This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Educational Philosophy and

Theory in 7 July 2014, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00131857.2014.931430.

‘Won’t Somebody Think of the Children?’

Emotions, child poverty, and post-humanitarian possibilities for social justice education

Liz Jackson (lizj@hku.hk)

University of Hong Kong

Abstract:

Under models of moral and global citizenship education, compassion and caring are

emphasized as a counterpoint to pervasive, heartless, neoliberal globalization. According to such

views, these and related emotions such as empathy, sympathy, and pity, can cause people to act

righteously to aid others who are disadvantaged through no fault of their own. When applied to the

contemporary issue of alleviating child poverty, it seems such emotions are both appropriate and

easily developed through education. However, emotional appeals increasing a sense of urgency

regarding such a dire issue should not necessarily be prioritized in the face of competing possibilities.

Emotions can be difficult to develop, regulate, and sustain. Their appropriate expression and

application in global contexts can be problematic, as people’s valuation and understanding of feelings

varies across societies. Additionally, there are tensions between discourses of emotional care and

compassion and rational duty to social justice. This essay examines competing views on education for

understanding and responding to child poverty, and defends post-humanitarian imaginaries and the

possibility of non-relational care ethics. Care, compassion, empathy, and emotion may be involved in

learning about child poverty, but an a priori rational orientation is also essential in such grave matters

of social injustice.

Key words: social justice, emotions, affect, compassion, care, rationality, moral education, global

citizenship, inequality

Bio: Liz Jackson is Assistant Professor of Curriculum and Policy Studies at the University of Hong

Kong. Her areas of expertise include philosophy of education, global studies in education, and

multicultural and citizenship education. Her book, Islam and Muslims in U.S. Education:

Reconsidering Multiculturalism was published in May 2014 with Routledge.

‘Won’t Somebody Think of the Children?’

Emotions, child poverty, and post-humanitarian possibilities for social justice education

Liz Jackson (lizj@hku.hk)

University of Hong Kong

There’s a world outside your window,

And it’s a world of dread and fear,

Where the only water flowing,

Is the bitter sting of tears,

And the Christmas bells that ring there are the clanging chimes of doom,

Well tonight thank God it’s them instead of you.

(Bob Geldof, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’, 1984).

When I do good I feel good; when I do bad I feel bad; and that’s my religion.

(Abraham Lincoln, qtd. Fehrenbacher & Fehrenbacher, 1996, p. 245).

The relationship between emotions and social justice is contentious in educational theory

today. Under models of moral and/or ‘global citizenship’ education promoted by Nel Noddings,

Martha Nussbaum (2001), and Kathy Hytten (2009), compassion and caring are emphasized as a

counterpoint to pervasive, heartless, neoliberal globalization. According to such views, these and

related emotions such as empathy, sympathy, and pity, can cause people to act righteously to aid

others who are disadvantaged through no fault of their own, under the right conditions. Megan Boler

(1999), Sarah Ahmed (2004), Barbara Applebaum (2014), and Michalinos Zembylas argue relatedly

that emotions are intrinsically related to civic participation for social justice. Witnessing and/or

experiencing emotional discomfort is recognized in their works as crucial components of moral or

political education, that facilitates students facing injustice and inequality. Again, such an education

serves as a counterforce to a depoliticized civic education, as experiencing a particular affect or

feeling1 is not the end goal, but rather something that can be exposed and critically examined, to lead

to ‘new understandings of social relations and new ways of being in the world’ (Zembylas, 2008, p. 5).

When applied to the contemporary issue of alleviating worldwide child poverty, it seems such

emotions are both appropriate and easily developed through education, as children are a vulnerable

social group who face disparate life opportunities through no personal fault. However, emotional

1 Some researchers, such as Massumi (2002), distinguishes emotion from affect as follows: Emotion refers to a

conscious, and therefore sociologically and culturally experienced and recognized feeling, while affect identifies

less, or unconscious, ‘direct’ bodily experiences or sensations. However, here I follow Ahmed (2004) in viewing

this dichotomy as problematic. As Ahmed notes, consciousness is complicated by personal history, while

emotions ‘clearly involve sensations [and] the lived experiences of being and having a body’ (2004, p. 40, f40).

