Sympathy as a “Natural”
The Ruffin Series of the Society for Business Ethics 2004:53-58 (2004)
| Abstract | In this essay, I want to reconsider sympathy as a “natural” emotion or sentiment. Adam Smith famously defended it as such (as did his friend David Hume) but both used the term ambiguously and in a different sense than we use it today. Nevertheless, it seems to me that Smith got it quite right, that the basis of morality and justice is to be found in the realm of affect rather than in theory and principles alone, and that sympathy is a “natural” or should we say a “basic” emotion. But that means that morality may not be an exclusively human characteristic, as many philosophers (including Smith and Hume) have assumed. But some contemporary thinking in psychology and philosophy makes that extension plausible | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,653 |
| External links |
 |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesPatrick R. Frierson (2006). Adam Smith and the Possibility of Sympathy with Nature. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 87 (4):442–480.
Rico Vitz (2004). Sympathy and Benevolence in Hume's Moral Psychology. Journal of the History of Philosophy 42 (3):261-275.
Cor van der Weele (2011). Empathy's Purity, Sympathy's Complexities; De Waal, Darwin and Adam Smith. Biology and Philosophy 26 (4):583-593.
Bence Nanay (2010). Adam Smith’s Concept of Sympathy and its Contemporary Interpretations. Adam Smith Review.
Jon Rick (2007). Hume's and Smith's Partial Sympathies and Impartial Stances. Journal of Scottish Philosophy 5 (2):135-158.
Douglas Chismar (1988). Hume's Confusion About Sympathy. Philosophy Research Archives 14:237-246.
Rico Vitz (forthcoming). The Nature and Functions of Sympathy in Hume's Philosophy. In Paul Russell (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of David Hume. Oxford University Press.
Deborah Mower (2009). Teaching Ethics Via Sympathy. International Journal of Applied Philosophy 23 (1):51-60.
John W. McHugh (2011). Relaxing a Tension in Adam Smith's Account of Sympathy. Journal of Scottish Philosophy 9 (2):189-204.
Fonna Forman-Barzilai (2005). Sympathy in Space(S): Adam Smith on Proximity. Political Theory 33 (2):189 - 217.
Philip Mercer (1972). Sympathy and Ethics: A Study of the Relationship Between Sympathy and Morality with Special Reference to Hume's Treatise. Oxford,Clarendon Press.
John A. Fischer (1987). Taking Sympathy Seriously: A Defense of Our Moral Psychology Toward Animals. Environmental Ethics 9 (3):197-215.
Noriaki Iwasa (2011). Sentimentalism and the Is-Ought Problem. Croatian Journal of Philosophy 11 (33):323-352.
Neil Saccamano (2011). Aesthetically Non-Dwelling: Sympathy, Property, and the House of Beauty in Hume's Treatise. Journal of Scottish Philosophy 9 (1):37-58.
Analytics
Monthly downloads
Sorry, there are not enough data points to plot this chart.
|
Added to index2011-01-09Total downloads1 ( #274,556 of 548,984 )Recent downloads (6 months)1 ( #63,327 of 548,984 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
