Begotten or Made?

by Oliver O'Donovan

the exclusive importance of compassion among the virtues. Compassion is the virtue of being moved to action by the sight of suffering—that is to say, by the infringement of passive freedoms. It is a virtue that circumvents thought, since it prompts us immediately to action. It is a virtue that presupposes that an answer has already been found to the question “What needs to be done?,” a virtue of motivation rather than of reasoning. As such it is the appropriate virtue for a liberal revolution, which requires no independent thinking about the object of morality, only a very strong motivation to its practice.