Here I use the term emotion most often and affect occasionally, viewing these as on more of a continuum of

recognized, culturally particular emotion, versus more ‘sensational’, less conscious, affect.

appeals increasing a sense of urgency regarding dire issues like child poverty should not necessarily

be prioritized by civic-minded educators in the face of competing possibilities. In general, there are

many challenges to developing students as active citizens, or ‘good Samaritans,’ based on emotions

like compassion, caring, empathy, and pity. Emotions can be difficult to directly develop, regulate,

and sustain. Their appropriate expression and application in global contexts can also be problematic,

as people’s valuation and understanding of such feelings vary across societies (Kang, 2006; Okin,

2003). Additionally, there are tensions between discourses of emotional care and compassion and

rational duty to social justice.

I elaborate these claims in this essay, firstly examining defenses of compassion, care, and

emotional altruism, by Nussbaum, Noddings, Zembylas, and Lawrence Blum in particular; in contrast

to appeals to non-emotional rationality as a (possible) basis of altruism and moral distress by such

thinkers as Tom Nagel and Eamonn Callan. Next, I consider post-humanitarian imaginaries that go

beyond what Lilie Chouliarki calls the ‘politics of pity,’ in considering the case of learning about

child poverty, and the possibility of non-relational care ethics in applying Noddings’s care model on a

global scale. Comparing these pro-rational and pro-emotional views, this paper defends a critical-

rational model of post-humanitarian altruism, but applies important insights from throughout the

analysis to developing education for understanding and responding to dire issues such as child poverty.

Care, compassion, empathy, and emotional attachment may indeed be involved in learning about child

poverty within this framework, but an a priori rational orientation is also essential in this case, due to

the challenges, risks, and problematic ethical implications of favoring affect over reason in grave

matters of social injustice.

Affect and Emotion in Moral Education

Compassion, empathy, care, and sympathy are common emotions sought and analyzed by

theorists who feel that moral, civic, and/or political education should have an affective component.

For Nussbaum, compassion is the most crucial emotion related to social justice that educators should

strive to develop in students, closely related to empathy, but only for those who (one perceives) suffer

through no fault of their own. By empathy, Nussbaum means ‘participatory enactment of the situation

of the sufferer…combined with the awareness that one is not oneself the sufferer’ (2001, p. 327).

Compassion, according to Nussbaum, extends from such empathy based on the related understanding

that one suffers from a ‘serious bad thing,’ without personal fault. One can be empathetic without

being compassionate. Nussbaum gives the example of a juror who, ‘may come to understand the

experience of a criminal without having compassion for the person’s plight,’ upon reaching a guilty

verdict (2001, p. 329). However, empathy which leads to compassion, Nussbaum argues, can motivate

altruistic action. Educators therefore should encourage empathy and compassion in civic and moral

education, particularly by sharing literature, for example, that invokes students’ empathetic responses.

In Noddings’s (2002) work on care ethics, care has relational, emotional, and ‘rational-

objective thinking’ components. Caring cannot be ‘perfunctory’ or based primarily upon a sense of

rational, objective duty, as caring relation with others is held as a good for parents and educators to

develop in youth. On the other hand, in giving care one must be respectful, attentive, and responsive,

examining critically what would be an appropriate, proportionate response to another. (Noddings

gives an example of people donating clothes and food to Afghanistan after an earthquake, when what

was sorely needed was building material.) Noddings also indicates that a caring response may not

follow predetermined rules, as it is particular to a situation, not subject to universalizable ethics

(2002). Hytten similarly argues that caring and compassionate citizenship education will prepare

students to get to root causes of social injustice through creative problem solving, not alleviating

symptoms of problems but changing existing structures (2009).

Like Noddings, Blum (1980) has argued that altruism as an emotional response to others is a

good in itself: this is the intrinsic value of altruistic emotion. According to Blum, one gains something

from experiencing another’s altruistic emotions toward her, even if the other cannot necessarily help

in a tough situation. Altruism is viewed by Blum therefore as a disposition to moral action on behalf

of others, which also qualifies as a good in itself. Even in a situation where one seems unable to do

any good and where, at first glance, no good can be appreciated by others due to the altruism, Blum

writes that, ‘It might not be so obvious whether someone is suffering, nor so clear whether there is

something one could do to help.…Encouraging compassion and concern, rather than always a focus

on duties of beneficence, can, among other things, reveal greater needs for and possibilities of

beneficence’ (1980, p. 155-156).Thus an emotional concern for others and interest in their well being

can be seen as motivational but also as intrinsically valuable, as a manner of relation, across these

diverse thinkers.

