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Abstract
When we see a child crying, the urge to help him and to comfort him comes to us spontaneously. We understand what he is experiencing, and feel in us something of his sadness, his distress: this is what we call empathy. This sense of the other is the fruit of our evolutionary history and is hardwired in our biology. Empathy has interested a lot of thinkers and in particular the Scottish philosophers of the Age of the Enlightenment such as Adam Smith or Hume. More recently, the philosophers Robert Gordon (St Louis, Missouri) and Alvin Goldman (Tuscon, Arizona) proposed the theory of simulation according to which when we understand the other, we simulate the other's point of view and we use this prospective to understand the other and predict his behavior. The French neuropscyhologist Jean Decety adopted this point of view. He specifies that the empathy is the capacity to mentally simulate the subjectivity of the other, to put ourselves in the shoes of another: it lies on biological systems.

Empathy dissolves the boundaries between self and others, and feelings of altruism towards others are activated. This process results in more compassionate and caring contexts, as well as helping others in times of suffering. This book provides evidence from neuroscience and quantum physics that it is empathy that connects humanity, and that this awareness can create a more just society. It extends interest in values-based management, exploring the intellectual, physical, ecological, spiritual and aesthetic well-being of organizations and society rather than the more common management principles of maximising profit and efficiency. This book challenges the existing paradigm of capitalism by providing scientific evidence and empirical data that empathy is the most important organizing mechanism. The book is unique in that it provides a comprehensive review of the transformational qualities of empathy in personal, organizational and local contexts. Integrating an understanding based upon scientific studies of why the fields of positive psychology and organizational scholarship are important, it examines the evidence from neuroscience and presents leading-edge studies from quantum physics with implications for the organizational field. Together the chapters in this book attempt to demonstrate how empathy helps in the reduction of human suffering and the creation of a more just society.

With its foundations of injury, harm, and pain, the sociology of punishment is poised to give attention to the role of empathy at precisely those instances of social experience where human connection, understanding, and social knowing are destroyed, avoided, prohibited, or simply impossible. I explore this predicament through a specific case drawn from fieldwork in a geriatric prison, where institutional and intersubjective relations established by prison workers challenge empathic connections. The 'graying' of the prison population, one of mass incarceration's unanticipated consequences, brings issues of pain, death, and dying to the fore. The majority of research to date on aging and dying in prison has had an important descriptive and policy orientation. There has been less of an emphasis upon the theoretical underpinnings of such a turn and the nature of intersubjective relations at the intersection of care and punishment. There have been no intensive ground-level analyses of aging in prison against the backdrop of mass incarceration in the contemporary era. This study seeks to fill that vacuum while offering a more complex understanding of the relevance and limits of empathy to the study of punishment.

This brief essay uses several works of fiction and nonfiction to illustrate the profound character of evil that obtains when individuals lose their capacity to empathize with the circumstances and situation of others. W.H. Auden explored the contours of human evil throughout much of his career and argued that it inhered, even at its most vicious, in all of humankind. The persistent challenge for nations particularly and civilization more generally is to acknowledge that fact and to ensure that this omnipresent and often apparently "unspectacular" force is not unleashed. The paper provides several examples aimed at illustrating that observers should consider current trends in American policy and politics carefully as they signal a sharp decline in empathy for major groups within the polity, an inauspicious sign for United States democratic politics.

Positioned at the heart of psychology's theory and practice, as well as at the core of the so-called feminist ethic of care, empathy is nevertheless a matter of ambivalence for feminist psychology. This paper describes two symptoms of a failure of advanced Western-style democracies to get empathy right in terms of gender justice: the first is described here as the phenomenon of 'empathism'; the second as the 'female empathy tax'. Difference feminists (in psychology and elsewhere) have advocated a politics of recognition directed towards the celebration of the superiority of female and maternal empathy. Intended to enhance women's status, this is likely to backfire from the point of view of sexual equality unless complemented by a politics of affective redistribution between the sexes. Relinquishing the feminist attachment to the lopsided 'feminization' of empathy, in favour of its 'androgynization' as a fundamental human capacity, allows for the formulation of a post-patriarchal account of empathy.

This brief essay uses several works of fiction and nonfiction to illustrate the profound character of evil that obtains when individuals lose their capacity to empathize with the circumstances and situation of others. W.H. Auden explored the contours of human evil throughout much of his career and argued that it inhered, even at its most vicious, in all of humankind. The persistent challenge for nations particularly and civilization more generally is to acknowledge that fact and to ensure that this omnipresent and often apparently unspectacular force is not unleashed. The paper provides several examples aimed at illustrating that observers should consider current trends in American policy and politics carefully as they signal a sharp decline in empathy for major groups within the polity, an inauspicious sign for United States democratic politics. ; Published version

In this note we shall discuss a concept that - despite its prominence in both Hume (1739) and Smith (1759), its obvious relevance for social behavior, and its not so infrequent use in colloquial language - has never gained a foothold in economic theory: the concept of empathy. Specifically, we illustrate how some insights from the psychological literature on empathy can be incorporated into a standard utility framework, and demonstrate the potential interaction of beliefs and utility through the channel of empathy. (author's abstract)