A Life of Ethical Ambiguity

I have to say that I do appreciate Andrew Peterson's book (2017) , Compassion and Education: Cultivating Compassionate Children, Schools and Communities, and it has left me wanting to write more about his work. Peterson talks about the notion of how reading literature can help learners to improve their capacity to reflect actively on who they feel is most deserving of compassion and empathy (p.122-126). I think what I most appreciate about Peterson's work around empathy is that it is refreshingly non-dogmatic in the way it treats compassion. A life need not be a saintly one, for example, to be worthy of compassion, and it occurs to me that compassion is most needed to understand and reach out to ethical ambiguity. This goes back to something I recall reading years ago about the function of Buddha statues as not benefiting the Buddha himself, but, rather, as benefiting those who are uplifted by such images.Compassion seems to function in this way, because it acts upon certain kinds of suffering, while at the same time identifying a life that does not potentially need to suffer at all.
  Is there a particular moral quality that is most cultivated by beholding ambiguity in literature? If anything, I think it's the capacity to behold conflicting ideas without categorizing experiences too quickly or dismissively. This is perhaps different from the stereotypical idea of what we think is happening when we empathize with others. Rather than wholeheartedly embracing the other in an uncritically sentimental or "loving" way, perhaps compassion means to have a clear understanding of a person with their strengths and weaknesses and to apply wisdom to helping them from their own situations. This is perhaps more clear eyed but it might be a more sustainable way of looking at compassion education.

Peterson, Andrew (2017) Compassion and Education: Cultivating Compassionate Children, Schools and Communities. London: Palgrave MacMillan.