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This chapter explores the cultural institutions and arrangements best suited for fostering in people a positive disposition toward caring, including the sentiments of sympathy and compassion. A brief survey is provided of recent psychological studies on the childrearing practices most likely to foster the development of caring attitudes and behaviors in children. A number of family policies are then proposed to enable and encourage parents to raise their children according to these practices. Drawing on the work of Nancy Chodorow, next the chapter argues that the current gendered division of caring within and outside the family must also be addressed if men, in particular, are to become more positively disposed to caring. The chapter then briefly discusses Nel Noddings's proposal for a more caring educational curriculum, and proposes an alternative set of educational reforms. The final section explores the effects of the media, and especially television, on people's attitudes about caring, and outlines some policies for mitigating some of the harmful consequences of television and other media on people's attitudes about caring.

This chapter discusses how an integrated, moral-therapeutic perspective on philanthropy emphasizes the confluence of self-interest, community service, and the virtues. Although all virtues contribute to philanthropy, the chapter focuses on compassion, gratitude, hope, and justice. An integrated, moral-therapeutic perspective enables us to appreciate the confluence of morality and mental health in meaningful lives of service.

This chapter considers the issues in relation to humanitarian interventions, arguing that moral compassion without a sense of the political realities can be disastrous. It also looks at Niebuhr's ethical realism in relation to the Just War tradition.

This chapter summarizes the aspects of Schopenhauer's theory of value and metaphysics that make selflessness a central point of contention, and Nietzsche's response to them. For Schopenhauer, compassion is the basis of ethics. But he takes selflessness into the metaphysical realm by arguing that the individual is an illusion: the good person sees through the principle of individuation, and conscience is an intimation of identity with one's victim. Ultimately total self-abnegation (‘saying no’ to life and oneself, as Nietzsche puts it) is the route to salvation. Nietzsche regards this metaphysics as an embarrassment, but has other arguments against Schopenhauer: that compassion is a complex phenomenon often driven by self-interest, that it detracts from one's life-purpose and capacity to be happy, that it is mistaken to think all human beings matter equally, to consider suffering something to eliminate from existence, and to take a life-denying attitude because of it.

This chapter elucidates the main ways in which Adam Smith’s sentimentalist theory of justice departs from Hume’s. It begins with an objection to grounding political commitments in sympathetic sentiments voiced in the twentieth century by Hannah Arendt and John Rawls. Both Arendt and Rawls are concerned that, if our politics is inspired by a sense of sympathetic union with our fellow human beings, we will overlook the all-important distinctions among individuals necessary for an adequate conception of justice. The remainder of the chapter argues that, even if Hume’s sentimentalist theory of justice is liable to this criticism, Smith’s alternative theory is not. Smith’s is a distinctively liberal, rights-based conception of justice grounded in an understanding of sympathy and the moral sentiments which fully appreciates the distinctions among individuals in a way that Hume’s public-interest-based theory fails to do.

Few today are aware that Immanuel Kant embraced moral sentimentalism at one point in his philosophical career, only to later reject it. This chapter argues that Kant's reasons for rejecting sentimentalism need not lead us to do the same. Although the later Kant is willing to endorse many emotions that enable finite creatures to better conform to duty, he nonetheless argues that no form of fellow-feeling must ever be allowed to threaten the rational self-control which he identifies with autonomy. Yet once we see sentimentalism as dependant on a harmony of all the faculties in a reflectively stable psyche, rather than advocating the slavery of reason to passion, we see that the distinction between rationalism and sentimentalism is not between the autonomy of reason and the heteronomy of feeling, but rather between two competing theories of what reflective autonomy involves.

This chapter begins with Siddhārtha's hair‐cutting rite at five years old. This vratabandha rite is also described in accordance with Newari practice. The poet introduces the Amarakosha, an important traditional text. The poet also gives Prince Siddhārtha an updated modern education, with physical education and subjects such as geography, engineering, astronomy, etc. After years spent in studies, Siddhārtha returns to the capital. His cousin, Devadatta, has his first argument with Siddhārtha over a duck Devadatta wounds while hunting. The poet provides an example of how a Buddhist court would highlight compassion over property in its deliberations. Lastly, the king and his courtiers devise to remedy Siddhārtha's growing malaise with a ceremony to which unmarried girls of the kingdom are invited to meet the prince. The chapter ends with the father's decision to send a team of negotiators to arrange for a marriage with Yashodharā.

