Politics of empathy: ethics, solidarity and recognition

The Politics of Empathy argues that empathy is a necessary condition for ethical subjectivity and the emergence of a more compassionate world.One of the reasons empathy is important is because it gives us a sense of what it is like to be someone else. However, to understand its ethical significance we need to look elsewhere. This book claims that empathy is ethically significant because, uniquely, it allows us to reflect critically on the nature of our own lives and sense of identity. More specifically, it allows us to reflect critically on the contingency, finitude and violen