Indifference to suffering

The international community reports very selectively and to widely varying degrees on the suffering of peoples. Very extensive coverage may be given to accidents involving several hundreds of deaths. Little reference, or none at all, may be made to massacres of tens of thousands over a period of months. Whilst the media may successfully report on accidents and disasters, and occasionally on situations involving thousands of people over an extended period of time, international agencies are obliged to avoid referring to situations which are considered to be the internal concerns of particular countries or else limit themselves to emitting token resolutions protesting them. Examples include the massacres in Kampuchea and Uganda.

1. Television has turned people into moral tourists: it is a trip to visit other people's suffering. Television has made it possible to witness existing horrors second-hand and to feel strong emotions, but the memory is short and the indignations are very brief.

1. Social apathy
2. Indifference

1. Silence about historical situations
2. Insensitivity to the plight of disadvantaged people
3. Inadequate national empathy for external hardship
4. Impaired human empathy toward animals
5. Conspiracies of silence
6. Complicity with structural injustice

1. Suffering
2. Failure to legally rehabilitate victims of miscarriage of justice
3. Abandonment by the international community
4. Tolerated atrocities

1. Lack of solidarity with the poor
2. Hypocrisy
3. Culturally conditioned self-gratification

1. Reporting suffering
2. Relieving misery
3. Recreating value systems
4. Overcoming indifference
5. Exhausting moral resources
6. Ensuring response to injustice
7. Being indifferent
8. Avoiding reference to suffering

1. Suffering
2. Justice
3. Injustice
4. Indifference
5. Immorality
6. Failure
7. Avoidance