considered even by those who are reluctantly opposed to greater foreign responsibility for
Germany). Prudent reasons are also pertinent for our moral awareness--and it could not be

15

otherwise; our responsibility includes an awareness of reality. Our readiness to help other people
in need or to accept some of them as our fellow citizens will depend on our individual sentiments
and commitments--and on the role of our moral and historical obligations for our accepted
collective identity--and this also could not be otherwise.
But we should always be skeptical of our own sincerity sometimes it is as if we were
compelled not to be touched by a needy stranger, and sometimes it seems "natural" to pass by on
the other side of the road, as the priest between Jericho and Jerusalem did. But as we
institutionalize a crucial part of our domestic charity (the welfare state), a fortiori we should
institutionalize some of our (not so popular) moral obligations towards individual strangers,
especially refugees, but also towards peoples and nations. We at least should institutionalize a
public advocacy for the kind of compassion that does not "come naturally." And, as nobody likes to
risk his or her fellow citizens' life, we should be doubtful about our sincerity especially when we
invoke noble and pacifist motives for non-engagement. Institutionalized co-responsibility in
international affairs might help to develop and establish standards for military help or
intervention, but as these should be related to democratic deliberations at home, they must depend
on public opinion, popular mood, and sensibility. So the feeling of responsibility might be greater
in some countries than in others; and it might evolve (or devolve) in time.
Minimal Coherence: A Modest proposal
Are there no fixed grounds for our moral obligations, no a priori criteria that might
establish our duty to help, to intervene--or to refrain from it? I do not believe that there are any
'objective' criteria for (active or passive) help. A certain percent of the national product should be
spent on welfare, international development, peace-keeping, or private charity--or a certain percent
of strangers admitted for emigration every year, in relation to growth-rates of the per capita income
or the per family number of children (or any other objective factor). Again, we cannot appeal to
something more objective than the self-understanding of the state, the nation, the collectivity in
question. We are again, metaphysically speaking, in the open sea of self-understandings and
meanings, feelings and sentiments.
Differences in political culture might also be relevant. Take an example from social policy,
just for the sake of the argument. United States citizens somehow "genetically" prefer "private" (or
religious) charity and hate any generalized right to solidarity which exists in a state regulated and
enforced welfare system, whereas in Europe, private charity covers only some supererogatory

16

moral assistance (especially for noncitizens, for the immigrants, and for those outside the
population of working citizens: the old and disabled persons). If private or religious Caritas in the
United States would produce roughly the same minimum standard of decency for all fellow
citizens as the welfare state elsewhere without thereby damaging economic competitiveness and
innovation, it might be a morally neutral choice between the Unites States and the European
system.
Let us now consider the shame that "we" (Americans and Germans who belong to the
richest populations in the world) who see or know about the killing fields of Rwanda and do
nothing bear. It is a shame; that can only mean we should feel ashamed of this, of our passive or
even "actively passive" injustice (Shklar, 1990), and we should feel obliged to change it. Almost any
kind of "humanitarian imperialism"--possibly authorized/legitimized but not necessarily run by
the United Nations (Michael Walzer calls it "trusteeship," perhaps with participation or coresponsibility of the Organization of African Unity [OAU]) would have been preferable to the
actual unrestricted genocide in Rwanda. And, whereas there are good historical reasons for why
German troops did not fight against the Serbian army (or in the Balkans more generally), I do not
see any serious moral or political objection against "out of area" actions of NATO forces
(comprising German units) in Africa, under United Nations authorization and OAU control.(18)
As in the domestic policy example concerning private charity and public welfare given
above, we might adopt at least an "internal" coherence test. It would go like this: a nation that
refrains totally (as a matter of principle) from taking part in United Nations peace-keeping or
"humanitarian" operations should be (at least) more receptive to strangers. It should be more open
especially to refugees from crisis areas than to other countries, thereby at least indirectly
contributing to the rescue of strangers in need. This would be a plausible argument against
countries which chose a restrictive immigration policy and at the same time refuse to accept their
share of international responsibility (as is presently the case of Germany). Even this minimal
coherence test obviously would not give us any "clear cut" definition of our moral obligations.
However, it should provoke awareness. And it might reveal in what ways we should attempt to
resolve the contradictions between foreign policy and moral sentiment.
The question is, should we? There is always another way of avoiding "cognitive dissonance" or its
moral equivalent, namely, treating facts as though they were mere opinions." We can look away. We
can choose or get used to not being aware of the state of the world. The priest passed by on the

17

other side of the road, the news consumer switches channels, and the politician refers to the intrastate character of most of the actual "ethnic wars." It is, in fact, a matter of choice whether or not we
look at our neighbor.

