Moral philosophy has long taken an interest in the emotions. Ever since Plato's defense of the primacy of reason as a source of motivation, moral philosophers have debated the proper role of emotion in the character of a good person, and in the choice of individual actions. There are striking contrasts that can be drawn among the main traditions in moral philosophy as to the role they assign to the emotions, and to the particular emotions that they evaluate positively and negatively.

Here are some examples. Utilitarianism is often presented as a theory which simply articulates an ideal of sympathy, where the morally right action is the one that would be favored by someone who is equally sympathetic to the pleasure and pains of all sentient beings. And, on another level, utilitarianism tends to evaluate highly actions motivated by sympathy and compassion, and to evaluate negatively actions motivated by malice and spite. Kantianism (or deontology, as it is often called) has a completely different structure and, consequently, a different attitude towards the emotions. It conceives of morality as the self- imposed laws of rational agents, and no emotion is thought to be involved in the generation of these laws. It is true that Kant himself does find a special role for the emotion—if that is the right word—of respect for rational agents and for the laws they impose on themselves. But Kant seems to regard respect as a sort of effect within us of our own inscrutable moral freedom, and not as the source of moral legislation. So one sort of emotion lies at the center of utilitarian thought, while deontology denies that any emotion can be thought of as the foundation of ethics. If we consider the evaluation given of particular actions, we find Kant's notorious claim that actions motivated by sympathy have no moral worth, and that the only morally valuable motive is the sense of duty. The role of emotion in general, and of particular emotions, is different still in the virtue ethics tradition that traces back to Aristotle.

When we turn from academic ethics to the themes and ideas that run through our culture, we again encounter conflicting and contrasting trends. In politics we often hear calls for greater compassion and "tough love" for unfortunate members of our society. It was said that Michael Dukakis was evaluated negatively by Americans when he responded too calmly in a debate in 1988 to a question about how he would react if his wife were murdered. Yet we some- times are told that our foreign policy ought only to be guided by a cold calculation of national self-interest, and not by any compassionate excess incited by, say, pictures of Albanian refugees. There were commentators who said that Prime Minister Begin erred in agreeing to trade Arab prisoners for captured Israeli soldiers because of his sympathetic response to an interview with the captives' distraught relatives. Compassion, it was said, led him to betray a cardinal principle of Israeli politics: do not negotiate with terrorists.