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    Recruiting Smith as support for a broad, non-affective co... — Carmelics
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    Challenges→Proper empathy can be understood broadly to include vicarious sharing of non-affective states such as beliefs and desires, not only affective states.

    Recruiting Smith as support for a broad, non-affective conception of empathy misreads a thinker who consistently anchors the concept in passions and sentiments.

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    Reasons For

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    • 1.Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments explicitly grounds empathy (sympathy) in the capacity to share feelings, not abstract cognitive understanding.
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    • 2.Smith repeatedly emphasizes imagination of emotional states, not rational principles, as the mechanism by which we understand others' experiences.
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    • 3.Modern non-affective readings abstract empathy into perspective-taking or cognitive simulation, categories absent from Smith's 18th-century framework.
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    Reasons Against

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    • 1.Smith's sympathy requires imaginative distance and judgment to align our sentiments with others', involving cognitive mediation beyond mere passion.
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    • 2.The impartial spectator, central to Smith's ethics, is a rational construct for evaluating propriety, not a purely sentimental mechanism.
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    • 3.Contemporary scholarship distinguishes affective and cognitive components within Smith's account itself, rather than treating sentiment as exclusive.
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    Related

    Contemporary scholarship distinguishes affective and cognitive components within...Modern non-affective readings abstract empathy into perspective-taking or cognit...Proper empathy can be understood broadly to include vicarious sharing of non-aff...Smith repeatedly emphasizes imagination of emotional states, not rational princi...
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    Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments explicitly grounds empathy (sympathy) in the ...Smith's sympathy requires imaginative distance and judgment to align our sentime...The impartial spectator, central to Smith's ethics, is a rational construct for ...

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