Commentary: How Can We Have Compassion Towards Animals?

Professor Snow has offered an original and illuminating analysis of compassion which, among its other virtues, provides a plausible account of why we feel compassion for animals and why it is rational to do so. I fully endorse her general approach, so my comments will not be in any wayan attempt to undermine or refute her analysis; instead, I wish to raise some questions that follow on the heels ofan acceptance of her account. To summarize very briefly: Professor Snow's account of compassion for animals is part of a larger exploration of the correct way to understand compassion in general. l She agrees with other analyses which claim that compassion requires that the individual feeling compassion must "identify with" the being (more accurately, identify with the plight of that being) for which compassion is felt. (In what follows, I will refer to the being which feels compassion as "the source" and the being for which compassion is felt as "the target.") However, she disagrees with Piper and Blum2 about what is required for such an identification. Piper and Blum think that imagination is a necessary component of any act of identifying with, Le. that the source of compassion must imaginatively "project'! herself into the situation of the target. The problem wj.th this account is that demanding such an act of imagination, if true, would cast doubt on our ability to feel compassion for many nonhuman animals. Philosophers, at least since B.A. Farrell and Thomas Nagel, have noted that imaginatively