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Abstract
This dissertation argues that widespread failures to address climate-induced displacement arise from manufactured social, spatial, and temporal distance. This distancing obscures suffering and obstructs ethical engagement. I develop an alternative moral vision by reinterpreting Arthur Schopenhauer’s ethics of compassion, given that conventional approaches in climate ethics fail to adequately address this deep perceptual problem. I employ a hermeneutical and multidimensional approach, articulated by William Schweiker and David A. Clairmont, to read Schopenhauer’s philosophy as a "subtractive religion" and uncover its overlooked moral resources. My reading reclaims his pessimism as a generative foundation for an ethics grounded in the recognition of shared suffering. My analysis resolves the apparent contradiction between resignation and compassion in his work, presenting this tension as a productive religious aporia. From Schopenhauer's metaphysics, I develop a practical, suffering-centered ethics that relies on the derived virtues of humility, kindness, and understanding, which are essential for sustaining compassion through imperfection and uncertainty. I conclude by applying this theoretical model to the practice of mutual aid. I argue that mutual aid serves as the practical enactment of Schopenhauerian compassion. As a form of prefigurative politics, it systematically collapses the moral distances that hinder compassionate action. Through its non-hierarchical, relational, and immediate practices, mutual aid counters the fear, abstraction, and deferral that define contemporary responses to displacement. By bringing Schopenhauer into dialogue with climate ethics, feminist theory, and the politics of direct action, this work offers a coherent moral orientation for building collective life in an age of ecological upheaval and forced migration.