However, emotional education (that is, education of, for, or intentionally leading to emotional

responses) has grave risks. Zembylas (2008) notes that students experiencing empathy and

compassion regarding others’ trauma or suffering can unfortunately also lead, firstly, to an

inappropriately sentimental reaction by students, who want to do and be good people despite (and in

relation to) their experiencing unfair advantage and privilege over others. In this response, students

are prone, particularly in observing cases of global underdevelopment and poverty, to orient

themselves to suffering using a ‘deficiency imaginary of development’ (Jackson, 2014). According to

the deficiency imaginary, people are missing something which other people—student volunteers, for

instance—can provide. This sentimentality can thus create a naive assumption that once an empathy

gap is bridged, problems of a structural nature can easily be solved (Zembylas, 2008). Compassionate

models of citizenship realized as international volunteerism, seemingly celebrated in some of

Noddings’s work (2003), can thus lead to ideologically fueled development work, whose outcomes

are actually more indeterminate for the so-called subjects of aid (Cook, 2012). The response is

doubtlessly one of emotional concern and care, but the result is far from appropriate and effective.

The first quotation introducing this essay, from the popular 1980s Christmas song by Band

Aid (a collection of rock and pop musicians) for the Live Aid benefit for Ethiopia, gives a sense of

this sentimentality and deficiency understanding of others’ disadvantage as a problem that might be

solved easily. The song continues:

Here’s to you,

Raise a glass for everyone,

Spare a thought this yuletide for the deprived

If the table was turned would you survive,

Here’s to them,

Underneath that burning sun,

You ain’t gotta feel guilt, just selfless,

Give a little help to the helpless…

Feed the world….

The relationship is understood as obviously, emphatically unequal, requiring a response from the

privileged listener. Yet as my postgraduate students can recognize, the song is also patronizing in its

large-scale blanket assumptions about African deficiency. Lyrics about how there is no snow in Africa,

no rain or rivers, and no knowledge of Christmas, unnecessarily paint the entire continent as a vast

desert of misery and ignorance. A critical listener is prompted to consider to what end the song would

engage in such ruthless stereotyping, and if the problems, seen realistically, would not independently

warrant urgent concern.

As Zembylas notes, other times witnessing trauma of the disadvantaged can lead to

resentment or desensitization (2008). Resentment can be experienced by the so-called subjects of aid,

who observe that they seem to be powerless within the deficiency imaginary, and dependent upon

those who are learning from their disadvantage. As Maria Lugones and Elizabeth Spelman note, it is

important to query who actually stands to gain from encounters marked by such disparity and mutual

recognition of so called deficiency. As they discuss tensions between white women feminists and

women of color, they note that self-interest cannot be a given reason for cross-cultural contact and

mutual aid, as the disadvantaged do not owe more advantaged counterparts anything, including a

moral or spiritual enhancement that may come from engaging in social justice projects. The notion of

moral obligation is also insufficient, and causes resentment, as they write:

We couldn’t want you to come into our worlds ‘out of obligation.’ That is like wanting

someone to make love to you out of obligation…Out of obligation, you should stay out of our

way, respect us and our distance, and forgo the use of whatever power you have over us—for

example, the power to use your language in our meetings, the power to overwhelm us with

your education, the power to intrude in our communities in order to research us and to record

the supposed dying of our cultures…the power to keep us in a defensive posture. (1983, p. 26).

As Liz Jackson notes (2014), a volunteer-initiated community garden becomes more than a

community garden in development work; it becomes acknowledgment that an outsider knows better—

had an idea no one else in the community was able to develop and implement. In such contexts,

Nancy Cook also notes how international aid volunteers are enthusiastic to learn from their experience,

which can cause further resentment from their ‘tutors,’ the development subjects. Desensitization

involves a kind of irritated rejection by spectators to suffering, based perhaps on a sense of frustrated

impotency in the face of challenges, or by a suspicious sense of emotional manipulation. Chouliaraki

(2010, p. 111) discusses this as ‘compassion fatigue, or the “I’ve seen this before” syndrome,’ as

people may feel powerless or unable to bear the weight of the world’s problems, while also potentially

wary of communication that is meant to take someone on a needless, unhelpful ‘guilt trip.’

