280 Global Ethics for Leadership
22.4 Compassion is not Pity
The virtue of compassion particularly affects the relationship
between men. It is rooted in the golden rule—‘do unto others as you’ll
have them do unto you’. True compassion is hardly present in our rela-
tionship with each other. We have found a substitute for compassion in
pity. Pity is born of vanity, self-love and earthly scheming. With pity
personal benefit and advantage mostly takes first place; the desire really
to help others is nearly always lacking.
Pity means feeling for others, particularly feelings of sadness or sor-
row, and is used in a comparable sense to the more modern words
“sympathy” and “empathy”. Through insincere usage, it can also have a
more unsympathetic connotation of feelings of superiority or condescen-
sion.
The word “pity” comes from the Latin word “Pietas”. The word is
often used in the translations from Ancient Greek into English of Aristo-
tle's Poetics and Rhetoric. Thus, from Aristotle's perspective, in order to
feel pity, a person must believe that the person who is suffering does not
deserve their fate.
By the nineteenth century, two different kinds of pity had come to be
distinguished, which we might call “benevolent pity” and “contemptu-
ous pity” (Kimball). David Hume observed that pity which has in it a
strong mixture of good-will, is nearly allied to contempt, which is a spe-
cies of dislike, with a mixture of pride. It is an emotion that almost
always results from an encounter with a real or perceived unfortunate,
injured, or pathetic creature.^
A person experiencing pity will experience a combination of intense
sorrow and mercy for the person or creature, often giving the pitied
some kind of aid, physical help, and/or financial assistance.^ Although
pity may be confused with compassion, empathy, commiseration, con-
dolence or sympathy, pity is different from all of these. Nietzsche point-