ABSTRACT
Most discussions of the relationship between humans and animals, where empathy and compassion are concerned, focus on two things: continuities between human and animal emotion, and good discontinuities, meaning discontinuities in which we humans have something morally valuable that animals don't have. In Upheavals of Thought, this chapter argues for an analysis of the human emotion standardly called "compassion" that derives from a long Western philosophical tradition of analysis and debate. Animal compassion is limited, focused on the near-at-hand and relatively rigid. Human compassion cases suggest, is profoundly uneven and unreliable, in ways that make animals look, at times, like morally superior beings. The chapter helps to understand how human compassion is infected by anthropodenial. Once one has targeted a person or group as emblematic of animal decay and animal weakness, this very segmentation of the moral universe will block the formation of an idea of similar possibilities and vulnerabilities.
