A Conceptual and Empirical Sketch of Compassionate Empathy

Taken in one sense, the question of whether encouraging compassionate empathic responding is a legitimate aim of a higher education in ethics is at best trivial and at worst inane. For better or for worse, there is a long if now routed tradition, strongest in the United States but apparent in the structure of British universities as well, that the final stage of the long process of personal, social, and moral development stretching from the earliest years of childhood and into the primary and secondary school years was college, understood as an opportunity for the refinement of one’s moral character through sophisticated cultural initiation and personal development. In this connection, it is not insignificant to observe that during most of the nineteenth century the keystone of the college curriculum in United States was moral philosophy. The course was required of all students and usually taught by the college president himself.1 One can reasonably assume that, before this flower of renaissance humanism began to fade, not to provide a college environment supportive of compassionate empathy, along side other such character traits as honesty, courage, fairmindedness, and integrity, would be inconsistent with the college system’s own raison d’être and constitute, therefore, an educational failure through neglect. From this perspective, even to entertain the question of whether it might or might not be a good thing for young people to be initiated into sympathy and compassion, in practical ethics education as elsewhere in higher education, might be accused of being, in Williams’ (1981) evocative phrase, one thought too many.