Empathy as the Only Hope for the Virtue of Compassion and as Support for a Limited Unity of the Virtues

This paper tries to establish a robust connection between the emotion of empathy and the virtue of compassion. Indeed, the central claim is that without empathy we have little hope for becoming compassionate people. But empathy has a dark side as well, and so the second goal of this paper is to show how several other virtues will also be needed to complement empathy-based compassion in order to guarantee that a person reliably acts well in helping others.