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The Moral Significance Of Empathy: A Scottish Sentimentalist Perspective, Xiaolong Wang

The Hilltop Review

Which feature of human nature accounts for moral motivation? From a Scottish Sentimentalist perspective, the answer lies in our fellow feelings: empathy, the capacity for sharing what other people feel; and sympathy, the capacity for feeling concern for other people’s well-being. Recently, disagreement has emerged within Scottish Sentimentalism on which of the two fellow feelings does the real work in motivating moral acts. Paul Bloom famously argues that sympathy is sufficient for moral motivation with the help of theory of mind (or often called mind reading), and thus concludes that empathy is not necessary from a Scottish Sentimentalist perspective. I …