Sympathy

Three elements and none of them is a shared feeling. Pity is the response, cognitive analysis is how it is arrived at and moral judgment is what supplies the criterion, so sympathy is a conclusion reached about somebody rather than an experience shared with them. Empathy is the contrast, being the ability to share understanding with another through empathic conduits, which requires a channel that sympathy does not. Sympathy is a result of cognitive imagination, and where no shared empathic conduits exist people are encouraged to associate those they do have empathy with to those in distress, which manufactures a cognitive connection in place of a real one. It requires no empathic bonds at all, being a cognitive decision based on observed facts or on endoreality, and the endoreality clause matters, since a judgement reached from within a group's reality will find the group's own suffering more compelling. Marsh's clinical point is the sharpest use of the distinction. People displaying characteristics associated with psychopathic and narcissistic diagnoses have low affective empathy but average cognitive sympathy, which she reads as support for the view that the supposed impairment is something other than a failure of understanding. Both terms should be allocated usefully, which is the practical argument for keeping them apart, since the two describe different capacities that come apart in real cases.

Psychology draws a similar distinction, separating affective empathy, feeling with, from cognitive empathy or perspective taking, and separating both from sympathy or compassion, which include a motivation to help. Adam Smith's theory of moral sentiments built an ethics on sympathy in a sense closer to modern empathy, so the terms have swapped territory historically. Paul Bloom argued against empathy as a guide to moral action on the grounds that it is parochial and innumerate, favouring reasoned compassion instead, which is close to what Marsh calls sympathy and treats as the lesser thing. The disagreement between them is substantive rather than terminological.