The Politics of Humanity

study across the social and natural sciences.^14 As Lynn Hunt notes, empathy is a
concept broadly equivalent to the Enlightenment understanding of sympathy, a
term that has in modern usage crept closer to our understanding of pity.^15
Sherman demonstrates that, though we may describe our humanitarian
commitments in terms of, say, a Kantian notion of respect, “[if] respect for human
dignity is a part of the humanitarian posture, then it must be thickened with, and
made operational through, empathy”.^16 Sherman is prepared to pin down the
agenda of humanitarianism, rather than allowing fully for the negotiations and
contestations that necessarily constitute the idea of human dignity, and can even
emerge from the sentimental experience of humanitarianism. But her account of
the mechanisms of empathy nevertheless convincingly shows how developments in
psychological research bear out Adam Smith’s version of sympathy. Smith famously
emphasised the importance of our ability to “trade places in fancy”.^17

By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive

ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body,

and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form

some idea of his sensations ... His agonies, when they are thus brought home

to ourselves, when we have adopted and made them our own, begin at last

to affect us, and then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels.^18

His account comes close to the modern understanding of empathy as the cognitive
ability to imagine oneself into another’s situation. This ability performs a vital role in
absorbing and making sense of others’ suffering. As Sherman puts it:

Empathy and protoempathy are ways we transcend the self and achieve a

kind of social intelligence or understanding. If, as research suggests,

empathetic capacities are also important contributors to altruistic behavior,

14
For a recent overview see Jeremy Rifkin, The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global
Consciousness in a World in Crisis 15 (New York: Penguin, 2009).
16 Hunt, Inventing Human Rights , 64-65.
17 Sherman, "Empathy, Respect, and Humanitarian Intervention": 109.
18 Cited in Ibid.: 110.
Cited in Laqueur, "Mourning, Pity, and the Work of Narrative in the Making Of
"Humanity"", 48.