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Identification and Economic Behavior Sympathy and Empathy in Historical Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2008

Philippe Fontaine
Philippe Fontaine
Affiliation:
École normale supérieure de Cachan
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Extract

In modern economics, the use of sympathy and empathy shows significant ambiguity. Sympathy has been used in two different senses. First, it refers to cases where the concern for others directly affects an individual's own welfare (Sen, 1977). Second, the term has served the purposes of welfare economics, where it is associated with interpersonal comparisons of the extended sympathy type, that is, comparisons between one's own situation in a social state and someone else's in a different social state (Arrow, 1963 [1951]). On the other hand, empathy has been used interchangeably with sympathy either to render the idea of interdependent utility functions (Leibenstein, 1976), or to convey the imaginative process of imagining oneself in someone else's place (Harsanyi, 1977).

Type
Essays
Information
Economics & Philosophy , Volume 13 , Issue 2 , October 1997 , pp. 261 - 280
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

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