Sympathy (empathic concern) is mainly understood as a feeling for another and is often contrasted with empathy—a feeling with another. However, it is not clear what feeling for another means and what emotions sympathy involves. Since empirical data suggests that sympathy plays an important role in our social lives and is more closely connected to helping behavior than empathy, we need a more detailed account. In this paper, I argue that sympathy is not a particular emotion but a type of emotional experience: those that have another person as focus. I explain what this means and show that this sheds light on why sympathy, rather than empathy, directly motivates altruistic actions.

Physician empathy is considered essential for good clinical care. Empirical evidence shows that it correlates with better patient satisfaction, compliance, and clinical outcomes. These data have nevertheless been criticized because of a lack of consistency and reliability. In this paper, we claim that these issues partly stem from the widespread idealization of empathy: we mistakenly assume that physician empathy always contributes to good care. This has prevented us from agreeing on a definition of empathy, from understanding the effects of its different components and from exploring its limits. This is problematic because physicians’ ignorance of the risks of empathy and of strategies to manage them can impact their work and wellbeing negatively. To address this problem, we explore the effects of the potential components of empathy and argue that it should be conceived as a purely descriptive and wide term. We end by discussing implications for medical education.

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The development of social robots in medicine is an important area of development in robotics. It is possible that in the future, robots will become able to (partly) replace physicians. Several authors think robots ought not to replace physicians because they cannot be empathic, and empathy is necessary for good are. In this paper, I show that although widely accepted, this argument rests on two questionable assumptions. The first one is that because empathy is highly beneficial to care, it is necessary for good care. The second is that because empathy is necessary for good care performed by humans, it is also necessary for good care performed by robots. I discuss these two assumptions and show that the empathy-based argument against the use of social robots in medicine is not as convincing as we might have originally thought. I conclude that we need to explore further what good care is and the role that empathy plays in it.

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