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"This book brings together work from a wide range of disciplines to explain processes underlying empathy and fairness. The expert contributors approach the topic of empathy and fairness from different viewpoints, namely those of social cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, evolutionary anthropology, economics and neuropathology. The result is an interdisciplinary and unitary framework focused on the neuronal, developmental, evolutionary and psychological basis of empathy and fairness."--Publisher's description, from p. [4] of cover

When Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, and other ethicists of caring draw
the contrast between supposedly masculine and supposedly feminine moral
thinking, they put such things as justice, autonomy, and rights
together under the first rubric and such things as caring,
responsibility for others, and connection together under the second.
This division naturally leaves caring ethicists with the issue of how
to deal with topics such as justice, autonomy, and rights, but it also
leaves defenders of more traditional moral theories (now dubbed
"masculine") with the problem of how to treat (if at all)
the sorts of issues that ethicists of caring raise.

carolyn j. dean is Professor of History at Brown University. She is currently working on a study tentatively entitled "Empathy,Suffering, and Indifference after the Holocaust."

In this study, a "Revised Empathy Scale" was constructed by using an empathy scale from the previous study (Hashimoto & Shiomi, 2000). A questionnaire consisting of 30 items on empathy and the Shimoda Personality Inventory (SPI) were administered to a total of 870 subjects
(466 university and 404 high school students). Through factor analyses, four factors were extracted for the empathy scale. The four factors were named the "Cannot feel others' positive feelings," the "Can feel others' positive feelings," the "Can feel
others' negative feelings," and the "Cannot feel others' negative feelings," respectively. Their reliability and validity were confirmed. The characteristics of empathy in adolescents were clarified by the scale's relationship with the characteristics of the
SPI.

This paper asks what it is to claim empathy, voice and authenticity as the grounds of feminist research. It explores representational practices that refuse such grounds by residing in both situated and constantly changing intersections of interpretation, interruption and mutuality. The typical investments and categories of ethnography are challenged so as to put under theoretic pressure the claims of scientificity. Grounded in a study of women living with HIV/AIDS, also challenged is the ethnographer as "the one who knows" whose task is to produce the persuasive text the elicits reader empathy. Finally, the paper probes what is at work in the concepts of "voice" and "authenticity" in ethnographic work.

My review of the past thirty years of narrative scholarship returns to the work of Harvey Sacks and Erving Goffman, situated in Dell Hymes' ethnography of communication, to examine where their interactive model for understanding narrative has taken us. Although in some disciplines, narrative research is used as empirical evidence of how people interpret their experiences, Sacks' work points more to the ways that personal narrative destabilizes the relationship between narrative and experience. Current work focuses on narrative at its limits, including the study of fragmented, rather than coherent, selves; multiply voiced, rather than monologic, points of view; and compromised, rather than easily empathetic, relations of understanding. This work builds on, rather than departs from, research on narrative thirty years ago. In this essay, I suggest a connection between early research on entitlement and contemporary research on the ethics of narrative, and I focus in particular on the problem of empathy.

This essay explores several moral attitudes that undergird a commitment to humanitarian intervention. Humanitarian intervention is usually understood to mean assistance or relief, often in the form of a rescue response by the international community to such emergencies as natural disasters, systematic human rights violations, or genocides that take place within the borders of sovereign states. But the term can equally mean aid before the fact, or prevention, as well as longer-term commitments to international justice that go beyond emergency relief. Whether the aid is relief or prevention, short- or long-term, and however it relates to broader questions of international justice, the same question applies: How do we come to feel the ethical imperative to ally ourselves with those outside our borders? If, as Kant puts it, "ought implies can," then what makes the "oughts" of intervention psychologically feasible? Of course in international affairs the issue is, more typically, whether certain proposed interventions are politically feasible, Do they promote our national interest? Are they cost effective? Even more practically, will food relief get where it is intended to go? Do the rules of military engagement allow us to protect the victims we are trying to help?

AbstractIn Roberts and Strayer (1996) we described how emotional factors were strongly related to children's empathy, which in turn strongly predicted prosocial behavior. This paper focuses on how these child emotional factors, assessed across methods and sources, related to parental factors (empathy, emotional expressiveness, encouragement of children's emotional expressiveness, warmth and control) for a subset of 50 two‐parent families from our earlier sample. Parents reported on their emotional characteristics and parenting; children (5 to 13 years old; 42% girls) also described parenting practices. Children's age and parenting factors accounted for an average of 32% of the variance in child emotional factors, which, with role‐taking, strongly predicted children's empathy. In contrast to earlier, less comprehensive studies, we found important paths between parents' and children's empathy, mediated by children's anger. These countervailing pathways largely neutralized each other, resulting in the low correlations usually seen when parents' and children's empathy are examined in isolation. Thus our findings are an important confirmation and extension of the theoretically expected link between parents' and children's empathy.