Sympathy as Affective Self-Governance

Kant appears ambivalent about the moral value of sympathy: while often skeptical of it as a source of moral motivation, he nonetheless holds that there is a duty to cultivate it as a means of promoting rational benevolence. We aim to clarify the moral function of sympathy by developing a new account of its role in Kant’s moral theory. We argue that its moral function is affect regulation. On this view, cultivating and exercising sympathetic feeling enables agents to regulate or preempt negative affects that would otherwise interfere with the capacity to follow the dictates of practical reason. Sympathy does not directly motivate moral action; rather, it preserves the conditions under which agents can effectively act from reason by blocking disruptive affects. After briefly considering and rejecting prominent epistemic, communicative, and motivational interpretations, I show that this affect regulation account better fits Kant’s distinction between active sympathy and passive compassion, as well as his conception of virtue as moral strength of will. The result is a reinterpretation of sympathy as an indirect but indispensable aid to moral agency.