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Sympathy is an emotional response that involves both understanding and being moved by the suffering or joy of another. Perhaps the most famous illustration of this response occurs in the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan, where a certain Samaritan stops to help a man left half dead by thieves on the way from Jerusalem to Jericho. Sympathy, then, as this parable suggests, is a kind of positive response to another’s suffering and is distinct from other negative responses, such as schadenfreude, a kind of joy or pleasure at another’s misfortune. Further, sympathy, as we commonly understand it, is also distinct from empathy—although this distinction is not always observed. Empathy involves the sharing of another’s feelings or the processes by which we come to feel as another feels. Sympathy, in contrast, involves, first, an awareness of another’s suffering as theirs and not ours and, second, being moved to relieve that person’s suffering.

To talk of “positive” and “negative” responses to the suffering of others indicates yet another widely attributed (though contestable) feature of sympathy: that it is a kind of moral emotion or response. Sympathy, or equivalently now compassion, understood as a kind of moral response to the suffering of another, has had a significant influence on moral thought and practice, specifically in the moral theories of several modern philosophers, including in the eighteenth-century David Hume and Adam Smith, in the nineteenth-century Arthur Schopenhauer, and in the twentieth-century Max Scheler. Such figures, however, do not necessarily understand sympathy quite as we would.

Hume, for instance, sees sympathy as a kind of mechanism through which the feelings of others are transferred to us (the two analogies he uses are the reverberation of sound and the reflection of light in a mirror), which seems closer to empathy as described earlier.

The idea that sympathy is an attribute important to morality extends, however, beyond the modern world. One obvious earlier reference to sympathy as a morally significant attribute comes to us from Buddhism, though this is hardly the only one. One explanation of why sympathy should feature in the moral thought and practice of different cultures is perhaps that human suffering is such a basic evil that its relief (except in certain highly specific circumstances, such as those related to criminal punishment) is thought across cultures to be an unqualified moral good. Even in societies where sympathy does not figure prominently in moral thought and practice (as was plausibly the case in various ancient societies, including ancient Greece and Rome), it would generally still be recognized as an important human quality in some sense. A person completely devoid of sympathy would in almost any human society be viewed as lacking a critical human attribute—indeed in terms of modern psychological categories, we would describe such a person as a sociopath, a person devoid of any moral sense or conscience.

Sympathy, then, seems to be a fundamental human psychological attribute or state. Indeed its presence seems central to normal human psychological development. Even infants, for example, become distressed at witnessing the distress of others. While this response may simply be an early form of empathy, it seems plausible to suggest, as some psychologists have done, that sympathy as a more cognitively complex emotional state develops from this simpler emotional response. Thinking of the development of sympathy as a part of normal human psychological development may then be thought to provide support for a kind of naturalistic explanation of morality. It is our natural capacity for sympathy (a capacity that we develop from infancy to adulthood) that makes certain moral cultural practices—including, for example, our recognition of claims on us derived from other’s needs—possible. But while a number of moral philosophers (including Hume and Smith) have advanced moral theories in which sympathy plays something like this naturalistic explanatory role, other moral theorists, most notably those influenced by Immanuel Kant, would deny that sympathy has this sort of moral foundational role. According to the Kantian view, morality is founded not on our emotional capacities but on our capacity for reason alone.

Bibliography:

Hume, David. [1739–1740] 1978. A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd ed., rev. and variant readings by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kant, Immanuel. [1785] 1964. Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals. Trans. H. J. Paton. New York: Harper and Row.
Scheler, Max. [1913] 1954. The Nature of Sympathy. Trans. Peter Heath. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. [1839] 1995. On the Basis of Morality. Trans. E. F. J. Payne. Providence, RI: Berghahn Books.
Smith, Adam. [1759] 1976. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, eds.D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press.