Notes:
1 Remember the other well-known rhetorical trap set for Jesus, allegedly by disciples of the Pharisees who
had brought Herodians with them to testify to Jesus's answer: should a good, law-abiding Jew pay taxes to
the Roman empire, that is, to a pagan foreign ruler and his local collaborator, Herod? Jesus's counter
question: what do you see on your penny coin? And, as we know, the answer ending this dispute became
proverbial also: "Render unto Caesar the things which be Caesar's" (See Matthew 22:15-22; Mark 12: 13-17;
Luke 20:20-26).
2 For an extremely useful comment on the Samaritan episode, see the remarks of the great Benedictine New
Testament scholar, Jacques Dupont (1989). Peter Winch, in his stimulating philosophical comment on this
biblical text, is referring only to the second version of "being thy neighbor" (of the three versions of solidarity
I will distinguish below) and, therefore, does not note the tension/relation to the other two meanings of
'moral neighborhood' (see Winch, 1987).
3 The nineteenth chapter from which the lawyer is quoting presents a somewhat casual example of various
prescriptions which somehow recall the Ten Commandments concerning, in the first instance, the freely
chosen duties of the Chosen People towards the Lord (because the people at the time had already opted for
the Covenant; see Walzer, 1985). Then, we find detailed purity rules concerning the offerings, nutrition,
agriculture, and sexual relations and, finally, social rules valid for the Covenant people (Leviticus, 19:11-18),
which in one verse (19: 34) are also extended to strangers. I shall return to this point. Even if the book of
Leviticus follows immediately after the book of Exodus, all of these detailed prescriptions look very much
like later interpolations of the rituals of sacrifice, probably from the era of the Second Temple.
4 See the mission of Phillip in the city of Samaria/Sebaste (Acts of the Apostles, Chapter 8), where Simon
Magus, "[who] before time in the City used sorcery, and bewitched the people of Samaria," is baptized and
quite naturally represents an initial internal danger for the new Christian community: misunderstanding the
Holy Ghost as witchcraft and as a "gift of God [that] may be purchased with money" (Acts 8: 20). So the
baptized Samaritan is seen by the first Christian Jews as naturally inclined to "impure" syncretism-Christian
spirituality mixed with witchcraft.
5 Michael Walzer (1990, p. 512) has given a stimulating interpretation of this Amos text, understood as a
model of 'reiterative universalism' and, politically, of national self-determination.
6 Already, Hannah Arendt had tried to localize the political essence of Kant's philosophy in his Critique of
Judgment. See Foucault, 1984; Arendt, 1982; Kallscheuer, 1993.
7 On these questions, see Sen and Drze, 1987.
8 In the final chapter of his book, Equality and Partiality, Thomas Nagel sustains that only a truly "just social
order" might release us from our duty to be interested and engaged in more than simply the questions and
conflicts that regard us, our families, and our friends (Nagel, 1991, p. 248). So, unless this just state of affairs
exists, we are obliged to adopt not only a subjective, but also a more objective point of view. But what else
does this phrase--we are morally obliged--mean than that we should feel obliged?

