Choosing to Feel : Virtue, Friendship, and Compassion for Friends

If suffering is one hallmark of the human condition, another is the virtue of compassion, which disposes persons to suffer the pain of others as partly their own. In Choosing to Feel, Diana Fritz Cates draws on an Aristotelian-Thomistic foundation to develop an original theory of compassion as she explores how persons are able—and why they would want-to deliberately orient themselves toward the co-suffering of another person's pain. Cates opens with an account of virtue which examines what it means to choose to feel a passion according to the measure of practical wisdom. She goes on to explore the nature of friendship and some of the impact that Christian faith can have on one's view of self and others. Cates then integrates her view of virtue, friendship, and compassion in a way that specifies what someone who is good at being compassionate does and does not choose to feel as someone who intentionally binds him or herself to other persons. The book focuses primarily on the com pas passion that persons feel toward friends, but it culminates in an analysis of compassion for strangers and enemies. Throughout, Choosing to Feel promotes conceptual clarity and depth of understanding regarding what compassion is, how it can be cultivated, and why it should be cultivated as part of a full human life. Scholars and students of religious, theological, and philosophical ethics will appreciate this study for its unique combination of rigorous philosophical analysis and attentiveness to the complexities of lived moral experience.