Despite these risks, Zembylas argues for witnessing of others’ trauma and disadvantage as ‘an

affective practice [that is] an ethical and political project…to explore affects such as kindness and

compassion and to promote their enactment’ (2006, p. 316). Zembylas argues, following Ahmed

(2004) that emotions are not only ‘within us,’ though education may suggest this is or should be so

(‘Don't be angry!’ ‘Don’t cry!’). Rather, emotions circulate within cultural and social spaces. As for

Noddings and Blum, a relational model is emphasized here, over the view of people as autonomous

actors with independent internal or external motivations for action. Within this view, there is no such

thing as a ‘safe’ classroom, but naiveté on the part of educators who would try to ignore that

classrooms are emotional places, in the sense that students and teachers relate to one another while

continually experiencing a range of affective states. This educational relating can become critical and

productive, if not totally safe, through dialogue, ‘that includes resources for expressing and

interpreting old and new affective relations’ (Zembylas, 2006, p. 321). Furthermore, by ‘acting to

promote the practice of making connections—through intimacy, kindness, and

compassionate…teachers and students create movements of difference and hope’ (Zembylas, 2006, p.

321-322). Recognition of fellow witnessing can lead to creative new visions and understandings of

political solidarity.

The end goal is not to develop emotional states, Zembylas would emphasize—and here he

comes into conflict with the quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln, cited at the beginning of the article:

‘When I do good I feel good; when I do bad I feel bad.’ As Zembylas notes, ‘emotions are indicators

of moral beliefs—they do not constitute them’ (2008, p. 4). Emotions signify moral dispositions, but

‘justice has to be established first.’ On the other hand, Zembylas characterizes the lack of certain

emotions, of rage or compassion in situations of injustice, as ‘particular kinds of affective relations to

social norms that are responsible for people’s traumatic experiences’ (2008, p. 4). The question

remains of how, through dialogue, emotional education can be transferred into appropriate moral

being and behavioral dispositions, rather than dramatic sentimentality and resentment, or

desensitization, which Zembylas does not hold as a sign of immorality, but rather as an indicator of

ambiguous feelings about appropriate responses to social injustice, which are potentially ‘dangerous’

insofar as they also provide for unwillingness to act. As Zembylas points to the establishment of

injustice and justice in identifying emotional education’s value, I now turn to more rational

examinations of whether and how a less emotional moral education can better guide moral altruistic

behavior.

The Possibility of Rational Altruism

The risks of sentimentality have concerned moral and ethical philosophers for centuries, of

course, as Blum (1980) and Nussbaum (2001) note in their examinations of Immanuel Kant’s concern

with emotional moral dispositions. Kant was weary of those who did good in a self-congratulatory

way, or through a soft-hearted rather than ‘active and rational benevolence’ (1964), thus embodying

sentimentality, giving rise to resentment among subjects of do-goodism, as discussed previously. Yet

he did feel that experiencing others’ pain was part of moral duty.

It is a duty not to avoid places where the poor, who lack the most necessary things, are to be

found; instead, it is a duty to seek them out. It is a duty not to shun sickrooms or prisons and

so on in order to avoid the pain of pity, which one may not be able to resist. For this feeling,

though painful, nevertheless is one of the impulses placed in us by nature for effecting what

the representation of duty might not accomplish itself. (1964, p. 35).

In today’s world, this favoring of first-hand, emotional experience over mediated representational

understanding might be read as a method to avoid desensitization. Yet Kant also took pains to

emphasize that moral duty was strictly rational, which is echoed in the views of liberal philosophers

today who caution against the undue use of emotion in education, where critical understandings of

justice issues can be better served by more rational, objective views.

Nagel thus emphasized the ‘possibility’ of rational, not emotional, altruism (1970). This he

distinguished from both a ‘generalized affection for the human race,’ and from some desire or demand

for strict apathy, as he understood that dispositions of altruism are usually accompanied by other

feelings, such as love, sympathy, pity, and compassion. Yet crucially he argued that from an objective

view (as from nowhere) one should strive to understand altruistic moral duty as a secondary

requirement on action (1970). He viewed this as favorable to altruism based in egoism or out of

‘sentiments of sympathy and benevolence,’ which he viewed as ‘altruistic reasons [that] are parasitic

upon self-interested ones’ (1970, p. 16).

