The last post made the case that compassion is not a private virtue reserved for personal relationships – it is a public responsibility, and one that holds whether you start from philosophy, science, or faith. Most people, when pressed, will agree with that in principle.
The hard part is what comes next.
Because agreeing that compassion matters is easy. Extending it in practice – especially to people whose lives look nothing like our own, whose choices we might not understand, and whose circumstances we have never faced – is genuinely difficult. And pretending otherwise is one of the main reasons well-intentioned efforts to build a more compassionate society so often fall short.
This post is about what compassion actually requires when it meets the real world.
Why Good Intentions Are Not Enough
Start with a basic observation: most people who design bad policies are not trying to design bad policies.
The benefit cliff – the design flaw in many assistance programs that causes families to lose more in benefits than they gain from a raise, effectively punishing modest economic progress – was not created by people who wanted to trap low-income workers in poverty. It was created by people trying to target limited resources efficiently. The intention was reasonable. The outcome was harmful.
Cash bail was not designed by people who wanted to create a two-tiered justice system based on wealth. It was designed as a mechanism to ensure court appearance. The intention was reasonable. The outcome – people losing jobs, housing, and custody of children while awaiting trial for offenses they have not been convicted of – is deeply unjust.
This is the problem the Outcomes Test in the Public Dignity Standard is designed to address. A policy must be judged by what it produces, not by what it intends. Good intentions are the beginning of the analysis, not the end of it.
But there is a prior problem, and it is the one this post is really about. Before we can evaluate outcomes, we have to be willing to understand the situations of the people our policies affect. And that requires something most of us underinvest in: genuine knowledge of lives different from our own.
The Knowledge Problem
Harry Gensler, the philosopher whose framework for the Golden Rule informs the Public Dignity Standard, argues that applying the rule correctly begins with knowledge. Not assumptions. Not secondhand impressions. Not what confirms what we already believe. Accurate knowledge of what other people’s situations actually involve – and how our actions affect them.
This is harder than it sounds, for a simple reason: we are surrounded by information that confirms what we already think.
Political media, social networks, and in-group conversation all tend to reinforce existing beliefs rather than challenge them. If your primary information about poverty comes from political rhetoric, you will likely conclude that it is primarily a product of bad choices. If your primary information about immigration comes from certain news outlets, you will likely conclude that immigrants pose a threat. If your primary information about crime comes from local news coverage – which systematically overrepresents violent crime relative to its actual frequency – you will likely overestimate how dangerous your community is.
None of these conclusions are inevitable. But they are predictable when knowledge is filtered through sources with a stake in producing particular conclusions.
Genuine knowledge – the kind the Golden Rule requires – means going further. It means engaging with research rather than anecdote. It means listening to people in the situations being discussed rather than only to people commenting on those situations from the outside. It means being willing to discover that what you assumed was wrong.
That is uncomfortable. It is supposed to be.
The Communication Problem
Here is the other side of the same coin.
If those of us who want to extend compassion more broadly are serious about that goal, we have an obligation to think carefully about how we communicate – not just what we believe.
Different people interpret the world through very different lenses. Class, religion, culture, geography, and upbringing all shape how we see social problems, who we think deserves help, and what we believe government is capable of doing well. Two people can look at the same situation and reach completely different conclusions without either of them acting in bad faith. Keeping that reality in mind is essential when trying to bring others along.
Take the debate over gender as an example. In clear terms, sex refers to biological characteristics while gender relates to identity and social experience – how a person moves through the world and how they want to be recognized in it. Many people are unfamiliar with this distinction, not because they are unintelligent or malicious, but because it is rarely addressed in K–12 education. Most people never encounter it unless they take specific college courses in sociology, psychology, or related fields.
Dismissing people who don’t understand the distinction as ignorant is neither accurate nor productive. It is almost certainly counterproductive if the goal is broader understanding.
One way to explain gender that many people find accessible is through the analogy of names. A person’s given name may feel ill-fitting – not wrong in any objective sense, just not quite right for who they are. Choosing a different name is simply a way of aligning how others address them with what feels authentic. Gender works similarly: it reflects an effort to align one’s internal experience with external recognition. This explanation doesn’t require anyone to abandon their existing beliefs. It just asks them to understand what the concept actually means before forming a judgment about it.
As a professor, I have learned this the hard way. I sometimes leave a lecture confident that I explained something clearly, only to discover on an exam that many students missed it entirely. When that happens, I do not blame the students. I reconsider how I presented the material. The same principle applies in public discourse. When people fail to understand an issue, the first question should be whether the people raising it communicated effectively – not whether the audience was paying attention.