This chapter examines how women, far more than men, prioritize the protection of vulnerable and poor populations and support government intervention on “compassion” issues. Were women to gain more equal standing and authority, deliberations in public settings may well come to reflect a different set of priorities. In the same conditions where women speak more and carry more perceived influence, women are also more likely to speak to their distinctive concerns. Not only do women speak less when they are minorities under majority rule, they also speak less to the concerns women tend to raise and act upon. In other words, a valuable set of perspectives and considerations is nearly entirely lost to the group in the setting where women's standing is lowest.

Hrdaya describes how after his enlightenment the Buddha was nourished by two traveling merchants, traveled to Benares to preach his first sermon to the former five companions, and there established the sangha, his monastic community of monks. The conversion of the fire‐sacrificing Kāshyapa brothers begins the poet's narration of a series of incidents that explain the growth of the Buddhist community. The poet mentions other people who donned saffron robes to become disciples such as the famous Sāriputra and Maudgalāyana, Mahakashyapa, and others. Also introduced are great merchants like Anāthapindaka who became devoted lay disciples. Interwoven are sermons the Buddha preached, in which the Dharma (“Teachings”) is set forth. Basic teachings such as Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, and the ideal of compassion are conveyed. The poet follows the Pali sources, especially the Dhammapada. This chapter covers basic doctrinal points and the formation of the Vinaya, the monastic code.

This chapter supports, in essence, the traditional interpretation of the parable, while at the same time expressing its message in a new, simple and universal language. It rejects fanciful recent interpretations such as that proposed by the French research group Entrevernes (1978), Robert Funk (1982) or James Breech (1983). Drawing on Simone Weil's commentary on the parable, it traces throughout the Gospels Jesus’ emphasis on compassion and absolute inclusiveness, and it explicates the way of thinking encouraged by Jesus as follows:

this person is someone like me

something bad happened to this person

this person feels something bad because of this

I want to do something good for this person because of this

Most discussions of the continuity in compassionate concern between humans and other animals focus on continuities and on “good discontinuities,” areas in which humans appear to have superior moral abilities. This chapter focuses on “bad discontinuities,” areas in which human compassion appears diseased and obtuse in ways that correspond to no defect in other species. After offering an analysis of the cognitive structure of compassion, the chapter then examines the relationship between each component of compassion, as it appears in standard human cases, and its role in a variety of animal cases, mapping the differences between humans and a range of animal species. The chapter then attempts to pinpoint the ways in which human compassion goes awry, through the influence of distortions supplied both by defective cultural norms and by a more tenacious underlying anxiety about weakness and need that leads human beings to create classes of subordinate beings to whom they then refuse compassion. Finally, this analysis is used to illuminate a range of cases in which humans refuse compassion to other humans in ways that appear deformed and reprehensible.

“Responses: A Summing Up” replies to the wide‐ranging contributions to the book. It argues for the complete exclusion of torture from public policy, and defends a broadly consequentialist ethical view of war. It discusses the mutual interplay between society and systems of belief, and urges the relevance of epistemology to dialogue between conflicting ideologies. In discussing an “external moral law,” it expresses doubts about “external reasons.” It discusses the obligation to alleviate poverty, recognizing how hard we find this, and looks for ways of doing better by working with the grain of our psychology. It considers how fantasies about being hard and tough erode the compassion that inhibits atrocities. “Responses: A Summing Up” (overoptimistically?) hopes to express some coherence of outlook toward these very diverse questions.

Examining the common view that Buddhism is sensitive to nonhuman animals, this chapter concludes that the tradition has an ambivalent view of existence as a nonhuman animal, and that early Buddhists were often very derisive and dismissive of the realities of nonhuman animals. Despite the central place of animal stories and their important emphases on continuity and compassion and the ethical achievements obvious in the First Precept (do not harm), recognizable harms to even the most complicated nonhuman animals, such as elephants, were deemed to be humans’ prerogatives under the moral order. The notion of “speciesism” illuminates features of how mainline Buddhism has come to understand the place of other animals even though there are subtraditions and important ethics‐based attitudes that do not easily fit the description “speciesist.”

Candrakiriti was a Mahāyāna Buddhist whose numerous philosophical treatises on the Madhyamaka school were written between the mid‐sixth to the mid‐seventh centuries c.e. Traditional accounts of his life recount legendary stories about a charismatic figure who exemplified the Bodhisattva's practice of compassion and exhibited insight into the emptiness of inherent existence. Candrakiriti uses philosophical inference and argument, as well as the narration of short stories about ruthless kings, hapless fools, and promiscuous women, to demonstrate the superiority of Buddhist practices and beliefs. As an antidote to the four illusions that impede progress on the Buddha's path, he advocates the cultivation of mindfulness.