From: Dogan Goecmen (Dogangoecmen@AOL.COM)
Date: Thu Nov 23 2006 - 02:42:53 EST
The fundamental category of Smith's ethic is not empathy but sympathy. Empathy is a much narrower in scope. It merely involves mutual understanding. Sympathy however implies also mutual support (solidarity). For Smith mutual sympathy requires some sort of situational commoness. According to Smith master and slave may understand one antoher but they do not sympathise with one another because their situations involve contradictory relations. This leads to what he calls corruption of moral relations. So according to Smith the principle 'to see one self' as others see or likely to see' requires despite all differences also some sort of common interest. Sympathy as Smith explores it has physiological foundation but it is a sociological category and wants to say that the basis of social relations should be mutual sympathy or in Hegelian terms mutual recognition. Dogan
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