This is particularly relevant to the previous discussions, as we thus far have considered cases

of social justice which involve parties in different positions of privilege or advantage. Surely, faraway

or otherwise ‘alien’ social groups will not gain from an altruism based out of sentimental affection,

before like individuals and groups will. Indeed, this understanding of compassion or altruism based on

relation implies in Blum’s (1980) and Nussbaum’s (2002) work that prioritizing friends, loved ones,

and/or one’s fellow compatriots may be ethically acceptable, if not preferable to a more objective

consideration of one’s duties to humankind. Relatedly, Kupperman (1995) argues that both Stoics and

Buddhists have favored detached judgment on issues of justice, rather than some (implausible)

absolute lack of emotional concern, with the implication that, ‘An element of impersonality may seep

into private life. A degree of warmth may seep into public life,’ for what he promotes as the ‘limited’

altruist (1995, p. 133). Again, reasoning here relates to the possibility that egoism or some other self-

interested motivation often spurs action, though such sources of action cannot be foundations for a

more pure or dedicated duty toward others.

Callan (1997) further articulates against the notion that the emotional good coming from care

could be better than the rational good, in a way that has implications for arguments above identifying

caring relation as a good motivator of just actions. Callan first considers the case of an illiterate

husband and wife. The wife wants to learn to read, but the husband forbids her. Finally, he accepts her

wish. Callan asks: Does it matter in this case whether the husband’s change of heart stems from love,

rather than his sense of her objective rights and his related duties? Callan argues it makes a difference,

as a ‘fundamental part of our self-conception is a worth we possess that does not depend on the

affection of others,’ which should be a part of any love from others, yet a priori. He then swaps

husband and wife for slaveholder and slave. In this case, it is hardly morally superior or better for the

slave, if the slaveholder frees the slave out of love rather than duty. Because rights are independent of

and must come before claims of partial affection and care, to be freed out of love would remain

degrading to the slave, and morally distressing to observers.2

These examples powerfully illustrate how moral judgment should precede sympathetic or

compassion-based emotional motivations to action, if both can be present at the same time. Empirical

data also suggests that while emotions may be present in good moral judgment, the former are no

substitute for the latter. Callan’s claim that one’s sense of justice should be primary to any

sympathetic emotional response such as ‘moral distress’ echoes interviews with rescuers of Jews in

Nazi Europe, who often expressed their motivations in terms of their sense of injustice and protest of

evil, rather than in relation to sympathetic, emotional feelings toward others (Konarzewski, 1992). As

Zembylas notes, young children engaged in moral reasoning tasks have been observed to understand

right and wrong in an objective sense, ‘but do not attach moral sentiments to them until…around the

age of 10.’ As Zembylas goes on, ‘In other words, the cultural diversity of emotions shows that

emotions are linked to antecedent moral judgments but do not constitute them’ (2008, p. 4).

Furthermore, when it comes to the case of protecting against and combatting the extent of

existing child poverty, interpersonal relation is usually unavailable. The ‘Adopt a Child’ style of

campaign, popular in the Western world in the past, aimed to give people a sense of immediate

relation, and deficit payment in line with the view that good deeds come from related ‘good’ emotions.

Yet today such campaigns may be more likely associated with desensitization, as images of

impoverished children are understood to cause spectators pain and a more overwhelming sense of

compassion otherwise. As Chouliaraki (2010) observes, in the 1960s and 1970s such ‘shock effect’

campaigns were most popular in humanitarianism, as depersonalized mothers and children, ‘half-

naked, exposing emaciated rib cages, arms and legs,’ created ‘maximal distance,’ to intentionally

develop, in the spectator or witness, guilt, shame, and indignation (p. 110-111). The shock effect aims

2. Relatedly, Theodore Klein (2000) distinguishes liberatory caring from paternalistic caring. While paternalistic

caring lacks respect for the agency of the cared-for, and acquiescent caring subordinates the caregiver to the

cared-for, liberatory caring is ‘oriented to changing realities of domination and subordination,’ and enables the

cared-for to maintain/develop agency.

to actualize and realize these emotions beyond the level of internalization, prompting action. Yet

people rejected the relationship which was possibly experienced as unbearable, leading to compassion

fatigue.

