What is empathy?

ANDREW SCULL

In making moral choices, many would claim that empathy in this sense makes us more likely to care about others and to consider their interests when choosing our own course of action. Siep Stuurman, for instance, in his huge study The Invention of Humanity, sees the emergence of a sense of common humanity, and the widening and deepening of a discourse of human rights, as depending on long processes of cultural change and intellectual argument whereby the deeply ingrained ethnocentrism that was omnipresent at the dawn of history was increasingly modified and left behind, moving towards (though never entirely realizing) a changed mental universe where “people came to see foreigners as fellow human beings or even as equals”.