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 ethical 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 shared suffering of another person's pain.
While Cates's primary focus is rooted in the compassion that persons feel toward friends, her study 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 nurtured as part of a full human life.

Diana Fritz Cates is Assistant Professor of Ethics at the University of Iowa.