Later campaigns, such as ‘Save the Children,’ as Chouliarki notes, aimed in response to create

a relation that was bearable and positive, developing a balance between a sense of guilty, anguished

urgency, and sustainable engagement with suffering and trauma. Yet in creating bearable relation,

sentimentality and resentment are enabled, as the deficiency imaginary takes hold:

Dialectically linked to empathy, through the logic of the sympathetic equilibrium, gratitude

relies on the social logic of the gift between unequal parties, which helps to perpetuate the

unequal relations, [as the gift] binds the grateful receiver into a nexus of obligations and

duties, [while] the generosity and tender-heartedness of the West united donors in a

community of virtue that discovers in its own fellow-feeling for distant others a narcissistic

self-contentment. (Chouliaraki, 2010, p. 113).

Naiveté in this case disables responses to injustice which Noddings would recognize as appropriate

care—attentive, responsive, and respectful, while on the other hand, desensitization can lead to

suspicion today, about whether would-be sponsors are being manipulated, in this time of heighted

media attention to globalization and its discontents.

In this context, Chouliaraki identifies a newly emergent style of ‘post-humanitarian

communication’ that accepts and explicates inherent and unavoidable tensions related to the

spectators’ need to help, as well as the problems and challenges of doing so in such contexts marked

by grave inequality. In contrast to pitiful representations, the portrayals within the post-humanitarian

imaginary provide developmental subjects who encounter and observe their spectators head-on,

looking straight into the camera. The traditional relation of powerless and pitiful, or caregiver and

cared-for, is diminished here, as it is not the case that one witnesses another’s suffering, as an actor

looking upon a passive other. Moral agency is, ideally, prompted without undue ‘emotionalization,’

given ‘technologization of action’ (‘just go to this web address’), and a lack of explicit appeal to do

good, to do something, to help someone else. On the one hand, this is classic corporate branding; one

identifies with and relates to the intermediary in making contact and doing good (Chouliaraki, 2010, p.

118). It is a commodification of international aid. On the other hand, this new style of post-

humanitarian communication aims to

insinuate the classic constellations of emotion towards suffering but do not quite inspire or

enact them. Guilt, heroism and compassion re-appear not as elements of a politics of pity,

partaking of a grand narrative of affective attachment and collective commitment, but as de-

contextualized fragments of such a narrative that render the psychological world of the

spectator a potential terrain of self-inspection. (Chouliaraki, 2010, p. 119).

Chouliaraki argues that emotion-oriented versus post-humanitarian campaigns differ, as the

former uses moral universalism while the latter relies on ‘reflexive particularism,’ wherein feelings

are critically deconstructed in their relationship to moral action. Understanding emotions not just

sociologically but economically, reflexive particularism recognizes emotion as scarce, and in relation,

‘the public’s bounded ability to feel and act on distant others’ (Chouliaraki, 2010, p. 120, emphasis

added). With this orientation toward emotion’s role in moral action, ‘this style acknowledges that

compassion fatigue lies not so much in the excess of human suffering that transcends individual

capacity to feel for or act on it, but rather in the excesses of discourses of morality around which we

are called to organize our feelings and action towards suffering’ (Chouliaraki, 2010, p. 120). Similarly

Jonathan Leighton describes empathy as ‘a limited resource that we need to use wisely,’ seeing

desensitization as grounded in people’s inability to witness seemingly hopeless suffering (2011, p.

226). Individual judgment is thus seen as a primary motivator of one’s actions, framed by discourse in

such a way that emotional feeling need not be understood as intrinsic to motivation, nor good and

appropriate social action.

How to care for those we are not related to is additionally spelt out by Daniel Engster and

Sigal Ben-Porath in terms of non-relational care in international relations. As Engster writes (2004, p.

64),

since all human beings need care and claim the right to be cared for when in need, and more

generally depend upon the caring of others to sustain not only our own lives but also human

life and society, we must logically recognize the rights of others to make claims upon us for

care when they need it, and should endeavor to provide it when we are able to do so without

significant danger to ourselves.

Like Nagel’s hope of objective altruism, care is articulated here as a generalizable ethical requirement,

stemming from human need and vulnerability. Ben-Porath (2008) argues in parallel that the fact of

global interdependency justifies a global ethics of care as a practice of interacting with international

others with attentiveness, responsiveness, and respect.

These ideas are empirically grounded, in media theory, in Chouliaraki’s (2008) observation

that emergency news discourse—unlike other types of news stories about development and aid—can

produce a moral demand for action, based on fragile and apparently incidental, rather than systemic,

historical, connectivity to distant others. Such discourse can potentially better bolster one’s sense of

cosmopolitan spirit in responding to distant others’ needs, without begging the painful question of

historical-causal intergroup relations, or drifting into sappy and patronizing sentimentality.

