I think there are better alternatives to the psychological concept of desensitization you are applying to moral feeling. Rather than treating moral and non-moral feeling like mechanical receptors which can be adjusted up or down in their sensitivity to being triggered as a function of the sheer quantity of stimulation they are subjected to, I embrace psychological approaches which understand emotional receptivity as expressions of our relative success or failure at making sense of events in relation to our aims and purposes. Whether constant exposure to a specific content of experience leads to boredom and disinterest or a deepening of caring depends on what it is I am looking for in that experience, and why I am doing so.
Death is a profoundly mysterious notion and as such is rightly an inescapable topic not just for philosophers but the average person. I spent some time devouring images and videos of death. I accomplished what I set out to do; I became ‘desensitized’ to these images. But what that meant was not that meaningless repetition of death-related images dialed down my emotional feeling receptors, it meant that I became bored by these images after learning that the process of dying in itself is not very illuminating. I might just as easily have come to the opposite conclusion, that profound insights concerning the nature of existence were being opened up by my study of the mechanics of dying. Which of these two responses ensue, ’desensitized’ boredom or deepening caring and understanding, can’t be determined by the frequency of exposure itself, but by what I want to do with that exposure. Since my interest here was strictly in this process rather than in the moral circumstances surrounding the event, my boredom did not in any way carry over to my responsiveness to the moral aspects.
On the contrary, satisfying my curiosity concerning the mechanics of death allowed me to disentangle the different aspects of death in my mind (mechanical process vs moral dimensions)so that the moral dimensions could appear more clearly when I decide to shift my attention to them. If I were then to bombard myself with repeated exposure to Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky in an effort to grasp these moral dimensions better, whether this endeavor resulted in desensitization or a deepening of my moral understanding would be a matter of how I construed what I was reading.
In a sense, I was acting ‘bureaucratically’ in deciding it was useful to pair down my focus on death to the distanced, indirect perspective of its mechanics. Doing so allowed me to satisfy my curiosity while at the same time more clearly delimiting the bounds of its ethical dimensions. A surgeon approaching the body as a mechanism is also treating it bureaucratically, in order to better focus on the immediate goal of repairing injury by disentangling it from the empathized felt body.
You raised the question of whether someone who chooses to remain at the distanced, detached ,bureaucratic’ level of involvement is protecting themselves from the intensity of feelings they can’t cope with. I think this is certainly true, but I don’t think such defense strategies are mere forms of denial or rationalization, they are necessary for all of us. No one can cope with experiences which exceed their ability to make sense of them. The fault doesn’t lie in the strategy, but in the existential predicament of not being prepared to assimilate strange, threatening otherness. It isn’t desensitization or bureaucracy which keeps us from greater empathy, but our not having the intellectual resources to makes sense of others in a way which allows us to relate to them.
I think Levinas’ notion of the face of the Other comes up short in this regard. Levinas loads the ethical dice, so to speak, in his formulation of the Absolute Other. The ethical dilemma we face is not that of recognition vs reification, self-transcendence vs self-interest, the arbitrary conservative thrust of the lure of the familiar vs the compassionate embrace of otherness. When we seem to fail to recognize and maintain the other‘s autonomy this is not a retreat into self but, on the contrary, an experiencing of otherness which is too other to be intelligible. For Levinas, justice begins
with maintaining the autonomy of the other, as if one first glimpses this autonomy and then decides not to honor it. But the other’s autonomy can only exist for me to the extent that I can integrate it intelligibly within my way of life, which is itself the ongoing production of a collaborative community.
The failure to coordinate harmoniously among competing realtional intelligibilites results in the appearance of injustice, as though there were an intention on the part of one of the parties not to recognize an aspect of the other. However, it is not autonomous content that we strive to maximize, but intelligible process, and intelligibility is ontologically prior to the actions of an autonomous subject who recognizes or fails to recognize others. When there is disagreement between the victim and the alleged perpetrator about whether an injustice has indeed been committed, who determines, and how is it determined, that someone is closing themselves off to the face of the Other?
If it is intelligible ways of going on that are being protected, then from the vantage of the ‘perpetrator’, what is being excluded, closed off and eliminated is not a particular content (the face of the Other) , in the service of reifying one’s own autonomy. On the contrary, the aim is to exclude from a system of practices that which would render it nonsensical and deprive it of coherent meaning. In other words, from the vantage of the so-called perpetrator, the practices of exclusion and elimination are in the service of rendering justice by preventing the degradation of meaningful autonomy in general.
Levinas’question of how to be alive to each being’s suffering assumes a need to resist the unjust desire or intention not to be alive to the suffering of others, that is, the unethical impetus to intra-affect with others by excluding their experience. But the suffering other can only be acknowledged if they can first be identified and made sense of as a suffering other. What matters to us, what we care about, whose suffering we empathize with, is dependent in the first place on what is intelligible to us from our vantage as nodes within a larger relational matrix. We can only intend to recognize and welcome the Other who saves us from chaos; we intend to reject the Other who offers the oppression of incommensurability. Freedom from incoherence implies a sense of liberation, freedom from the order of intelligibility and intimacy a sense of subjection.
We always have intended to welcome, sacrifice ourselves for the intelligible Other, and always disliked, `chose against’ the incommensurate Other. What is repressive to us is what we cannot establish harmonious relation with. To choose to embrace the unforeseen and is to prefer that aspect within unforeseen experience which is foreseeable, which offers us the hope of avoidance of the abyss of senselessness and incoherence. To the extent that we can say that we look forward to the unknown, it is only to that degree that we ANTICIPATE the unanticipatable that there is the hope of trust and recognition in that otherwise meaningless unknowable. We cannot get beyond this link between the lovable and the recognizable without losing the basis of any ethics, which is the ability to distinguish between, even if without yet defining, what is preferred and what is not.