Throughout the years, care ethicists have raised concerns that prevalent definitions of empathy fail to adequately address the problem of otherness. They have proposed alternative conceptualizations of empathy that aim to acknowledge individual differences, help to extend care beyond one’s inner circle, and develop a critical awareness of biases and prejudices. We explore three such alternatives: Noddings’ concept of engrossment, Meyers’ account of broad empathy, and Baart’s concept of perspective-shifting. Based on these accounts, we explain that care ethics promotes a (...) conceptualization of empathy that is radical in its commitment to engage otherness and that is characterized by being: (1) receptive and open, (2) broad and deep in scope, (3) relational and interactive, (4) mature and multifaceted, (5) critical and reflective, (6) disruptive and transformative. This type of empathy is both demanding and rewarding, as it may inspire health professionals to rethink empathy, its challenges, and its contribution to good care and as it may enrich empathy education and professional empathy practices in health care. (shrink)

This paper presents a praxiological analysis of three everyday educational practices or strategies that can be considered as being directed at the moral formation of the emotions. The first consists in requests to imagine other's emotional reactions. The second comprises requests to imitate normative emotional reactions and the third to re-appraise the features of a situation that are relevant to an emotional response. The interest of these categories is not just that they help to organize and recognize the significance of (...) what might otherwise appear to be a disparate set of ordinary moral-educational interactions between children and educators. We suggest, further, that this analysis provides some new insight into what distinguishes the broad and recurrent conceptions of moral education from one another. Rather than being straightforwardly reducible to intractable differences over core normative or meta-ethical questions they can also be seen as correlating with different suppositions about the central role of the emotions in moral life and, correspondingly, different but to a large degree compatible interpretations of what the. (shrink)