Developing a better objective future is a desire binding social groups in disparate conditions, while in

emergency conditions, there are fewer emotionally or psychologically pesky problems of power,

politics, and resistance to the status quo.

Educational Implications

Child poverty is a fundamental injustice. Children cannot be held accountable for deprivations

they may experience, and deficiencies of shelter, food, healthcare, and emotional care. Though grave

child poverty is less visible in Western, modern, industrialized societies than in others, particularly in

Africa and South Asia, child poverty also occurs in many of the former social contexts. In this case,

those who advocate for emotional education as moral education may view a lack of emotional concern

with this issue of social injustice, in one’s own society or worldwide, as reflective of the strength of a

different kind of moral, emotional education. The question we are lead to is: Who taught us not to feel

for others?

A compassion or empathy deficit is constructed along neoliberal or legal-rational, often

nationalistic, lines. Nussbaum (2001) observes how people are discouraged from identifying Nazis as

normal (rather than dramatically pathological) people today, and how the emotion of disgust is

encouraged in American understanding of criminals who, even if guilty, are intended to suffer

predictable, unnecessary trauma within the U.S. ‘justice’ system. Similarly, it is viewed as taboo to

show terrorists as ordinary people in mainstream film today, as disgust is officially circulated, while

compassion cannot be, in this domain. The media, more susceptible to corporate pressures than

schools, is seen to have an undue advantage and arbitrary moral educative role, while nonetheless

engaging in acts of vilification rather than compassion, showing others as objective of disgust or scorn

rather than pity, in common discourse (Nussbaum, 2001; Chouliaraki, 2008).

Can educators do as Chouliaraki describes in post-humanitarian communication, obscuring

emotional relation with others in such a way as to more productively encourage moral or civic

development? This post-humanitarian schema could discourage sentimental or resistant responses,

commonly observed by educators working in the domain of emotional education about social injustice.

Such an educational activity, beyond a politics of pity, could consider multicultural or other stories

about others, as active agents: In the case of learning about child poverty, a story which relates to one

or more children living in poverty, who interact with others with more advantage, but where suffering

or trauma is clear, but not the only part of the message. However, the context could still point students

to the idea of emotional manipulation by educators, leading possibly to resistance or desensitization. It

could still also breed, on the other hand, sentimentality.

Applebaum (2014) gives a story of two students in her higher education class, one white

female and one black female. In response to the black student’s (more or less nonchalant) observation

that people on campus open doors less frequently for her than for white students, the white student

interrupts, livid: ‘I would never do that! How rude!’ Is it a sign of the pervasive narcissism of today

that we must fight against student continuous circling back, ignorantly, to their own privilege

(Chouliaraki, 2010)—or a perversion of student-centered learning, that social justice educators must

plan from the possible outcomes of educational inventions (Jackson, 2014), helpless to create ideal

educational experiences? Is there a place in-between business-as-usual emotional bankruptcy toward

the status quo, and engagement with disadvantage that does not easily transform into sentimentality or

resistance?

To consider a grave educational injustice like child poverty in education requires interrogating

whether and how, as Noddings suggests (2003), students are taught to accept suffering and trauma, as

part of religious belief, or in dismissal of the ways that people are caused systemically to suffer by

others without their consent. It would be hard in educating people about this case to entirely avoid

sentimentality. Many people view it as part of being human to care for, feel sentiments for children;

this is seen increasingly as an evolutionary function of cuteness. This sentimentality must be critically

engaged and not enabled to ‘take over’ an educational situation, however. Children deserve care and

empathy no more than they deserve practical and radical steps taken to enable equality of life

opportunities. They must not be seen as pitiful puppies or kittens, but as people, despite their

vulnerability and uneven social standing.

The goal of moral education should not be to merely engage emotions, as signs or symptoms

of what is going wrong in the world, and of what could go right. Rather, the goal should be to enable

moral action. By recognizing more fully the dangers of excessive, abusive, or otherwise wasted,

scarce feeling, educators can enable more moral students who may participate in appropriate, active

ways to improve the world for less fortunate. This requires thinking more than feeling for issues such

as global/child poverty. A non-relational, post-humanitarian view which recognizes emotional

expression and circulation as a precious resource in addressing distant others has potential as we

develop new visions of students, as active world citizens who can become empowered to deal with

severe and urgent injustices, if in moral distress, rationally and effectively.

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