Meeting People Where They Are
Building the kind of broad coalition that can produce meaningful change requires engaging not only people who already share our values, but also people who do not – at least not yet. That requires meeting people where they are rather than where we wish they would be.
The Black Lives Matter movement offers a useful illustration. In hindsight, the message might have reached more people had it been framed as “Black Lives Matter, Too.” The intended point was that society already recognizes that some lives matter, and that Black lives deserve the same recognition. Without that clarification, many people responded with “All Lives Matter.” That response is sometimes an expression of genuine hostility. But it is also sometimes an expression of genuine confusion – a misunderstanding of what was being claimed. Clearer framing from the outset might have reduced some of that confusion and kept more potential allies in the conversation. None of this means oppressed groups are responsible for making their suffering palatable to others. It means those of us trying to build broad public support have to think strategically about how people actually hear moral claims.
A similar dynamic emerged in discussions of police violence. Although Black Americans are disproportionately affected, police use of force affects people across racial and socioeconomic lines. Framing the issue as one that threatens everyone – not only a single group – could have broadened public support for reform without diminishing the specific and disproportionate harm done to Black communities.
This is not a suggestion to water down the argument. It is a recognition that the goal is not to win the argument but to change the outcome – and those are not always the same thing.
Ideally, people would act compassionately even when doing so offers them no direct personal benefit. In practice, lasting change often requires showing people how an issue connects to their own lives. Not as a manipulation, but as an honest acknowledgment that self-interest and shared interest are less separate than they often appear.
Not Going Too Fast
There is one more dimension to this that is easy to overlook: pace.
Americans have made genuine progress in learning to extend compassion more broadly over the past fifty years. Attitudes toward race, gender, and sexuality have shifted in more inclusive directions. Language has changed in ways that reflect greater care for how words affect people. These are real improvements worth acknowledging.
But in nearly every case, that progress unfolded over decades – not years, and certainly not news cycles. Remembering this is essential as we try to extend compassion further today.
Many people worry that extending compassion to one group requires withdrawing it from another. Some want to show greater compassion toward transgender individuals, for example, but fear that certain changes may come at the expense of fairness for others. This fear is often unfounded. But when change moves faster than people can absorb, that fear intensifies – and people who might have come around with more time instead dig in further. Pushing too fast, too hard, often backfires. Not because the goal was wrong, but because the pace made it feel threatening rather than inviting.
This is not an argument for slowing down where urgency is real and harm is ongoing. It is an argument for strategic patience – understanding that the goal is not moral self-satisfaction but actual change, and that bringing people along matters as much as being right.
What the Public Dignity Standard Requires
The Outcomes Test requires evidence. But before we can evaluate outcomes, we have to genuinely understand the situations of the people our policies affect. And before we can bring others along toward more compassionate policies, we have to communicate in ways they can actually receive.
These are not soft concerns. They are practical requirements.
Compassion that stays inside our own heads – that feels the right feelings and holds the right beliefs but never does the work of understanding, communicating, and persuading – does not change policy. It does not reduce suffering. It does not move the circle of moral concern even slightly outward.
The Public Dignity Standard asks more than that. It asks whether we are willing to do the hard work that genuine compassion requires – not just believing the right things, but understanding enough to act effectively, and communicating well enough to bring others with us.
Good intentions are where compassion starts.
They are nowhere close to where it ends.
Foundations/Further Reading
- Harry J. Gensler, Ethics and the Golden Rule — Golden Rule reasoning, knowledge, imagination, consistency, and action.
- The Oxford Handbook of Compassion Science, edited by Emma Seppälä, Emiliana Simon-Thomas, Stephanie L. Brown, Monica C. Worline, C. Daryl Cameron, and James R. Doty — compassion science, empathy, altruism, compassion fatigue, culture, and the psychology of compassionate action.
- Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion — why good intentions and emotional empathy are not enough for large-scale moral and policy decisions.
- Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion — moral psychology, political disagreement, and why people with different moral foundations talk past one another.
- George Lakoff, Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate — political framing, communication, and why wording shapes how people receive moral arguments.
- Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die — clear communication, memorable ideas, and how to make complex arguments understandable.
- Ray Surette, Media, Crime, and Criminal Justice: Images, Realities, and Policies — media distortion, crime perception, and the gap between public fear and empirical reality.