Abstract
This chapter presents a portrait of American children as situationally vulnerable and introduces the public emotion of civic tenderness as a response to the indifference that is routinely directed toward this vulnerability. Discussions of pro-social empathic emotions typically prioritize emotions like sympathy and compassion. While they are important in their own right, these pro-social emotions are responses to situations of current need. Civic tenderness is a response to situations of vulnerability. Insofar as a person or group is now in a situation of need, they had to have first been vulnerable to experiencing that need. Since vulnerability is conceptually prior to need, civic tenderness is prior to these other pro-social emotions. Through the process that I call tenderization, I explain how tenderness for poor and impoverished children’s vulnerability can be expanded to a society’s members, institutions, and systems.
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Notes
- 1.
For a interesting discussion of Compassion as a certain kind of reasoning attendant that is mediated by our cognitive judgements readers should see Martha Nussbaum’s “Compassion as a Basic Social Emotion”.
- 2.
When it does, it is proper to say that the indifference is both negating and exclusionary. Examples of such attitudes could come about when the loyalties that tie you to your own social group is enhanced if you systematically ignore the suffering you cause to people outside your group and where you justify your ignorance of this suffering by denying the legitimacy of the claims from the people suffering; this is often the case with American Police officers in regard to the victims of police brutality.
- 3.
Other social mechanisms such as a norm of civic inattention—the attention we are encouraged not to pay to one another when sharing civic spaces—also contribute to sustaining civic indifference. However, to explore each of the mechanisms in detail and how they work in sustaining civic indifference would take us too far afield and would be best left for another time. This kind of analysis would be best suited for an explicit concentration on civic indifference in its own right. Under the constrains of the current chapter and guided by our current goal, it is sufficient to introduce each mechanism that sustains civic indifference.
- 4.
I understand an emotional disposition in the same way as Kalawski in “On the Subjective Distinction between Tenderness and Joy”. Emotions differ from emotional dispositions in that the former have a shorter duration than the latter. Further, dispositions are expressive of tendencies toward. To say that one has a tender disposition toward some object, then, is to say that one is oriented toward that object in a way that one is sensitive and responsive to it in situations of vulnerability.
- 5.
It is worth explicitly exploring the relationship between tenderness and other empathic emotions such as fear, compassion, anger, pity, sympathy, and empathy. However, to elaborate the relationship between tenderness and these emotions would take us too far afield and so shall be left for another time.
- 6.
Kalawksi calls tenderness the emotional ‘surge’ that corresponds to love as caregiving (Kalawski 2010); Nico Frijida states, “tenderness can be regarded as the impulse toward tender—that is caregiving—behavior” (Frijida 1986, p. 83); Sherman et al. found that tenderness “is more than just a positive feeling state—it can literally make people more physically tender in their motor behavior” (Sherman et al. 2009, p. 285); Bertocci says that tenderness involves an “impulse to protect” (Bertocci 1988, p. 263); William McDougal talks about tenderness in constant conjunction with its “protective impulse” (McDougal 2015, p. 78).
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Clardy, J.L. (2019). Civic Tenderness as a Response to Child Poverty in America. In: Brando, N., Schweiger, G. (eds) Philosophy and Child Poverty. Philosophy and Poverty, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22452-3_16
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