Empathic emotions and justice in society

Empathy is defined as an affect more appropriate to another's situation than to one's own. The paper (i) summarizes different modes of empathic affect arousal; (ii) shows how empathic affect may interact with social-cognitive development, to produce four levels of empathy development; (iii) suggests that causal attributions may transform empathic affect into sympathy, guilt, and empathic anger, which are major moral affects; (iv) discusses how these affects may influence moral judgment and behavior; (v) points up empathic morality's limitations and the need to embed empathy in relevant moral principles; (vi) discusses possible links between empathy and justice principles, with special focus on Rawls; (vii) illustrates the interplay of empathy, moral judgment, and justice; and (viii) suggests that moral principles may become hot cognitions.     

Window of opportunity: Reflections on an idea fashionable in the west

The essay warns about the extreme danger of the fashionable idea that the West has only a marginal role to play in Russia's integration into the world community. It does not take into account the ferocious war of ideas in post‐Soviet Moscow which all but insures that nationalist ambition ‘to return Russia to the status of a leading global power’ would come out a winner. As a result of this the window of opportunity that opened after the disintegration of the Soviet empire may well slam shut again. The only way to prevent it seems to be for the West to create its own strategy of Russia's integration in which the dominant up to now theme of economic assistance (hardware) is replaced by the theme of intellectual participation (or the software of integration). That is why the purpose of the essay is to try to offer a logical set of criteria that could provide the basis for such an intelligent strategy.