Compassion or Renunciation? “That” is the question of Schopenhauer’s ethics

The traditional view of Schopenhauer’s ethical thought is to see renunciation from the will-to-life as the truest, most ethical response to a world such as ours in which suffering is tremendous, endemic, and unredeemed. In this view, Schopenhauer’s ethics of compassion, which he encapsulates in On the Basis of Morality in the principle “Harm no one; rather help everyone to the extent that you can” is a second best way of living, valuable only as a step along the path to “salvation” from the will-to-life in complete renunciation. In this paper, we suggest that this traditional picture of the ethics of compassion as ultimately a way station to the normatively preferable option of renunciation masks a fundamental conflict at the heart of Schopenhauer’s ethical thought. Instead, we argue, Schopenhauer should be interpreted as offering two independent, mutually antagonistic ethical ideals: compassion and renunciation. Bracketing Schopenhauer’s resignationism, we then pursue his ideal of compassion and offer a reconstruction of Schopenhauer’s ethics that espouses ‘degrees of inherent value’ among living beings. We aim to show that on this reconstruction, Schopenhauer offers a hybrid Kantian/moral sense theory of ethics that has considerable novelty and philosophical attractions for contemporary ethical theorizing.