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9 This, by the way, might also be an argument in favor of Bernard Williams' "thought experiment": creating
an enlightened international rescue agency, "extremely well-funded by charitable billionaires" and
commanding military forces recruited among "idealistic mercenaries," a kind of "armed amnesty
international," a rescue council whose "decisions of policy would be made by a guiding committee of
respected international figures" (Williams, 1994). These wise and well-respected women and men who
should decide about humanitarian and/or military interventions obviously also would have to be a group of
well informed people, whereas in democratic states, governments and parliaments depend in their decision
making process on a majority of its citizenship, who, in most cases, are not even informed about the issues at
stake (nor interested enough to inform themselves).
10 Thomas F. Homer-Dixon uses this metaphor in an interview and continues: "Inside the limo are the air
conditioned post-industrial regions of North America, Europe, the emerging Pacific Rim, and
few other isolated places with their trade summitry and computer information highways. Outside is the rest
of mankind, going in
completely different direction" (Kaplan, 1994, p. 60).
11 See the drastic judgment of Africa Watch director Alex De Waal:
One consequence of the depoliticisation of relief was that
'natural disaster' model of human suffering prevailed [in the media--and in public opinion campaigns of
charitable non-governmental organizations]. Repeatedly, when a government reduced its own citizens to a
state of acute hunger and desperation, through corruption, ineptitude or brutal counterinsurgency warfare,
the blame was put on the weather. The famine in Ethiopia during 1983--1985 was perhaps the most
spectacularly successful example of this--a famine caused in large part by a combination of military strategy
and Stalinist social engineering was attributed to drought and ecological crisis (De Waal, 1994, p. 15).
12 As the debate about the Somalian intervention has shown, it is in the prototypical ethnic/national warfare
of disintegrating empires or post-colonial states less and less possible to make clear-cut distinctions between
humanitarian and military intervention (which does not mean that there is not difference between healing
and shooting). Even non-absolute pacifists should be prepared, at least in principle, to "back" humanitarian
help by some kind of military intervention. Otherwise, the humanitarian help might just help the stronger
party (as non-governmental organizations help in Ethiopia seems to have done for the Mengistu regime).
13 In 1993, Pope John Paul II said this about the Serbian aggression in Bosnia-Herzogovina. He had opposed
the Allied intervention against Iraq, sustaining that in the nuclear age, "just war" was no longer possible
(Hehir, 1992).
14 For a non-universalistic "foundation" of, as I understand him, more or less the same universalistic and
inclusive moral sentiment, see Rort 1993. But I am not sure whether the contraposition between alleged
'universalism' and mere 'relativism' is useful or even necessary when we understand morality on the
grounds of moral sentimentality. A philosopher trying to combine both points of view in an inclusive
outlook of moral sentimentality was the usually misunderstood Johann Gottfried Herder.
15 Therefore, liberalism is criticized by, for example, Leo Strauss and Karol Woytila and welcomed by
Richard Rorty. The problem is obviously that the democratic mood--after the "Martin Luther King years,"
when the American middle class was making more money every year and was able to feel sympathy for the
week"--might shift the other way, when, in situations of economic malaise, "Times Get Tougher and Morals
Get Toughest" (Rorty, 1994). Proposition Number 187 in California seems to confirm Rorty's skepticism.

19

16 This had been an argument in German public opinion during the Gulf War. Whereas for some Germans
(for example, me) the Iraqi missiles fired against Israel (remember: gas weapons and German technology!) in
itself constituted a special reason for solidarity with the Allied intervention, others maintained that this
special reason should have no objectively different weight in our moral deliberation (Tugendhat, 1992, pp.
104-14).
17 On this moral "doublespeak," see Tugendhat, 1992, pp. 66-76. On alternative policies, see Bade, 1994.
18 The real problems begin here (and here philosophers cannot claim any special competence): what about
the relationship between international legitimating (the United Nations), political authorization and/or
regional responsibility (OAU), and military command (for example, NATO)? Whereas yesterday the erosion
of national sovereignty under Cold War conditions could be understood (whether criticized or legitimized)
as a mere effect of the Super Power bipolarity (which, consequently, also depotentiated the United Nations),
that is, the post-Cold War situation, whether we define it as unipolar, multipolar, or anarchic, no new power
order or any other system of international stability has yet emerged. The United Nations General Assembly
has not yet developed a structure of legitimacy other than the inefficient "one sovereign state, one vote"
principle, and even the "just war norm" of non-intervention still refers to the "Westphalian" (or Wilsonian)
sovereignty of nation-states. As this superstructure does not correspond to the real networks of power and
economic codependency, it risks more and more to become ideology (see Kallscheuer, 1994). There are
tendencies in international law and also in United Nations resolutions to abolish this absolute and exclusive
sovereignty principle, but there is not
convincing new institutional structure of the "international community" (which is everything but a
community) or a new and operational concept of legitimacy in international affairs.
19 Thus, Hannah Arendt, referring to the way Germans referred to their Nazi past after the war
("Vergangenheitsbewaltigung"), defined the "flight from reality" in public and private opinion in 1950
(Arendt, 1993, p. 251).
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