In this essay I will address some of the issues that moral philosophers have raised about two particular emotions —compassion and sympathy. I do not think these two emotions are identical, as I plan to demonstrate. But they are similar, and I often will speak about one of them when I am really speaking about both. This is to avoid tiresome repetitions.

This essay will be divided into three parts. The first will say a little about emotions in general, and then some about what are called the 'moral emotions.' I then will try to characterize sympathy and compassion as distinctive moral emotions that embody certain beliefs and desires. There is little argumentation in the first part, and I am mainly concerned with giving a perspicuous description of these two emotions. But I think my account already makes clear why we think they are valuable emotions that we want to instill in our children, and in ourselves. In the second and third parts of this essay I will look at some of the philosophical arguments about sympathy that have been generated by Kant's approach to ethics. In both parts I am looking at sympathy and compassion and comparing them to the motive that Kant exclusively praised—the sense of duty. In part II, I will examine three arguments that Kant and his followers put forward to establish that sympathy is morally inferior to the sense of duty. In part III, I will examine an interesting argument put forward by some of Kant's opponents that tries to show that, on the contrary, sympathy is sometimes morally superior to the sense of duty as a motive. My verdict, which is tentative at certain points, is that neither side wins and that the two motives are both valuable, and neither is clearly more valuable in the relevant comparison cases. A second point that I will emphasize from time to time is that sympathy and compassion have to be understood as emotions that have a certain important place in a person's character. However, they cannot be conceived of as the entirety of moral character, nor as the only morally important emotions.

As a final preliminary point, I will be largely looking at sympathy and the sense of duty as forms of motivation. By that I mean that I will look at them as psychological states that lead a person to act intentionally. Emotions have a passive aspect, which is captured in the older term for them, 'the passions.' This term emphasizes the respect in which we undergo—or are passive—in feeling an emotion. I do not deny that this is a feature of emotions. Some emotions, like grief, are only passive. But I will focus on the situations where compassion and sympathy lead a person to act, as they are known to do.