Ravi:
Don't know about that, but per capita GDP seems to track quite well the number of animals that are (almost invariably) inhumanely treated and killed. Of course in many parts of the "third world" animals have all but disappeared (apart from the ones that have a "symbiotic" relationship with humans) due to resource competition.
Animal liberation is a touchy subject around here ;-) so substitute "no of Iraqis killed" for "level of empathy and rationality" in your sentence above, if you wish, for an alternate view.
[WS:] The above may be true of the US, but it is certainly not true of EU. I also think that you commit the fallacy of telescoping historical event into an ahistorical perspective - what was true of X at one point of time becomes true of X at all times. By that logic, we are all sick of the chicken pox.
You miss my argument that there is a progress in the general level of empathy and rationality, as manifested by the fact that societies, especially those with high level of economic development, gradually adopted more empathic and rational attitudes. Instead, you counter with the statement about the Iraqis killed - or by implication, some other group being targeted at some point in history. However, your counterargument misses the point entirely, because it dos not speak to the change over time, which I am claiming. The Iraq war, repugnant as it is does not contradict a historical change of our attitudes toward war. If anything, its conduct and the lip service paid to "human rights" (the justification of the war) and "civilian causalities" suggest how much our attitudes toward war atrocities have changed - not long ago, rape and plunder were glorified spoils of war adventures.
Dennis: "The mandarin parable anticipates the development of Rastignac's character. Balzac wants to show that in bourgeois society it is difficult to observe moral obligations, including the most basic ones. The chain of relations in which we are all involved can make us at least indirectly responsible for a crime. Some years later, in Modeste Mignon, Balzac again used a mandarin to make a similar point: 'If at this moment,' the poet Canalis says, 'the most important mandarin in China is closing his eyes and putting the Empire into mourning, does that grieve you deeply? In India the English are killing thousands of men as good as we are; and at this moment, as I speak, the most charming woman is there being burnt but you have had coffee for breakfast all the same?' In a world dominated by the cruelties of backwardness and the cruelties of imperialism, moral indifference already implies a form of complicity."
[WS:] I think it is a similar case of telescoping fallacy, but this time telescoping in space rather than in time. What with "normal" vision would occupy only a hundredth of the picture is magnified to fill the entire picture.
The world is all connected, to be sure, but not all connections were created equal. Some connections matter more in some contexts than other. In a probabilistic view of the world, this is expressed as varying magnitudes and probabilities of different effects. However, imposing a rigid framework of moral categories collapses these magnitudes and probabilities in a similar way as a telescope collapses relative distances - everything appears to be very close, as if within an arm's reach.
Of course, we know it is an optical illusion in case of a telescope. Nobody will seriously argue that we are about trampled by a herd of elephants seen at a distance through a telescope, even though people were genuinely scared when the first movies were shown in theaters*). We know better than that today when it comes to optical illusions, but we still fall for the same trap when it comes to logic and morality.
The proper response to the argument implicit in the parable that you quote is: "our moral responsibility for world's events should be proportional to the strength of the causal effect on these events. If our individual action was 99.9% contribution factor to an event, we bear 99.5% of responsibility. If, otoh, our contribution was 0.01%, we bear only 0.01% of responsibility."
To put it in concrete terms, those who voted for Bush in 2000, bear about1/ 50,460,110 % responsibility for Iraq war. Those who voted for Gore - 0%.
Another observation, this telescoping through space and time is only accidentally due to a bourgeois political order i.e. inasmuch as capitalism facilitated growth of information technologies. But it is the latter that made awareness of the world events possible, and our old-fashioned, parochial mind sets that treated them as if they were happening next door. Back in the "olden days" people were aware only of what was going on in their little settlements, but blissfully ignorant of the world at large. This formed the habit of the mind to see everything as if it were happening in the immediate vicinity.
Wojtek
*) A short documentary by the Lumiere brothers _L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat_ was showing arrival of a train at a station. There were stories about people running from the theater in panic seeing a locomotive "approaching" them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'Arriv%C3%A9e_d'un_Train_en_Gare_de_la_Ciotat