ABSTRACT
This chapter referred to as radical concern, an on-foot approach to political philosophy invoking an affective response to conditions of need, suffering and vulnerability. It average person can catalogue such instances together, through the eyes and the pen of an empathic bystander, the chapter suggest, average person may begin to get somewhere close to equal concern. The theory of radical concern is, at its basis, a means of founding equality upon empathy, which is to say in our natural, emotional, affective and, indeed, cognitive responses to the world, its inhabitants, their situations and their lives. Based upon findings from neuroscience, social and experimental psychology and other subjects, it is not a simplistic, fully autonomic, response. It requires, often deep, empathic processing. This involves, to be sure, immediate, affective, autonomic responses to situations, to individuals and to stories; however, it also involves a very particular cognitive approach to such responses.
