She is mad at her boss, so you become sorry for her, or committed to fairness, or sad about the state of the world, or nostalgic for better times–but not angry at her boss. Sympathy: Feeling a supportive emotion in response to someone else’s emotional state that is not the same as that person’s original emotion.Your anger is probably different in texture and intensity from hers, but it’s the same in kind, an imperfect reproduction of her mental state. Your friend is mad at her boss because he treated her unfairly. Empathy: Feeling a similar emotion in response to someone else’s emotional state.Many wise people have thought about moral psychology and justice without using this word at all, so we should consider whether it does us any good.* It is not attested before 1895, and it gained its current meaning only in 1946. Political behavior is compatible with a fair amount of actual empathy. That the Israeli electorate supports policies that are unjust, and their Not so much the speech as the applause that I find problematic, because I believe (Applause.) I believe that’s what Israeli parents would want for these kids if they had a chance to listen to them and talk to them. I want them to have opportunities just like my kids do.

I honestly believe that if - if any Israeli parent sat down with those kids, they’d say, I want these kids to succeed.

They weren’t that different from your daughters or sons. And talking to them, they weren’t that different from my daughters. I - I’m going off script here for a second, but before I - before I came here, I - I met with a - a group of young Palestinians from the age of 15 to 22. To suggest that this argument is problematic, I would quote then-President Obama in Jerusalem on March 21, 2013: are trapped in dilapidated schools,” and that “innocent people being slaughtered and expelled from their homes half a world away. Our “empathy deficit” explains why we accept that “Americans … sleep in the streets and beg for food,” that “inner-city children …. In a 2006 commencement address, he also implies that the level of empathy in a society as a whole is a precondition of social justice. Here Obama links empathy to moral judgment. They can just crash a plane into them and not even consider, “How would I feel if my child were in there?” That’s why they can think of the people in the World Trade Center as abstractions. People like bin Laden are missing that sense of empathy. When I speak to students, I tell them that one of the most important things we can do is to look through somebody else’s eyes. I often say we’ve got a budget deficit that’s important, we’ve got a trade deficit that’s critical, but what I worry about most is our empathy deficit. (Apologies for some cutting and pasting from previous posts.)ĭoris Sommer mentioned that Barack Obama popularized the notion of an “empathy deficit.” In a 2004 interview with Oprah Winfrey, while he was still a State Senator, Obama said: or Ways of Caring ,” Harvard Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, March 15, 2019. My remarks at a conference entitled “ Empathy ….

2008 presidential campaign coinage