Empathy and Concern for Others

The purpose of this work is that of showing the complexity lying behind the concepts of empathy, sympathy, and concern and of showing how these concepts can help us understand the passage from descriptive premises to normative conclusions. I will operate some distinctions within what is usually considered, broadly speaking, as empathy in the literature, so that a more narrow concept of our basic ability can emerge. Thus, from the very basic form of empathy that infants possess, I will show how we can come to a more cognitive and complex ability: sympathy as a metaethical mechanism enabling us to judge a posteriori both other people’s behavior and our owns and to decide a priori—by means of the ideal spectator—whether this conduct is appropriate or not. Disentangling different meanings of “empathy” and “sympathy”, I will try to show that the former is an embedded capacity, while the latter is such a metaethical tool, so that the step from “empathy” to “sympathy”, and consequently to respect, concern, and care, will prove useful to understand the “is/ought question”.